Accidental Skyline.
Planetizen has announced its Top Ten Websites for 2014. Among the “ten best planning, design, and development websites” are the Accidental Skyline of New York, the Arches Project cataloguing the ancient treasures at risk during the war in Iraq, and Citiscope, which marshals the power of independent journalism to cover urban innovations around the world.
On innovation, the IEEE Spectrum reports that the space advocacy organisation The Planetary Society has set a date for the first flight of its LightSail spacecraft. The 30-centimeter-long CubeSat—a new class of small spacecraft—is set to take off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in May as a secondary payload on an Atlas V rocket.
GoogleMapsMania reveals that following the recently published, highly acclaimed map of all of the United States rivers, coloured according to the direction in which they flow, a similar map has been created for Europe.
Still on Google Maps, Geoawesomeness describes a new tool called the Map of Life, a web service powered by the Google Earth Engine that can help better define and locate species at-risk all around the world. The tool uses biodiversity data and high-resolution habitat information to locate and evaluate the actual conditions of species in greater detail than ever. It features almost 4 million records of 1 million species in 200 datasets.
Following our report on a new indoor positioning wheel from Aalto University, Geoawesomeness also discusses the new indoor positioning language, IndoorGML. This is the standard for encoding indoor data that will provide a cross-platform, vendor-neutral way of communicating indoor spatial information. IndoorGML has been recently published by the Open Geospatial Consortium.
And finally, for those looking for a new avenue to allow their creative imagination to run along, Strange Maps | BigThink has published the United Monsters of America map, showcasing the one corner of the animal kingdom that is immune from extinction: the monsters that thrive in our imagination (and on this map).
