We are now nearly a month into this years hurricane season, which ranges from the first of June until the end of November. Hurricanes are extremely large, wide-spread storms that are naturally difficult to study. GIS has been used for a long time to track, monitor, and measure the effects of hurricanes. Recently I found a data set on the National Atlas website that has data for historic hurricanes from 1851-2004.

The FBI's Uniform Crime Report provides statistics on the number of crime that are committed in American cities and counties. These data are archived at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The crimes knowns as Part 1crimes are typically composed of Murder, Rape , Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Assault, Burglary, Larceny, Auto Theft, Theft, and Arson. This post uses data collected from The National Atlas that includes information for a series of years 1994-2000.

Agriculture is one industry that has great interest in using Geospatial analysis for improving production and conserving and protecting land quality. Monitoring such things as water usage, growth, crop production, and many other related features of farming can greatly impact what is grown, how it is grown, and the ways in which agricultural products are processed.

The BP oil spill continues to plague the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama addressed the nation yesterday explaining the many challenges that oil spill presents, and the cost that it is having on the U.S. This post highlights the use of NASA satellite imagery of the oil spill and shows how to perform some basic analysis on how large the oil spill is. Specifically, you will see how to add and create your own layers for analysis.

The folks at Very Spatial Podcast have an interview this week with Gaige B Paulsen, President and Founder of ClueTrust, where he talks about Cartographica.

In light of the massive oil spill ongoing in the Gulf of Mexico this post is designed to highlight locations for data relevant to the spill, and to show these data in use in Cartographica. The BP oil platform Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 and resulted in the deaths of 11 crew members. The subsequent fire caused the extreme deepwater oil rig to sink causing the largest oil disaster in U.S. history. In hopes of promoting more understanding about the incident several websites have offered GIS data regarding the incident.

Washington D.C.'s GIS data catalogue provides numerous data about public issues within the city. One interesting data set is crime in D.C. In this post you will see how Cartographica can effectively manage large data sets for use in crime mapping. Specifically, this post will show you how to filter, export, merge, and analyze crime data.

For those of you who have been waiting in the wings for 1.2, that wait is now over! ClueTrust is pleased to announce the general availability of Cartographica 1.2, GIS for Mac OS X. We've got a ton of new and updated features, which we've been talking about on this blog for the past few weeks during our formal beta process. Follow the link for more information.

Exporting maps to Adobe Illustrator gives you the ability to enhance GIS output for presentation and publication. Cartographica 1.2 offers new enhanced features that give more specificity in what is exported to Adobe Illustrator from Cartographica. The new features give you the ability to choose line segment labels, to determine how polygons will be labeled, and it gives you the choice to export data along with the map. The segment labels option gives you choice in labeling lines with multiple segments. You can choose to label each line segment of label only the first segment. Also you are able to chose whether polygons will be labeled internally or if the label will be next to the polygon. Finally, you have the choice to export data along with the map, which give you the ability to do extra enhancements once inside Adobe Illustrator. The enhanced features of exporting files means that Cartographica is very adaptable to your needs in terms of what you want to be exported to Adobe Illustrator.

A new feature of Cartographica 1.2 is layer bounding-box invisibility. This makes it easier to use a single large background map for multiple mapsets without having to be constantly zoomed in. Given that Cartographica now has the ability to import live maps you will find that this tool is very useful because it allows more flexibility with zoom commands when working with a large background map such as a Live Bing map.