With the 100 year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic happening this month, there is no shortage of Titanic information coming out. One superb visualisation pointed out by O'Reilly Radar comes from ESRI, whom have created an interactive map showing the fates of the ship’s passengers.
Slashgeo.org draw attention to Canada Post’s recent filing of a copyright lawsuit against a crowd-sourced post code map, claiming that it has lost revenue from the free version being available. Of course the defendant, Geolytica, claim that there can be no copyright on post codes, so there was no infringement. It’s a scary prospect for any crowd-sourced mapping applications, and an interesting (if ultimately flawed) argument that a company can own rights to any maps derived from public information.
Very Spatial point out a story from the BBC that talks of an Indian man that got lost when he was 5 years old, ended up getting adopted by an Australian family, and then – 25 years later – used Google Earth to track down his long-lost family. Very touching.
Google Maps Mania talks of a site that allows you to look up any location on Google Maps and find out what the weather is like at a given time of year. Very useful for travellers planning their next holiday.
GIS Café alerts us to the fact that the US’s Envisat has stopped sending images to Earth. The satellite was launched in 2002, and has provided thousands of images and other data used in more than 4,000 projects in over 70 countries.
AnyGeo has a post showing a video visualisation of the 15,000 temperature records broken in the US in March 2012. That’s right: 15,000 records broken in a single month.
To round of the Best of Blogs this week is another post from Google Maps Mania, which talks of a great little mapping tool that allows a user to select up to four locations of different people, and then find a suitable place in the middle in which to meet. Good thinking, 99!
See you next week!
