River Scheldt at Terneuzen

Many vessels pass the river Scheldt to reach the harbour of Antwerp. This map shows part of this river with ship routes, buoys, resting places of seals and much more. It is based on an extensive mapping service from the Zeeland authority. The province of Zeeland makes a lot of geodata available for the public on this website. Watch the numerous ship wrecks mapped on this spot! If you click on the wrecks, you can get more information (click the middle of the symbol, not the body of the boat).


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John Snow's Cholera Map, London 1854

This map (published by Simon Liu from Esri UK) is based on John Snow's map of deaths caused by cholera during the summer of 1854 in Soho, London, showing that most deaths occurred near a contaminated water pump on Broad Street (now Broadwick Street). Death locations are represented by points, which are colour-coded based on which pump is the nearest. John Snow's original map is now in the public domain. Digitised location data was also used from the following source: http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/pubs/snow/snow.html



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Ferraris maps from 1770-1777

Between 1770 and 1777 Comte Joseph de Ferraris, General and Commander of the Artillery in the Austrian Netherlands, produced a chorographical map of these regions, which was put in print in 1780. After revolutionary France had occupied the Austrian Netherlands in 1794, Louis Capitaine, First Engineer of the map of the French Republic, issued a new engraving of Ferraris' work. The division of the map over the various sheets was rearranged in such a way that it formed a unity with the already existing map of France by Cassini, as to portray the southern Netherlands as an integral part of that country. The old Ferraris map sheets are shown below for a small part of Flanders, by clicking on the sheets, the picture has the URL tot the map viewer, showing the original detailed scanned maps as published by the Belgian National Geographic Institute and the Royal Library of Belgium. On the technical side: the images on this map are loading from a KMZ file. It might take a few seconds before these are shown(7 MB file).


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Light emission at night

This map presents a nighttime view of the Earth that provides an informational and educational view of our planet at night. The image was produced by mosaicking Defense Meteorlogical Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS) satellite images. This system was originally designed to view clouds by moonlight and to map the locations of permanent lights on the Earth's surface. These data are derived from 9 months of observations superimposed on a darkened land surface. ESRI georeferenced these data to a real-world coordinate system. The layer is suitable for display to a largest scale of 1:18,500,000. To access the source imagery used to publish this map service, you can use the Earth at Night Layer Package that is published by Esri.


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Esri just published a new World Relief map

The map only shows relief and hillshade, no other features. Bathymetry is not shown (use the ocean base map to show that). The map is only available at small scales at this moment, do not zoom in too far. The map was published on January 5th this year and might be interesting for geography lessons as a blind map.


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Costa Concordia Cruise Ship Disaster

The map below shows the recent track of the Costa Concordia which ran aground around the Isle of Giglio in Italy yesterday evening. Ship positions were taken from AIS, the ship tracking site which also has extensive information on the ship itself. Zoom to the disaster area to get more information including the harbour web cam with live images. Bookmarks available on the larger map. The arrows indicate the approximate direction of the vessel at that time based on the degrees transmitted to the AIS system. The last two recordings were transmitted with half an hour difference and 2.8 sea miles apart (at cruise speed this would mean app. 12 minutes). The recording at 20:37 shows a speed of 15,3 knots and a direction of 285 degrees, the very last recording shows a speed of 1.1 knot and cruising direction of 13 degrees, completely North and away from the Isle. From the AIS recordings it seems that the vessel got into problems between the two last recordings, turned around and headed for the port of Giglio which can be seen by zooming in on the last recordings. For a presentation of the full journey (Silverlight needed) click here.



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Residential Garbage Collection Routes

This map was made to show the routes of the residential garbage collector trucks. Do you know the routes in your area? Are the routes optimized? Is the workload on the different teams equally distributed? How much garbage is collected in each area? The analysis of garbage collection is more interesting than you would think!


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Crime analysis map (Chicago)

This dataset (published by Ross Capaccio) reflects reported incidents of crime (with the exception of murders where data exists for each victim) that occurred in the City of Chicago from 2010 to Present (YTD 2011) for the CPD Beat, Park, School and CTA Station crime by type analysis. For the Neighborhood time-series of total crimes, data is from 2001-2010, representing over 4.7 million incidents of reported crime.

Data is extracted from the Chicago Police Department's CLEAR (Citizen Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting) system.


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Dutch Population Statistics time enabled

This web map (published by Esri NL) shows the potential number of people present in the Netherlands, per grid (500x500 meter) and 4 different time frames.The grid maps used in this web map are based on the Populator®, an online data service which can be used to calculate the number of people in any given area. The grid size is merely an example, the model supports estimates per address and site. Time and data as shown in the web map, are an indication of the 4 time frames possible.

In all, the results can be obtained
· in 17 different types (e.g. homes, offices, hospitals and schools)
· on structural and occasional locations (addresses and sites)
· during 4 different time frames (week/weekend/day/night)
The Populator® is available through www.populator.nl, xml-webservices and customized solutions to serve specific application.


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City maps streetlight outages

This map displays the streetlights which are owned and maintained by the City of Rockville, Maryland. A small number of lights shown are privately owned. Lights shown in gold are operational while lights shown in red are undergoing maintenance. When zoomed in sufficiently close the pole number will appear on the light symbol. Additional information for each light can be found by clicking on the light symbol.

Zoom and pan to a streetlight interest, or enter an address to locate, then click on the streetlight symbol to see a pop-up showing the status of the light. These kinds of maps allow citizens also to report malfunctioning streetlights, even before they really become unoperational.


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Storm over Central Europe today

The new meteo map service based on NOAA data is showing an interesting pattern over Central Europe today. wind speed figures are visible if you zoom in.



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This was how it looked on Januari 5th:

Live Water Levels Flanders

The map below shows 4 water level gauge stations of the VMM. Clicking on the stations shows their live water level evolution in a graph, clicking on the graph links you to the original web page of the VMM (Vlaamse Milieu Maatschappij). Maps of the water level predictions are shown on the overstromingsvoorspeller site.



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Live Traffic Cameras Flanders

The Flemish Government publishes traffic density maps with the possibility of popups for traffic cameras. These images can also be visualised immediately on the map based on their location. I added the images for 4 different locations on the map (use bookmarks in the larger map to view them), visualisizing immediately the situation on the road based on the location, this gives a more intuitive impression of the situation than a page full of images. You can use this map on your Ipad to view the situation at the location where you are. I published two web apps based on this map, a simple app and a more complete app.


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The graph below gives an impression of the evolution of traffic jams during the day. The black line shows the current value.