Summary of Geomancers Meeting:<\/p>\n
I showed up late, as usual, but luckily Allan was there early to catch
\npeople as they came in. Attendance peaked about about 9 — enough to
\nfill two tables of people. The meeting examined and discussed the
\nCamberville Greenmap, being published by Jerrad Pierce, and the various
\nthings that can be done to make it more interesting and interactive: <\/p>\n
* Web based format (mapserver\/WMS\/tiling something or other)
\n * Linking locations to the Open Guide to Boston or a similar site —
\n allowing people to click on something and finding out more about it,
\n and possibly adding their own information to it
\n * Allowing display of more information, since you don’t have to
\n overwhelm people with everything at once like you do on paper:
\n various layers let you put the pieces together to build up your own
\n interesting greenmap<\/p>\n
There was some discussion of how the data was gathered, and about the
\nMrSID format that the aerial photography from MassGIS is in (mostly me
\nwhining about it). There was discussion of some of the symbol choices —
\nhow a chevron facing in the direction of the road can be misleading and
\nmake people feel like it’s indicating a direction. All in all, the
\ngreenmap is looking really cool, and I’m looking forward to getting a
\nversion of it online and seeing what more can be done with it.<\/p>\n
After my computer got on the network, we were able to talk about the
\nBoston Freemap that Schuyler and I built, some of the issues we were
\nhaving with it, and how to solve them. There was discussion of the
\nproblems with using a WMS for the soure of a tiled clientside WMS
\nbrowser: labels intersecting tile boundaries, as well as roads or road
\nlabels being drawn at weird angles. We also discussed (as was mentioned
\non the list) the various tradeoffs of using different image formats,
\nsome of which comes down to the fact that mapserver doesn’t quite do
\nwhat it would be nice for it to do.<\/p>\n
There was some discussion of the work that went into the mumbai freemap
\nproject: hand-digitization of vector information obtained from the local
\nplanning board, and the attempts to convert said data into a reasonable
\nprojection which would be overlaid on top of landsat satellite imagery,
\nsomething that’s not typically done. <\/p>\n
There was some discussion of the Platial platform, what works about it,
\nwhat doesn’t, where the value is, and how it can be used for the Real
\nEstate field. Apparently, the housing market statewide is in a serious
\ndecline: we’re passing the peak of the bubble, and many houses are
\nselling at 20-30% below their assessed value. This is a having a huge
\nimpact on the real estate industry, and is something that may be able to
\nbe alleviated in part by the sharing of local information: turn your
\nentire block into a cheerleader about a location. They want the value of
\nyour house to be higher so that the value of *their* house can be
\nhigher, and teh local view is a view that no realtor or anyone else can
\ngive you but the people who live there.<\/p>\n
There was also discussion of various ideas about what you could do with
\nthe various data out there from a geographic point of view: the ability
\nto churn out a ‘local rap-sheet’ would be a nice idea for a startup
\ntargetted towards Buying agents for real estate. <\/p>\n
We’ll probably do another gathering in a couple weeks: Possibly in
\nsomeplace quieter, and maybe not on a friday evening to attract a
\ndifferent crowd. The Muddy Charles is fine at 5, but towards 7 you
\nreally have to start shouting to get yourself heard, and I’d like to go
\nsomeplace with food for a change at some point, since I don’t drink beer
\n\ud83d\ude42 Any recommendations or suggestions for date\/time\/place would be
\nwelcome!<\/p>\n
Links below are what was left in my browser history, or what was left
\nbehind, and what I could remember. Feel free to add to it.<\/p>\n
Link-based Summary of meeting: Summary of Geomancers Meeting: I showed up late, as usual, but luckily Allan was there early to catch people as they came in. Attendance peaked about about 9 — enough to fill two tables of people. The meeting examined and discussed the Camberville Greenmap, being published by Jerrad Pierce, and the various things that can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email-posts","category-locality-and-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n * Greenmap<\/a>
\n * Mumbai Freemap<\/a>
\n * Boston Freemap<\/a>
\n * Open Guide to Boston<\/a>
\n * Platial<\/a>
\n * MLS Listing<\/a>
\n * Lowell Deeds Blog<\/a>
\n * Boston World66<\/a>
\n * World Flooding Map<\/a>
\n * MassGIS Raster imagery<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"