PUBLIC MARKS with tag data

NOAA today released the World Ocean Database 2009, the largest, most comprehensive collection of scientific information about the oceans with records dating as far back as 1800. This product is part of the climate services provided by NOAA.

This imaginative and insightful approach got me thinking about a related problem I’ve been keen to address for some time: data entry. How can we use paper as a more effective channel for information flow during and after humanitarian emergencies?

Threading

We’re quite familiar with the idea of writing a program that follows a specific sequence of steps as outlined in, say, a main() function. A Thread is also a series of steps with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A thread’s sequence, however, can run independently of the main program. In fact, we can launch any number of threads at one time and they will all run concurrently. Visit the Java site for a more involved explanation.

This is incredibly useful when it comes to data mining, as we can have separate threads retrieving different pieces of information from the network. If one gets stuck or has an error, the entire program won’t grind to a halt, since the error only stops that individual thread. To create independent, asynchronous threads, we simply extend the Thread class.

Structuring Data in Images of the Medieval World

Si l’on ajoute à cela la récente autorisation de la photographie à la BnF, on se couche satisfait… en attendant la prochaine étape : la Bundesarchiv a déjà versé 100 000 photos dans Wikimedia Commons, la base de données de Wikipédia, et la deutsche Fotothek 250 000. Alors, à quand la BnF, la RMN, les AN et toutes les AD ?

The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that any data that you create in (or import into) a product is your own. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products.

One of the 8 works I created for the Data Art Show at the Pink Hobo Gallery in Minneapolis.

All these pieces are a pun on the new craze for data visualization. The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well.

But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics.

Since I do not have a problem with aesthetics for their own sake in these pieces I deliberately took the opposite direction. Since I wanted to create something visually interesting I made up my own data which would give me the desired results. All these works are the result of generative algorithms, so all the elements and their connections are actually data and not something I assembled manually in Illustrator.

These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services.

You can read the full API documentation here: BlockChalk API v0.6

So what does this mean? It means that BlockChalk is now more than just a nifty GPS app for your iPhone. It’s an open platform for storing and accessing user-generated content within a geographic context.

What makes the BlockChalk platform unique?

* It’s dead simple. There are no badges, medals, points, unicorns, pirates, or other viral gaming craziness. BlockChalk is about locations and the messages people leave there, that’s it.