vizzuality blog

Visualizing endangered species trades at EcoHackNYC

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:09:00 +0200

We spent yersterday’s Earth Day at our offices in NYC trying to do balloon mapping, a nice way to end an intense EcoHackNYC weekend. It is the second time we co-organized this (un)conference. Last fall we gathered at NYU and this time we met at Parsons.

The event started Friday with a series of 5-minute ignite talks. On Saturday, we divided in small groups and worked on solutions. Here is a sample of some of our favorite geospatial projects.

Visualizing Species Trading

A five-team group, including three from Vizzuality, worked with a big and interesting dataset of 12 million endangered species trades, to create an interactive visualization called the Species Sphere. All data is fetched from CartoDB and visualized using d3.js. Amazing work done in just 8 hours!

Improving the creation of Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA)

Another group worked on a simple map interface to communicate local demand for community-supported agriculture (CSA). The project is built on Heroku for hosting, MapBox for map tiles, Leaflet for the mapping interface, and jQuery with CartoDB for all the analysis.

Visualizing deforestation

Check too this map of global forest height showing deforestation in the Amazon, build at the EcoHack:

We weren’t there alone

This time we also expanded the meeting beyond data and code and we teamed up with The Public Laboratory to add a hardware-hacking to the event. The Public Laboratory has developed a balloon mapping kit that enables you to collect your own aerial photos from up to 1000 ft. Using the open source MapKnitter web-based software, you can stitch the resulting images into a web-viewable map.

The Air Quality Egg team brought also their DYI sensor-box for real-time air column monitoring. It was customized and added to the balloon kit to gain additional capabilities. The system contains sensors to read NO2, CO, temperature, humidity, compass (to calculate wind direction), wind speed, dust (particulate matter), VOC’s, altitude, as well as O3, and streams the data in real-time via XBee to Pachube.com.

It was a great, brilliant event. We are looking forward to the next one!

A Worthy Event: EcoHackNYC

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:06:00 +0200

Vizzuality has contributed this post to the New York Botanical Garden blog. You can read it also here.

This weekend, for the second time in under a year, we are throwing an event to bring together scientists, developers, designers, and others to work collaboratively on environmental projects that matter. We call this event EcoHackNYC. It is a free (un)conference where a small group of people present projects, problems, or data they think need to be developed, and then larger groups of enthusiasts and experts work tirelessly to develop solutions (also check out last year’s event here). For us, this is a special event.

We have been working primarily on projects in biodiversity, conservation, and the environment, guided by a genuine passion and belief in the societal value of such projects and a love of working in domains that present multifaceted challenges, not the least of which is visually explaining meaningful knowledge. We are optimistic that scientific research results will drive forward new ways of understanding and communicating scientific information and will ultimately improve the world around us.

EcoHackNYC was conceived to help reduce one major obstacle in the way of the science we love: scientists, technologists, and designers have very few forums to cross-fertilize and forge new collaborations. Please come and join us with all of your beautiful ideas and diverse talents to help drive forward the technologies and solutions we so desperately need.

Registration for this event is still open.

CartoDB at the Open Government Partnership meeting

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0200

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) first annual conference started yesterday in Brasilia, Brasil. The meeting will welcome near 1,000 representatives from more than 60 countries to discuss the latest reforms, tools and innovations in the open government field.

The partnership has grown rapidly. Just last September, eight countries launched it to formalize their commitment to a more open, transparent use of information. Another 43 additional governments have joined the OGP in the last months.

The Brasilia two-day event is the biggest conference related with Open Government ever, and it will be supported with the attendance of Dilma Rousseff and Hillary Clinton. You can check the agenda here.

Vizzuality will be presenting several projects, particularly the Open Goverment Experience Locator (image above), developed together with the OGP and the World Bank Institute. This tool allows the exploitation of different Open Government implementation experiences. The Experience Locator features initiatives from around the world, with special emphasis on presenting the insights from practitioners involved, links to implementing partners and related resources for further exploration. It has been entirely developed on CartoDB.

Ruth del Campo will be at the Innovation Village in the Open Aid Register stand (another CartoDB-based platform) showing demos of the OGP Locator tool, together with CartoDB. She will also be showcasing how CartoDB can help you create maps with your data fast and easy. This is especially interesting in the field of Open Government, where Open Data is crucial and there is so much to be visualized and geolocated.

So, if you are around in Brasilia feel free to pass by our booth at the Innovation Village and say hi or try to reach @ruthdelcampo at anytime. We would love to show you how Open Source CartoDB can enable you to do much more with much less.

Open Data

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:45:00 +0100

We want to share a remarkable step for the open data movement in Spain. Based on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Spanish government unveils today a new transparency law for a more open government.

Following there’s a quote for the English edition of Madrid-based daily El País: ”The Cabinet on Friday will approve a far-reaching government transparency law that will give citizens full access to official documents and records, and enforce open government policies at all public agencies to break open the tradition of secrecy in Spanish bureaucracy”.

According to El Pais, three-pronged proposal of the new transparency law covers public contracts, right to information and good governance. Spain is the only EU country with over one million inhabitants with no access to information law.

Research shows that over one in two requests (54%) never gets any kind of response, while only 20% receive the information requested, according to Access Info Europe, which recently launched a new site called tuderechoasaber.es following the success of projects like whatdotheyknow.com. Users can make and track requests for information from Spanish public bodies.

Get ready for EcoHackNYC!

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:33:00 +0100

Last November, we helped create the first ever EcoHack unconference here in NYC. The idea was to bring together people from different backgrounds into the same room to tackle real problems related to the environment. It was an amazing event that drew project ideas and solutions from a diverse crowd of designers, coders, scientists and other amazing people. At the end of that first weekend, we asked the participants how soon they would like to see another event. Overwhelmingly the answer was in less than a year. So now, we are announcing the second EcoHackNYC to be held April 20th and 21st] at the Parsons Design and Technology lab. We will also be working to find places to showcase some of the outcomes on Earth Day, April 22nd!

In order to keep growing and bringing new ideas to the event, we have joined forces with the Public Laboratory to help draw a community of hardware hackers and data collectors to EcoHackNYC. Think balloons, air sampling, and image collection! They are also making hardware available for hacking during the event. This doesn’t mean we wont still be doing all the data and code hacking from last year too!

Just like the first EcoHackNYC, we will kick off the event with Ignite talks where you can present the ideas you want to work on for the weekend. So start thinking about what data, technology, or hardware you think we should be creating or improving and submit those ideas. This will be a really exciting weekend that offers the chance to work on projects that may help change the world. So head over to the site], register, and get ready for a great time!

Toward a Biodiversity Atlas of Kenya

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:57:49 +0100

This week we are taking part in the Kenya Biodiversity Atlas and Decision Making Platform planning workshop hosted by the ACC. There are two medium term goals of this workshop: the first is to produce a hard copy Biodiversity Atlas for Kenya, the second is to produce broader and evolving online resource for the data, information, and analyses that go into a Kenyan Biodiversity Atlas. There is a longer-term goal to then make the technologies available throughout the region. To help make the work successful, the ACC has brought together representative many regional organizations and agencies such as TAWIRI and ARCOS as well as global organization such as the WCMC, WWF, and members of the group at WRI responsible for virtualkenya.org.

The discussion has been exciting, positive, and very on target. I was asked to give a presentation and focused on several ideas, including the importance of data access and availability, supporting science at multiple levels, work toward immediate deliverables and successes to drive continued development, and being open openly. In some of the breakout sessions I have also presented some of the technologies we have been building into CartoDB and have discussed how our cloud based solution (especially for large geospatial data) could very capably support many goals of the project.

Before we have even completed the meeting, I think I have come to understand a few key take aways here. First, data openness and accessibility in Kenya and regionally is still lacking in many areas key to an online Atlas’s success. Bandwidth and accessibility are ever-present concerns when building an online tool in Kenya. These challenges are not insurmountable, and all parties at the meeting are aware of the need for such a resource, both to ensure Kenya is recognized as a biodiversity knowledge and wealth, but also to help drive forward data and communication in Kenya.

I am excited for this project to take off, as I am confident it will be a valuable resource for Kenya and beyond.

Eye On Earth summit in Abu Dhabi

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:11:14 +0100

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.

Presenting on Open Data for Sustainable Tourism with Inter-American Development Bank

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:32:00 +0100

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.

EcoHackNYC, bringing together diverse minds to solve challenging problems

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:04:00 +0200

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!

NEEMO, crowd sourcing a seafloor biodiversity identification

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:58:00 +0200

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!

We have found 2 new planets outside the solar system

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:14:00 +0200

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!

HTML5 for Rich Geospatial applications on the web

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 22:26:00 +0200

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!

Open Source CartoSet announced at FOSS4G in Denver

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:30:15 +0200

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 :)

Announcing UNESCOplaces.org, our first CartoSet project

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:41:00 +0200

“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:

Techniques for distributed high-speed map tile generation using Mapnik & Node.js: @tokumin will show CartoDB internals and introduce the new Open Source project.
CartoSet, a new FOSS to create highly visual geo portals: @jatorre will develop a full site using the new CartoSet Framework. Good luck with the demo effect!

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.

Vizzuality at FOSS4G

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:32:42 +0200

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.

Techniques for distributed high-speed map tile generation using Mapnik & Node.js: @tokumin will show CartoDB internals and introduce the new Open Source project.
CartoSet, a new FOSS to create highly visual geo portals: @jatorre will develop a full site using the new CartoSet Framework. Good luck with the demo effect!
Map design, usability and interaction: The geospatial world lacks of design, usability and interaction, learn from our lead UX designer, @saleiva, how to rock with maps.
HTML5 for Rich Geospatial applications on the web: We have been working quite a lot recently on HTML5 and new web apps. @xavijam will show you lot of experiments using canvas or how to structure an entire application demoing GeoCAT.

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!

Presentation on oldweather.org at #wherecampDC by @jatorre

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 03:31:18 +0200

Presentation on oldweather.org at #wherecampDC by @jatorre

#wherecampDC report

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:36:29 +0200

Last week @jatorre had the opportunity to attend #wherecampdc in Washington DC. The event was a blast, lot of fun and interesting discussions. Here is a little report on what he found. In his own words…

First of all It has been so far the best geo event I have ever been. The level of the discussions and the wiling of people to share was great.

On Friday night there were the ignite talks when there were some good presentations. There was a presentation on pixel bender by a company called Blueraster, pretty much doing the same things we have done with it. They do it based on the ESRI Flex API. There was one about Tilemill, nothing you dont know already, another about geocommons, opening their analysis capabilities we tried last Feb. Some others from National Geogrpahic, ESRI… well a bit of everything. I talked finally about OldWeather. And I think people liked it. Heare are the slides.

Now the second day, it was the actual unconference. Never been before in an unconference and is a neat idea, people sef organize in topics for discussions at the beginning. I attended a talk on mobile data capturing tools and heard that basically everything still sucks and that is hard to get developing countries embrace technologies because of cost and things alike. A company called Spatial Networks talked about some complete solutions for data capturing, free for non commercial use but not Open Source. Other really cool and inspiring project I learnt about was Walking Papers, that now I learn that Aaron is involved. Aaron is a continuos surprise!

Then I attended a lunch session about deforestation. How much satellite data is becoming obiquos, landsat has been publicly released and lot of services are starting to appear offering the data for free. That will enable tools like we are building for Google.org. People seem to be interested on collaborating with us on the deforestation tool as an open source project, so thats nice, we will see where it all gets, but a bonus motivation to do a great work for imazon.

After that I went to a session about Mapnik with Dane Springmeyer hosting it. Pretty amazing what these guys are thinking. There was a lot of interesting discussion about how to enable different kinds of interactivity using UTF8Grids and things like that. Also Dane is thinking hard how to improve performance in multiple fronts in mapnik so there is a lot of innovation going in this front. We discussed multiple ways to enable interactivity, vector vs tile, flash vs canvas… great discussion.

After that went into a session with the Dave Troy, the creator of TwitterVision, do you remember? This application that started visualizing tweets on a map. He showed some really curious graphs on the amount of geolocated tweets, the locations, devices, etc. There were some curious things, like there is more absolute geolocated tweets in South America than in North America, the incredible importance of Indonesia where tweeting is a really big thing. He also talked about how to capture the stream of tweets, process them, etc.

Later there was a session I organized about deforestation and Landsat imagery… I showed them and explained them what we are trying to do with visualraster. ESRI and BlueRaster have done the same already with Flex and Pixel Bender. We talked a bit if it would be possible to use Canvas or WebGL to perform similar things, but although I wanted to make it a technical discussion, it really did not happen.

After than we went for beers, and had quite a lot of them! Talked with lot of people interesting stuff that I will be little by little assimilate and disseminate :) The guys from developmentseed are awesome, we really share lot of things with them.

There were lot of people interested on environment and conservation so we decided to organize this fall a #ecotechcamp in NY with at least @nicopresto and @robinkraft. I am finding lot of interesting people outside the Biodiversity Informatics and Conservation world with lot of new ideas about how to use geo.

Finally I want to thank all organizers and sponsor of the event, specially Nathaniel, for their great job organizing everything. Seriously you guys rock.

Now, when should we organize a #wherecampNY ??

We will be participating (with just a lightning talk) at MADinSpain2011

Tue, 31 May 2011 11:29:01 +0200

Next Friday, 3st of June, we will be giving a lightning talk at MADExpress - a set of 8 selected lightning talks - as part of Mad in Spain 2011.

I promise we will not just talk about our projects and our company. I’ll try to tell you something “new” and really important - at least for us-.

See you there, Diego, Javier and I will be walking around, so… don’t hesitate in giving us a shout!

(Mad in Spain is the most important design and creativity event celebrated in Spain and organized by domestika.org)

Visualizing the latest spanish elections

Wed, 25 May 2011 17:52:00 +0200

One month ago we were contacted by the spanish public TV. They wanted us to work on visualizing the results of the upcoming spanish elections (the 22nd of May). Of course we decided from the beginning that we did not want “just another” election map. So we started thinking about what could be the most interesting thing to display together with the results. Immediately we ended up looking at different indicators, like age, inmigration, unemploeyment, etc. to see if we could find correlations and start telling stories. Well, the concept evolved, we worked hard and yesterday we launched.

Click the image to visit the application.

This is the first big project that we develop using the CartoDB technology for map rendering and as a geospatial database on the cloud. And we have learnt a lot from it. We now know better how CartoDB can be used in these kind of highly viral projects (lot of traffic).

We found the development particularly interesting because it included two main things: lot of frontend development and lot of data processing. And being data junks as we are, going deep into Open Public data is something we enjoy.

There is also some curious parts of the application, like the animated graphs, dynamic comparison of different variables and many other little goodies. The application is quite extensive and provide lot of different ways to view and understand the data.

Finally here you can find a little video we prepared using Gource to display the development of the application over the 3 weeks that we worked on it.

Hope you like it!

Vizzuality Featuring Planet Hunters

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 22:52:05 +0200

We want to show you the latest video we have done to explain one of our favorite projects, PlanetHunters. The video was filmed by our great friends from Riot Cinema which we love to work with. We hope you will like it.