We are now nearly a month into this years hurricane season, which ranges from the first of June until the end of November. Hurricanes are extremely large, wide-spread storms that are naturally difficult to study. GIS has been used for a long time to track, monitor, and measure the effects of hurricanes. Recently I found a data set on the National Atlas website that has data for historic hurricanes from 1851-2004. The first screenshot shows the entire data set added to a map. Notice that there are over 30000 segments in the file. Joined to each segment are a number …

The FBI's Uniform Crime Report provides statistics on the number of crime that are committed in American cities and counties. These data are archived at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The crimes known as Part 1crimes are typically composed of Murder, Rape , Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Assault, Burglary, Larceny, Auto Theft, Theft, and Arson. This post uses data collected from The National Atlas that includes information for a series of years 1994-2000. The following maps show a series of five years to highlight which parts of the country have the most troubles with Homicide. The first map …

Agriculture is one industry that has great interest in using Geospatial analysis for improving production and conserving and protecting land quality. Monitoring such things as water usage, growth, crop production, and many other related features of farming can greatly impact what is grown, how it is grown, and the ways in which agricultural products are processed. In this post, data on U.S. agriculture production were collected from The National Atlas Website, which has several data sets that are useful for analyzing various factors related to natural resources and land management. The downloaded data has variables associated with the spatial …

The BP oil spill continues to plague the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama addressed the nation yesterday explaining the many challenges that oil spill presents, and the cost that it is having on the U.S. This post highlights the use of NASA satellite imagery of the oil spill and shows how to perform some basic analysis on how large the oil spill is. Specifically, you will see how to add and create your own layers for analysis. In order to map the oil spill a satellite image was first collected from NASA's Website. This post uses Cartographica's edit feature …

The folks at Very Spatial Podcast have an interview this week with Gaige B Paulsen, President and Founder of ClueTrust, where he talks about Cartographica.

In light of the massive oil spill ongoing in the Gulf of Mexico this post is designed to highlight locations for data relevant to the spill, and to show these data in use in Cartographica. The BP oil platform Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 and resulted in the deaths of 11 crew members. The subsequent fire caused the extreme deepwater oil rig to sink causing the largest oil disaster in U.S. history. In hopes of promoting more understanding about the incident several websites have offered GIS data regarding the incident. For this post data were obtained from The …

Washington D.C.'s GIS data catalogue provides numerous data about public issues within the city. One interesting data set is crime in D.C. In this post you will see how Cartographica can effectively manage large data sets for use in crime mapping. Specifically, this post will show you how to filter, export, merge, and analyze crime data. The crime data sets collected from the D.C. GIS catalogue combines many different types of crimes ranging from homicide to theft. Cartographica has the ability to quickly manage and sort data from data sets such as these so that we …

For those of you who have been waiting in the wings for 1.2, that wait is now over! ClueTrust is pleased to announce the general availability of Cartographica 1.2, GIS for Mac OS X. We've got a ton of new and updated features, which we've been talking about on this blog for the past few weeks during our formal beta process. Follow the link for more information. We're happy with where we are now with 1.2, but that doesn't mean that we're going to stop here. We have big plans for the summer for Cartographica and Cartographica …

Exporting maps to Adobe Illustrator gives you the ability to enhance GIS output for presentation and publication. Cartographica 1.2 offers new enhanced features that give more specificity in what is exported to Adobe Illustrator from Cartographica. The new features give you the ability to choose line segment labels, to determine how polygons will be labeled, and it gives you the choice to export data along with the map. The segment labels option gives you choice in labeling lines with multiple segments. You can choose to label each line segment of label only the first segment. Also you are able …

A new feature of Cartographica 1.2 is layer bounding-box invisibility. This makes it easier to use a single large background map for multiple mapsets without having to be constantly zoomed in. Given that Cartographica now has the ability to import live maps you will find that this tool is very useful because it allows more flexibility with zoom commands when working with a large background map such as a Live Bing map. When a raster file is imported into Cartographica it will be displayed at its full extent. However when data are added for a specific location the map …

A great feature of Cartographica is the ability to add features to a map. This gives you the ability to quickly create new layers and add information to already existing layers. In conjunction with Cartographica's table tools (add coordinate, length, and area columns) the Add Feature option allows you to quickly georeference new layers, and it also can provide valuable information about the space used by the layer you created. These bits of information are important so that you can verify that the layer you created is a valid representation of the object being represented. The Add Feature option is …

Cartographica has been able to export to KML since it first shipped. Cartographica 1.2 has an enhanced KML exporter that makes it even easier to make your maps shine using Google Earth, Google Maps, and other products that use KML. The software now exports all raster and analysis layers, as well as the precise point types that you use in your maps in Cartographica (as opposed to using the default pushpins that are part of Google Earth's repertoire). To export a layer file to KML follow the steps below. First design a mapset that you want to export into …

Cartographica 1.2 offers new enhanced map layout and design capabilities with improved functionality and workflow.A new feature of 1.2 is the new layer control in Map Layout windows. Now, the visible layers in both Map objects and Legend objects may be edited separately from their original maps. This gives you the freedom to choose which layers displayed on your map will be shown in the design of final map output. Additionally, there were a couple of functionality improvement from previous versions. Specifically, the Map Layout legend no longer displays errant caution triangle when there is space for …

Cartographica supports many projection systems and now support the ability to add your own unique projection system to the program. The ability to add your own projection allows you to very accurately represent data on a map, which make for more accurate geospatial analysis. Cartographica has supported many projection systems in the past and the ability to add your own projection system gives Cartographica to accurately project data anywhere in the world. The new projection management features allow you to maintain custom projections in an group labeled User Defined Projections. This group contains all of the projections that you have …

A new feature of Cartographica 1.2 is the ability to re-geocode data that are already added to a map. This new option allows for additional information to be added to a dataset that describes the address used to match the point, a score indicating how accurate the geocoding process was, and a column that describes the source data used for geocoding. These pieces of information are important for keeping track of what went on during geocoding process, which allows for more accurate reporting of analysis results and procedures. Knowing how accurate the geocoding process was along with the specifics …

New to Cartographica 1.2 is the ability to compute columns in a data set (this includes adding computed columns to WFS layers!). Computed columns give users the ability to quickly create new variables that incorporate information from other data fields in the same data set. This allows users to quickly create rates, ratios, and proportions by using a simple drag and drop method. Cartographica currently supports a large number of basic math and geometric functions. See Below for the Step to Create Computed Columns The example below will calculate the number of retail sites per 1000 residents in Block …

Cartographica 1.2 offers several new geocoding features that will enhance user's ability to effectively geocode several forms of spatial data. Some of the new geocoding features include the ability to geocode with Bing, the ability to geocode layers that have already been imported, and the ability add spatial information to data sets that are incomplete, or not spatially defined. Cartographica can geocode both address and coordinate data and has the ability to add spatial information such as X and Y coordinates to layers that are not georeferenced. Some of the New Features of Geocoding in Cartographica! Geocoding can now …

Cartographica has had the ability to geocode address and coordinate data for a long time now. However, the ability to geocode using Bing is a new feature of Cartographica 1.2. Past geocoding methods in Cartographica have focused on the use of either Census Street Files (Tiger/Line Files) or coordinate data already stored in a data set. Bing offers more up-to-date access to street and address data through live access over the internet, which provides more accurate geocoding, especially for data that were collected in recent time. Using the Bing geocoder also means access to geocoding information in a …

A new feature of Cartographica 1.2 is the ability to add Live Maps to documents. Cartographica has the ability to directly use data from Bing, OpenStreetMap, and or any OGC-compliant Web Map Server. Each of these data sources can be displayed in Cartographica, and additional layers can be added for analysis. The advantages of directly adding Live Maps and WMS data are limitless, but the largest is the convenience of not having to dig around for a base map. These maps provide high resolution imagery of nearly every location on Earth, and provide great opportunities for research and exploration …

Version 1.2 of Cartographica has a new way of selecting symbols that allows the use of just about any image or drawing as a symbol, either from the built-in symbol browser, or from another source such as the internet. This is really handy as essentially any object that has an Identifiable symbol can be found on the internet and used (keeping in mind copyright ownership of the symbols). Symbol selection is now done through a drop zone inside of the Layer Styles window, located at the bottom of the window, to the right of the preview. When you click …