The Eye on Earth summit started on Monday 12th in Abu Dhabi. The conference is addressing the crucial importance of environmental and societal information and networking to decision-making.
Vizzuality is very aligned with the objetives of the summit and the declaration that has been signed. We have been working on Biodiversity and Conservation since we started and we hope that the work we do with our partners help move toward a more sustainable world.
Javier de la Torre is been presenting also some of our projects in the conference, like Imazon, a project together with Google and Imazon and OldWeather, but many of other of our projects where presented, like GeoCAT, ProtectedPlanet, GBIF, etc.
Now, that we have launched CartoDB, our Open Source geospatial database on the cloud, we are working with many different organizations to help them analyze, visualize and share their environmental data.
We look forward to join forces with partners to develop the technologies and platforms that will enable a truly integrated environmental data network that will help to make better conservation decisions. And if this movement is driven by Open Source so that everybody is included, we will be delighted.
Today we presented at MICTTing in Punta del Este, Uruguay, talking about how open data and open source can be leveraged for sustainable tourism programs.
Eric Gundersen from Development Seed joined us on the panel and presented on the open source mapping platform TileMill and Javier presented on Open Data, environment and CartoDB. The balance was great. There is a few companies out there that share the same vision as we do, and Development Seed is one of them. They are the authors of some really cool projects and pretty amazing technology. They also are an open source company and we have been following some of their creations code for a while in CartoDB. This exemplifies to its best, the great outcomes that can happen between small companies supporting open source and innovation.
Our collaboration extends well beyond the stage. Additionally, Development Seed and Vizzuality are talking a lot about future joint workshops, sharing projects, ideas and in general closer relations between the companies as we both work to push open source in the development and environmental space. We can not be more happy to be so close to such a talented company and we are sure we will all have lot of fun in the future.
At Vizzuality, we are passionate about biodiversity and the natural world. That is why we do what we do. Over the past few years we have made an attempt to work almost entirely on projects that we felt could have a positive impact. Working with amazing teams from GBIF to botanical gardens and from Google to NASA has given us the opportunity to interact with some really amazing people: scientists, engineers, designers, and librarians. Each time, we are humbled and amazed by what these people can accomplish.
Now, we want to share that with you!
With the help of our sponsors and friends, we are organizing an unconference called, EcoHackNYC, on November 4th and 5th at NYU. The purpose of EcoHackNYC is to bring together diverse minds to tackle real global environmental change problems dealing with data analysis, information access, communication, and data visualization. We are already so impressed by the reception from the community.
From our end, we are working with REDD Metrics, Brighter Planet, the Citizen Cyperscience Centre, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and NYU to make a really fun event. More amazing though, some world-class scientists, developers, designers, writers and others have already signed up to give their time freely to environmental and global change projects we haven’t even announced yet! It is these passionate people that we were excited to see come together in the same room. More than that, it is exciting to bring together people and communities that otherwise may not have the opportunity to work with one another. It is the synthesis of the diverse communities that we think could lead to some powerful results.
The event is going to be held at NYU in coordination with friends in the ITP department. We are less than two weeks away, so get involved, sign-up, submit a project, let us know you are interested from afar, tweet #EcoHackNYC!
This week we helped launch a new project on Zooniverse Labs, called NEEMO. For 13 days NASA astronauts, scientists and technicians on a mission called NEEMO-15, where they will be living in an underwater habitat called Aquarius to research marine life and prepare explorers for missions to far-off planetary destinations. During these missions, NASA collects thousands of images of underwater life and features. They need your help to analyze those images and help us guide the scientists on their excursions around the habitat!
NEEMO is a collaborative, spatial annotation, application built using Node.js. It allows users to race one another to identify and annotate seafloor biodiversity quickly and accurately. NEEMO is all about seeing how we can quickly build accurate sets of spatial annotations using crowd sourcing. The race is on! Using socket.io, NEEMO allows users to see and validate each other’s findings in real-time and all of the annotations are being stored, tracked, and served using CartoDB.
After only the first few days of collecting data, we have thousands of identifications and thousands more validations. We are really excited about it, keep the annotations coming NEEMOers!
Well, it might sound a bit too pretentious, but we can definitely say we have helped on finding 2 new planets outside the solar system. All thanks to the great PlanetHunters.org project.
The candidate planets had been confirmed on a recent published paper:
The publication is pretty rough, but the good guys from PlanetHunters have published a blog post explaining it. Now, how do these planets look like? We can not really offer you an image of the planets, but here are some pics from their stars.
Congratulations to all volunteers who have help science on planethunters.org. Citizen Science is proving project by project that new ways to do science are possible by engaging the general public. Now that we have found planets outside the solar system, what about doing some citizen science to help the environment on our own planet? More coming soon!
Today Javier Alvarez made a great presentation at #FOSS4G on how to use HTML5 new technologies for web mapping.
In front of a packed room full of geo geeks, he demoed several of our most innovative projects in terms on web mapping. Unfortunately we dont have the video, but at least we can show you his great slides. Which for an extra geek factor, he developed on HTML and JS with embedded maps and so on. Pity you could not see it, because he georeferenced live where to go and eat spanish serrano ham!
This week half the team is at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial FOSS4G conference in Denver. Yesterday, Wednesday was the first day of the sessions and Javier de la Torre presented CartoSet: a new FOSS to create highly visual geo portals. Check out his presentation (soon the sound will also be published):
The announcement was well received and lot of Tweets and blogs started to appear.
The source code for the framework is available at GitHub and we look forward for anybody interested in collaborating with us on the development.
Today we will be announcing CartoDB, the Open Source Geospatial Database on the Cloud we have been working hard on, but this deserves another post in itself :)
“A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a place (such as a forest, mountain, lake, desert, monument, building, complex, or city) that is listed by the UNESCO as of special cultural or physical significance.” Wikipedia.
Today we are launching UNESCOplaces.org, an unofficial redesign proposal of the UNESCO site using our new product CartoSet.
CartoSet is an Open Source Framework to publish and curate a geospatial dataset in simple and beautiful ways. Internally, CartoSet makes use of our upcoming Open Source Geospatial Database on the Cloud, CartoDB.
We are still cleaning code and making it easier for deployment and we will release all the source code at FOSS4G in Denver next week. If you want to learn more about CartoSet and CartoDB join us at the following presentations:
So today’s launch of UNESCOplaces.org is the first of many upcoming beautiful geospatial sites. We already have a number of people committed and developing their own sites, and starting next week everyone will be able to join the community.
We hope you like it and we look forward to meeting you at FOSS4G.
One mor year FOSS4G is here. The most important conference on Geospatial Open Source software will take place this year at Denver, and we will be there. Actually big part of Vizzuality will be there: @saleiva @tokumin @xavijam and @jatorre
This is a very important year for us. We will be presenting lots of new developments that we have been working for a long time and that we will be releasing. More specifically expect to hear from us about CartoDB and CartoSet quite a lot.
We are presenting also quite a bit, look for these sessions to learn about our projects and Open Source Products.
We are very excited to participate and attend the great presentations we see in the program.
Finally we will be staying in a nice penthouse downtown with the good people from UNEP-WCMC. We will probably be hacking one day during the week on CartoSet and CartoDB for environmental datasets. If you feel like joining us let us know!
Looking forward to meet everybody!
