FortiusOne‘s GeoCommons is a free web-based geospatial analysis and cartography tool that also allows you to upload, share and remix datasets, and it is being relaunched today. It packs quite a punch.

But first some history. GeoCommons was originally launched at Where 2.0 in 2007. Over the past year, feedback from neogeographers who most need such a service led FortiusOne to completely redesign the service, and also to team up with Mapufacture, who have been working on similar technologies and goals.

The result is the new GeoCommons, which I’ve had a chance to play with over the past few days. It’s easy to explore — just get a free account and start mapping with heaps of existing datasets, or upload your own.

What makes GeoCommons so intuitive is that the service’s two main functions are clearly delineated — there’s Finder! for “finding, organizing and sharing GeoData in common formats” and Maker! to “make stunning interactive maps with your own data, GeoCommons public data or both.”

Finder organizes the raw content, while Maker deals with the presentation of this content, though the tools that let you make a cool map aren’t just collections of pretty icons, but include nifty widgets for slicing the data so as to maximize clarity. For example, choosing the dataset of recent earthquakes is just the beginning. You then get to massage the data thus before it makes it to the map:

That’s a level of sophistication in end-user web-based geotools I have not seen anywhere else. The best thing is that subsequent users can try their own hand at manipulating the data within the map, or make a completely new map with the same data.

Geocommons is also agnostic when it comes to your basemap:

How can it possibly get better? Well, you can currently link to a map, but you can’t yet embed it on a web page elsewhere on the web. FortiusOne’s Sean Gorman says they have embeddable maps waiting in the wings, but don’t want to burden the servers with it just yet.

Also, if you want to get a dynamic KML network link to the data, you currently have to go via a map rather than directly from a data layer, but that too is just temporary. Writes Sean:

All the KML on Finder is raw data and not network links. So you can only upload raw KML and download raw KML and there is not currently network link support. We are currently working on support for dynamic data that would allow us to support both KML network links and GeoRSS but do not have it ready for launch. This is a big part of what we are doing with the merging of Mapufacture into GeoCommons.

And at the moment, you can’t upload KMZ files yet — they have to be KML, which means you can’t upload overlays. You also can’t upload KML files that reference overlays as URLs. But these are quibbles; GeoCommons takes Shapefiles and all CSV spreadsheets with longitude and latitude columns, and you can also download GeoCommons layers as KML, Shapefiles or CSV spreadsheets.

Have fun exploring this significant new neogeo toolset. As soon as GeoRSS and network link support for datasets is in place, imagine the things you will be able to do with GeoCommons married to Yahoo! Pipes:-)

{Update 13:42 GMT: Mapufacture’s Andrew Turner blogs Maker! and the goals behind this app.]

[Update 14:07 GMT: Sean Gorman blogs the launch.]

I’m going to try to stay awake for the US presidential debates, which go live here in Cairo at 3am, so in the meantime here is another round of interesting links with commentary:

• Auto-mapping astronomy paper references: the Daily ACK’s Alasdair Allen comes up with yet another ingenious KML hack for astronomers: All papers in the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) database that contain reference links to astronomical objects in the massive SIMBAD database can now be mapped via his script to a KML file that is viewable in Google Sky. At the moment it’s a perl script that you’d have to implement yourself, but here’s hoping that this becomes a web service real soon, linked to automatically from ADS queries. Alasdair also muses as to further possible data mining possibilities:
  

  If you had a large enough group of astronomers, and therefore a large enough number of papers, you could produce heat maps of the sky instead of using simple push pins. You could cross-correlate your own publications with that of a group or institute where you’re thinking of applying for a job, or the publication output of a survey team with the footprint of their survey…

• Stellarium updated: Talking of astronomy, really excellent open source desktop planetarium Stellarium just got a major update. It’s even prettier than before.
• Virtual Earth on iPhone how-to: So that I can get a bird’s eye view application on my iPhone faster, Chris Pendelton has written up a how-to for you, developer. If anybody knows of any apps out in the wild, or even Virtual Earth web maps that are mobile-savvy and accessible via a URL, please let me know.
• Debunking censorship myths in Wasilla & Boston: Xconomy’s Wade Roush debunks the latest censorship urban myth:
  

  One rumor making its way around the Web right now is that Google blurred out images of Wasilla, AK, after Alaska governor and former Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin was named John McCain’s running mate.

  As Wade points out, the reality is that a DigitalGlobe high resolution tile happens to cover half of Wasilla, while the other half is at 15m meter resolution, like most of Alaska (it being a big state). No conspiracy here.

  But Wade also fact-checks that now-infamous IT Security article Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps for all the places it says are censored near Boston. Surprise surprise, none of them are. He has a good theory as to why that article was so off-base — it was uncritically cribbed from a Wikipedia article that is itself not reliably sourced.

• Afrigadget: Only tangentially related to GIS, but a new favorite blog of mine is Erik Hersman’s Afrigadget, via Ethan Zuckerman, who drives home the fact that “Africa’s an amazing lab for innovation, because if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.”
• Thematic Mapping Engine: Better mentioned late than never on this blog, the Thematic Mapping Engine is an impressively polished global statistics visualizer for such indicators as mortality rates, CO2 emissions, internet usage and much more, mapped across the world’s countries as KML — even as a time series, where the data is available.

Cairo blogger and friend Elijah Zarwan, aka The Skeptic, has been lamenting the demise of widespread free wifi in Cairo’s cafés, now mostly replaced by a monopolistic pay-as-you-go registration system that also happens to make it more difficult for Cairo’s burgeoning blogging classes to criticize the government anonymously.

A crowdsourcing experiment was in order, so I started a Google My Map that anyone can edit to add the locations of those cafés and locations that are bucking the trend and deserving of everyone’s business. The map’s home page is here, but you can of course embed it like so:

View Larger Map

It’s early days yet, but anyone can make it better: You just need a Google account, but that account can of course be anonymous.

One concern: Malicious users could erase the data, and this is one area where Google Maps could be improved: Allow only non-destructive edits by collaborators, and add admin privileges for map owners, so that they can review all edits and destructive edit requests. In the meantime, I’m backing up the map regularly by copying the data to a private My Map. (That leads to another feature request: versioning)

• DigitalGlobe, Google, extend agreement: It’s described by DigitalGlobe in their press release as a “new multi-year, non-exclusive content agreement”. I wonder if that means the terms have been changed. The previous agreement gave Google exclusive web use of the imagery.
• Iraq Surge “success” due to ethnic cleansing? Science Daily writes up an analysis of satellite imagery of Baghdad taken at night which concludes that several Baghdad neighborhoods saw distinctive reductions in night light over the past few years – a proxy for population density. The inference is that the depopulation of these neighborhoods is a cause for the lessening of the inter-community violence in Bagdhad, as there are fewer mixed communities left. It’s a feasible thesis, though to me the unit areas measured in the analysis look rather large and coarse for any definitive conclusions to be drawn.
• The Google Earth censorship meme continues to spread: Emirates Business 24/7 believes that
  

  Google Earth is also victim to this arm-twisting tactics of authorities and, on the request of many countries, blocks geographical imprints of sensitive areas. Largely disputed areas are also blocked on Google Earth on the request of respective countries.

  I’m glad that UAE media pens articles critical of internet censorship (and some of the other points are spot on) but facts are facts and the above excerpt is fiction.

• India flooding gets updated imagery: The flooded Kosi river now has some proper updated imagery, thanks to the German Aerospace Center (DLR), GeoEye and the Google India Team.
• Virtual Earth v6.2 now out: The new map controls for Microsoft Virtual Earth are out. In this version developers get much better support for mobiles. I can’t wait to get bird’s eye view on my iPhone — until now, Virtual Earth wasn’t usable in the mobile browser. Alas, 3D still doesn’t work on Macs. (Talking of which, the Google Earth 3D plugin for Mac browsers still isn’t out yet either.)

So how close are we to getting a proper 3D virtual globe on the iPhone?

Clearly, recent apps for the iPhone have shown that true 3D games are entirely doable: Just take a look a Cro-Mag Rally to see a car racing game using real-time 3D rendering of the terrain.

No doubt plenty of short-cuts are employed for the sake of playability, and the terrains are fantasy places, but the player does get a sustained effect of being inside a 3D place rather than looking at a 2D screen. Same goes for Aphalt 4.

Then there is an actual stab at making a virtual globe: Earthscape does a remarkable job of hiding its shortcuts to create quite a seamless experience. You can zoom in on the globe from above, and then switch to a stationary bird’s eye view to see a 3D terrain view. Both modes get around what must be a very expensive calculation, in terms of processing power: Deciding which 3D pixels come in front of others. In the straight-from-above view, no such calculations are necessary as you zoom in, as you always get to see every pixel on the map, even if it is a 3D map (just travel across the Alps at close range to see the changes in perspective). When you switch to the bird’s eye view perspective, the application spends some time figuring out which pixels come in front of others for your one specific location — and it only needs to do this once, as you can’t look up to the horizon and then travel. In effect, what Earthscape does is construct a 360-degree panorama for your location and then lets you pan and zoom around that. All the work, however, only needs to be done once. You can’t move location while looking around in bird’s eye view. (see comments for clarification.)

Earthscape is an impressive proof of concept, a good app to impress iPhone newbies with. It does suffer from some limitations, currently, that don’t really make it usable as an efficient cartographic tool: It takes a very long time for the resolution to catch up with your zoom, even on wifi broadband; and while some US cities have high resolution imagery, Europe and the rest of the world does not. As a result, the Wikipedia layer included in Earthscape has a much higher level of granularity than the map it is displayed on.

In a way, these criticisms are a bit unfair, as we’re comparing Earthscape to the imagery dataset and data serving capacity of some of the world’s biggest companies, but they do reflect user expectations. I’m sure we can expect future updates to Earthscape to get road layers as well.

In one respect Earthscape has a feature that Google Earth and Virtual Earth haven’t even implemented: A feed of popular photo site Flickr’s “most interesting” georeferenced pictures. There is also a built-in feature to take and upload geotagged iPhone pictures to an Earthscape server, and the ability to see these photos and the most recent ones uploaded by everyone on Earthscape, but these are — for the moment at least — snapshots of people testing the feature. Flickr and Panoramio have proper “postcard” photos.

In sum: At its previous price of $10, I couldn’t really recommend Earthscape as money well spent (other than to review it), but at its current new price of Free, there is every reason to download it, play with it, and offer feedback to encourage further development.

Can we expect to get “live” bird’s eye view soon, in the sense that a 3D view towards the horizon is calculated in real time as we travel across the landscape? [Update: See comments; Earthscape does already let you move around] One iPhone application already does this, and with impressive frame rates: X-Plane 9.

X-Plane is a joy to use as a flight simulator (once you realize that it crashes easily if it doesn’t get to use plenty of unfragmented memory, i.e. restart the iPhone before use). The accelerometer-based controls are especially intuitive, and I hope future mobile virtual globes let us navigate the world in a similar fashion. The most impressive feature of Xplane for iPhone is that it uses the same bit of real terrain as in the full-fledged version (according to Xplane aficionados): The region around Innsbruck, Austria. It’s mountainous, and yet rendered in real-time. And it is $10 well-spent.

Can this be replicated in a virtual globe? There are three short-cuts that I can see that may make it harder for virtual globes to get the same frame rate as X-Plane: 1) the terrain is not downloaded on demand but instead already exists in memory; 2) the textures are quite rough and limited in variety; it seems to me that there is only one level of detail; 3) Plenty of haze ensures that the 3D pixel calculations don’t have to extend too far from the cockpit.

Still, it certainly looks feasible that a true virtual globe is within reach of the iPhone’s capabilities, and I for one can’t wait to play with it.

On September 13, a whole week ago, back when we were busy being consumed by the possibility of financial armageddon or the meaning of lipstick on a pig, something flitted past Earth that tends to put all that into perspective: Evidence in the form of electromagnetic radiation of a high-energy explosion that took place 12.8 billion years ago — making it the oldest and furthest gamma ray burst ever recorded, from when the universe was only 7% of its present age.

The recording was done by the Swift satellite, which is automated to quickly lock on and zoom into such events. This particular burst, GRB 080913, had a redshift higher than anything Swift had seen previously. Space.com has the story with a good image of the burst, NASA has the raw data including coordinates, and Swift’s site has raw imagery data with grid overlays (try the GIFs) so it didn’t take long to create an overlay for Google Sky. Here it is.

(In March 2008, Swift caught the most luminous gamma ray burst so far, coincidentally within hours of Arthur C Clarke’s death. That burst was 7.5 billion light years away. GRB 080913 is more than half that again older and further away.)

• Navigator: Valery Hronusov has come out with yet another Google Earth-centric application — and this time, it’s free. Navigator takes your GPS device as input and displays a myriad of details regarding individual satellite positions, signal-to-noise ratios, error estimates, course, speed, etc… In other words, it works like your GPS on steroids, and it uses Google Earth as the map. For Windows only, so I haven’t managed to check it out, but don’t wait for me.
• Google Maps for Mobile gets Street View: So announces Google Mobile Blog. Not for your iPhone, though. Perhaps an update is in the works — or can we expect future updates to come to Android first? For a sneak peek at what Google Maps for Android will look like, Mapperz has a video of a demonstration at the Google Developer Day held in London Sept 16. Alasdair Allan also has a report on “what’s new in geo” at the event.
• US Science spending cartograms: Science magazine reporter Declan Butler has been geographically visualizing different science indicators across US states using cartograms, much like the ones we’ve gotten to know at WorldMapper. Declan used the open-source Java tool called Scapetoad to make his, which is based on the same (Gastner/Newman) algorithm WorldMapper uses. WorldMapper, BTW, will soon be releasing a book of its pretty cartograms, reports The Map Room.
• Swiss Google Earth blog: Swiss Earth is Ronald Sautebin’s new blog about his country as seen in Google Earth. With part of the Google geo team recruited from Switzerland with the purchase of Endoxon in 2006, the country is certainly not short-shrifted in Google Earth. (In French)
• Live English Channel Ships: KML of real-time ship positions in the English Channel, brought to you by EarthNC and English Channel Ship Movements Website. I didn’t know you have to keep to the right — did you?
• Hurricane Ike imagery compared: Google Lat Long Blog points to KML overlays of post-hurricane Ike imagery Google has made available. Over on the Earth is Square, Chad compares it to the imagery provided directly by NOAA and finds NOAA’s imagery better.
• Taking servers to the seas: Times Online reports that Google is mooting putting server farms out to sea, where they can use seawater for cooling and waves as an energy source. Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze wonders whether this could also be a way to avoid tax and censorship laws. As for property taxes, sure, why not avoid them, but when it comes to evading sovereignty, then I think you need to be a whole lot further offshore than the maximum 11 kilometers mooted in the Times article. Further issues: The data cables would have to hit land somewhere, which means regulation there — and if you truly were to be out in international waters, then who is going to protect Google’s servers? Gives the term ‘computer-piracy’ a whole new meaning. (And, yes, similarities to the giant off-shore city in Snow Crash have been noted.)
• Drupal 6 + Google Earth: Dan Karran has updated the KML module for the Drupal content management system, with help from Robin Rainton. New feature: Caching of KML feeds and custom POI markers.
• State of the Map in India: Calcutta’s The Telegraph vents its frustration at continued anachronistic regulations that require all maps published in India to be subject to a lengthy “authenticatation” process, meaning that borders must conform to the government’s political stance, even if they do not portray the situation on the ground. (Via All Points Blog)
• Search SIMBAD via Google Sky (web): SIMBAD is the most extensive database of deep sky objects out there. In my review of Microsoft World Wide Telescope, I noted that you could do SIMBAD searches from within WWT, whereas you couldn’t in Google Sky. Now forum.nu lets you search SIMBAD and see the result in Google Sky (web). (Via Google Maps Mania)

I’m flying to Sweden tonight unexpectedly, as that bout of pneumonia I had in the spring has come back for seconds. Best to fix it properly this time — i.e. not in an Egyptian hospital. We’ll see if this means more time for blogging or less:-)