vizzuality blog

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.

Master in Global Environmental Change at IE University

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:44:00 +0100

Here at Vizzuality, we have always had a close connection to the academic world, as many of our clients are universities or research institutes. The IE University in Madrid, for example, are among our frequent collaborators.

Most recently, we’ve been working with Professor Jacob Van Etten, dean of the Faculty of Biology, to prepare the Master in Global Environmental Change. Now the fun part: Sergio and Javier, together with Andrew Hill, will be instructing a class for the masters, Data Management and Information Design.

The course will cover concepts, skills, and methods we use at Vizzuality to perform data analysis, processing, and visualization. Much of the material will involve geographic data and the use of maps. The course is meant to teach professionals to turn data into information, information into insight, and then leverage insight to make a better world.

We’ve arranged several fantastic guest instructors for the course, such as Jon Hutton, Director of the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre and Damon Stanwell-Smith, also from UNEP-WCMC and working on Biodiversity Indicators. On the technical side of things, we’re supported by Geocommons, providers of the mapping platform we will be using for coursework.

You can learn more about the classes on the course wiki. Soon we will also begin publishing the presentations and additional content. Also check out the class blog, where students will be posting everything developed during the class. Keep an eye on those students, too — at the end of the master, one will join Vizzuality for an internship!

Vizzuality at CERN

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:48:55 +0100

What a week for Vizzuality! We were invited to give a seminar on data visualization and citizen science at CERN, in Geneva. Sergio and I are both big physics enthusiasts, so visiting the renowned science center — whose mission is “finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works” — was an awesome experience. Of course, we wouldn’t expect anything less from the creators of the Large Hadron Collider.

To top it all off, we were hosted by the very department that launched the WWW and is currently building a huge GRID.

We were actually invited to CERN by Francois Grey and Daniel Lombraña, who are working on many interesting initiatives related to citizen science and volunteer computing. We first met Daniel when he dropped by our Madrid office for coffee, and we were immediately impressed by the projects he showed us. It turns out that his research overlaps — both thematically and technically — with much of our recent work, so it’s been great to be in contact with his group.

Our talk, New trends in data analysis and visualization on the web, was well-received. The abstract we sent must have been enticing — as our presentation began, the seminar room filled until people were standing in the back! Sergio was a bit nervous at first, but quickly warmed up. We got a lot of questions and began several really interesting discussions that continued through the lunch break.

You can view the presentation here, or check out the slides on Slideshare. Keep in mind that we were advised not to get too technical, so the talk provides more of an inspirational overview rather than revelations on technology. Nonetheless, we hope it gives you some insight into what we’ve been up to recently.

We look forward to working further with Francois, Daniel, and their team… and seeing the LHC next time we visit them!

Our first project on humanitarian crisis. 1 year after the Haiti...

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 11:00:00 +0100

Main site

Haiti Main page

We love stats

Detail information for each organization

Our first project on humanitarian crisis. 1 year after the Haiti earthquake we have been working with Interaction to display maps of NGO response. The application we developed is not just for Haiti, it allows Interaction to create as many sites as they want in a manner of minutes.

Check out the website and if you are curious read about the making of in our portfolio.

Old Weather: Our Weather's Past, the Climate's Future

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 12:34:00 +0200

We are very proud to announce that one of the projects where we have been working on is now released. Its name is Old Weather and is one of the most interesting project we think we have done so far. Go and check it out.

In essence, the idea is to to ask everybody to help digitizing log book from old boats so that we can learn how the weather was in the past. A log book is the daily diary that all boats have. On them they wrote, among other things, measurements of the weather conditions together with location. That brings the possibility to know what the weather was like 100 years ago on the ocean and try to understand how it has changed since then.

The project also includes the idea of “Games with a purpose”. People should have fun while digitizing. In Old Weather you can become a sailor, and by digitizing become a captain. The idea that you are only 10 pages away to promote to a new position is very engaging!

Old Weather is catching up in the media. You can find articles on TV, Radio and Internet. Check out for example the BBC or Wired, plus Twitter. With some great videos explaining the project, Zooniverse knows how to promote their projects. It is very exciting to be part of it.

Vizzuality has worked on the Visual Design and frontend programing. We had a great time working with the good people from Zooniverse and we look forward to work on them on future exciting projects like this one. We have a page now on our website describing the project.

Meanwhile I think we have already 3 captains at Vizzuality, go digitize some books and become a captain yourself!

OldWeather

TDWG Techno Bioblitz

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 11:12:00 +0200

TDWG Techno Bioblitz:

We have now a nice TDWG Bioblitz event page with links to software and general information about the event.

Vizzuality is participating on the event developing 3 different tools: the Taxonomizer, the Flickertagger and a visualization tool.

Looking forward to see everybody there.

Bioblitz at the next TDWG 2010 conference

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:57:00 +0200

This year at TDWG 2010 Annual Conference in Woods Hole, there is a new event going on. We are organizing a Techno/Bioblitz!

For those who dont know what a Techno/Bioblitz is, first of all is not some sort of new music style. It is a event where we invite everybody to discover an area, Woods Hole, going to the field and collecting or observing biodiversity. The technical people, for example us, we will be working on tools and methodologies to help on the data gathering process, the sharing of the data and finally its visualization.

Vizzuality is contributing by helping to organize the technical side, aka the “Techno”. Specifically we are working on the use of Fusion Tables for data storage, Taxonomy resolution services, validation services, visualization of data and maybe, another data gathering tool. If you want to join us on organizing the event, or want to contribute with software, subscribe to this mailing list.

On the other hand Javier is also chairing what promise to be a very interesting session on Hardware and Infrastructure. There will be talks on big Biodiversity projects and Cloud Computing.

Finally Vizzuality will likely be giving a computer demonstration of latest projects and might participate on some Lighting talks on data visualization.

Looking forward to meet the community at TDWG and have a great Bioblitz.

(Image taken from EOL Flickr group and licensed under Creative Commons)