We are continuing our coverage of the 2012 Olympic games in London, England, and we have an updated medalcount.csv file that can be used to map the distribution of medal counts around the globe. Download the medalcount.csv file. The medal counts are accurate up to 1:00pm on Wednesday, August 1. [Updated Final medal counts are available by downloading Final_Medal_count.csv] Once downloaded, save the file as a .csv. This dataset can be used to create choropleth maps and can be continually updated as the games progress. Download the World file from Geocommons and then import the data …

The 2012 summer Olympics in London, England are here, which is very exciting for many athletes and fans of sports from across the globe. This year's Olympics will host athletes from more than 200 countries and will consist of nearly 40 sports. The games will run from July 25 - August 12; for a schedule of the events take a look at the schedule on the official Olympics website. To celebrate the diversity of the event we decided to build a dataset that contains the countries participating in the Olympics along with the number of athletes from each location. The first …

ClueTrust is happy to announce today the immediate availability of Cartographica 1.2.8. This release fixes a number of small bugs and includes compatibility and feature fixes for both the Retina Display MacBook Pros and Mountain Lion. Full release notes are available on the macgis.com site. The new Retina Display Mac Book Pros are gorgeous, and we're happy to say that things are really looking good on those displays, and with the advent of Mountain Lion's new Gatekeeper system, we have increased security by implementing Apple's new signature system to show that Cartographica comes from us, so you …

The recent Supreme Court decision to uphold President Obama's health care plan has been received with mixed feelings across U.S. states. The goal of the health care plan is to ensure that all American's have an equal opportunity for health care insurance. A key aspect of the Obama health care plan was to expand Medicaid to cover those who were not covered by Medicare. This expansion was meant to fill the gap for people who couldn't afford insurance, but were determined to be poor enough to be exempt from the penalty for not holding insurance. The penalty for not …

Richard Florida is the well-known author of the book "The Creative Class" which describes the rise and the importance of a socio-economic class of individuals that Florida believes drives economic and social development. According to a Wikipedia, the creative class is made up of two separate groups of workers that make up about 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. The first of these groups is the Super-Creative Core: This group comprises about 12 percent of all U.S. jobs. It includes a wide range of occupations (e.g. science, engineering, education, computer programming, research), with arts, design, and media …

The Pacific Institute has recently released a set of GIS data on measures of Sea Level change on the West Coast. This is a topic that has been in the news recently as scientists are investigating changing sea levels along coasts around the world. We are always trying to point our customers to new sources of data that they can use in their own professional work, or for the purpose of exploring the world around them with publicly available data. To download the Pacific Institute data visit the GIS Data Downloads section. Notice when you go to the website there …

When creating maps that involve drawing new features such as points, lines, and polygons it is often the case that you may want to create several new features that are exactly the same. Essentially, you may want to create identical features without having to re-draw each one. Cartographica has multiple functions that allow you to perform this task. I will illustrate with an example using polygons. There is a pavilion structure in downtown Lexington, Ky that is used for various events, one being its hosting of the local Farmer's Market on specific days throughout the week. In Lexington, one of …

According to a recent article on Burrito Justice, during the Cold War the Russian government spent a lot of time and effort to create detailed maps of the many places in the world as potential targets for their military. The maps detail many different aspects such as elevation, water ways, and even streets that would be passable by tanks and other military vehicles. Now that the Cold War is over we can talk about the absurdity of it all and enjoy the hard work that the Russians put forth to make a series of really nice maps. The best location …

As reported in Ag Professional and forwarded along by one of our astute customers, the US Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency has put out a public call for comments on how data is collected for requests for Aerial Photography through the NAIP program, which is a great source of raster data for software such as Cartographica. The call for information is specifically expected to help the agency: Determine whether the continued collection of information is still necessary for the proper performance of the functions of the FSA, including whether the information will have practical utility; Assess the accuracy …

It's been about two years since I made this post about Snow Leopard and ClueTrust's plans to drop support for Leopard (10.5) in versions 1.2 of Cartographica and beyond. Since that time, we've had rapid adoption of Snow Leopard (10.6) and, in the past year, Lion (10.7) by our users (according to those statistics that you hopefully have been allowing us to capture). Earlier this month, we once again attended Apple's WWDC and we learned a lot about how we can take advantage of the new features in Mountain Lion and that Apple has now lowered …

The recent troubles in Syria have escalated a little farther when Syrian Forces shot down an American made F-4 Phantom Jet flown by Turkey. Multiple news sources are reporting on this issue and there have been some inconsistencies about what actually happened. According to an article written in the Telegraph, the Turkish Foreign Minister has stated that the F-4 was shot down in international airspace after briefly entering Syrian airspace. The attack came without warning to the pilots of the jet. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has condemned the attack and has been quoted as saying that the attack was …

Usually, our blog posts are all about the business of using Cartographica for analysis or for some other professional application. But, I am here to tell you that Cartographica can be used for exploring, and for viewing some of the most interesting locations on the planet. In a recent CNN article titled "Where Planes go to Die" author Thom Patterson points out some of the best aerospace sights on the planet. In checking out some of Patterson's suggestions I realized that Cartographica really allows you to explore and view interesting places without needing to do much work. Cartographica can be …

MapQuest has recently made available, through information on their developer website, access to their tile servers for OpenStreetMap-style tiles of satellite imagery (mostly from government sources) and their street databases. Because both CartoMobile and Cartographica support customized OpenStreetMap-style tile sources, you can now add these to your maps. Cartographica Desktop Within an existing mapset, add a new live layer by choosing File > Add Live Map… Choose Other OpenStreetMap Server: from the list of sources Type the following into the URL box: http://oatile1.mqcdn.com/tiles/1.0.0/sat Click Add A new layer named OpenStreetMap Live will …

The Center for Disease Control monitors various diseases within the United States. Often the CDC produces data for public use that can be used for scholarly and educational purposes. For this post I downloaded diabetes data from 2009 from this CDC website. The CDC are available for download in .xls format, so they need to be converted for use in Cartographica. After the data are downloaded, load the files into a spreadsheet program and save the file as a .csv. According to CDC data more than 25 million Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes and the rates of diabetes have …

There are a lot of mobile mapping applications for iOS, and even with that as a backdrop, we decided to develop and release CartoMobile because we saw a place for a sophisticated and easy-to-use App for creating and accessing your geospatial data from anywhere. We're often asked what sets CartoMobile apart from other mapping Apps for iOS. Basically, we believe that you should be able to have easy access to your data on the go. Here's how we have done this: No Need to Import/Export — CartoMobile handles shapefiles and raster files directly. There's no need to do any coordinate …

The Appalachian Trail is a hiking trail in the Eastern United States that ranges from Springer Mountain, Georgia and Mount Katahdin, Maine. The trail is more than 2,000 miles long and it passes through more than 14 states. The trail includes numerous locations for viewing sights, camping, and lodging and typically takes several months to hike. The website TopoFusion has .gpx data that can be downloaded and imported into Cartographica to map the Appalachian Trail. The TopoFusion website says that the data are designed to be uploaded to GPS devices. gpx files can be imported by connecting your GPS …

In an article released last week it was reported that the Federal Aviation Administration has released the names and locations of Organizations approved for flying drones within the U.S. Drones have become infamous over the past several years due to their use for military purposes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and many other places. The use of the military technology for domestic purposes should not be unexpected as we have seen many military technologies cross-over for domestic purposes. Many argue that the use of such Military technology in local police agencies may be problematic and seen as an increase in …

Recent reports have indicated that North Korea is planning a nuclear weapons test in the near future. The possibility of this test has been confirmed by multiple governments including South Korea and the United States. According to this article by the Associated Press North Korea successfully performed two nuclear test in 2006 and 2009. The nuclear tests have come under scrutiny by the United States and other countries. The discovery of the nuclear test came through observations made by satellite imagery of the test site location. Take a look at this article's satellite imagery. Simultaneously, North Korea is also planning …

We have done a lot of posts about tornado activity in the past on this blog. This is largely due to the interesting data that are openly available as well as the awesome power that tornadoes contain, which naturally makes them interesting. The recent tornado activity in Indiana and Kentucky and then Monday's dramatic daytime tornado that ripped through through the Dallas area has again brought my attention back to tornadoes. Recently Core Logic produced an interesting study on tornado and hail damage throughout the United States. Get the article here The report looks at similar data that we have …

Today, we're pleased to announce that CartoMobile® 1.2 has hit the AppStore with a number of new features and a bunch of bug fixes and usability tweaks. The biggest advance in 1.2 is the addition of MrSID and JPEG2000 image formats for Raster Imagery. This adds to our already robust selections of: TIFF, GeoTIFF, JPEG, and ECW, to create a very complete selection of image formats for offline access. As with previous formats, you can copy these directly to the device using iTunes and add them to your Map by choosing Import Raster Image. To accompany this addition …