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Hey! Not all for-subscriber biweekly posts are moody philosophical ramblings! This time I needed a break and just indulged in some fun.
The intersection of data and maps stretches back…. I have no idea how long. Centuries perhaps? While they used to take ridiculous amounts of time and effort to compile, these days the plethora of data and mapping tools has made it easy to have massive, globe-scale data inputs updating maps in real time to display on our phones. It’s so common now that we take things like real time weather maps and traffic maps for granted in our daily lives. I certainly go through life consuming this sort of data constantly without really stopping to marvel at it.
This week, after sharing a real-time map showing ships at sea, the at-sea equivalent of Flightradar24, on the Approaching Significance Discord I’ve been running (hint: you should join us!), someone responded that there is a map that tracks the location of GPS tracked sharks. SHARKS! In (near) real time!! That sparked the idea in my head that we’re in an age where there’s should be a lot of maps out there in our data-filled world now that show interesting stuff.
So, I went looking for them. Specifically, I wanted to find maps that are:
1 - data-driven
2 - updated often (ideally in minutes while you watch)
There’s actually a ton of other data-driven maps out there that show much slower-moving data. For example, there’s satellite data that show stuff like tree coverage, or maps that show the status of volcanos. While those are also very interesting, they don’t change on a time scale that’s entertaining for an evening at the keyboard with a glass of wine and thus I mostly ignored them.
The search for maps also started a very interesting meta game in my head. How can I find the interesting maps out there? What sorts of things would be interesting to see on a map, but would also move on the time scales of minutes? What intersection of technical skill, money, and motivation would cause some entity to publish data for effectively free use by some random person like myself?
When you stop to think about it, there’s a lot of things that move quickly in the world that would be very cool to see on a map — for example trucks, trains, or people. But that sort of data would be either a massive invasion of privacy, or likely proprietary information that some organization would want to keep secret or sell for money. Think about the sort of trouble a real-time map of every armored car carrying bags of cash in a city may cause.
So, thanks to many of these constraints, a lot of the things I did manage to find more or less came from four places: government agencies (or things using their data), non-profits, weather services, open data required by governments (a.k.a. transponders on things).
I encourage you to try to come up with ideas for maps that other people might have published. It’s hard! It’s fun!
Anyways, here’s all the stuff I managed to find after about two evenings of fun. If you have any favorites, send them to me!
Transport related
This category is relatively easy to find because public transport either has government regulations or a customer service incentive to show tracking data publicly
Flightradar24 - Airplanes, thanks to the ADS-B transponders broadcasting from planes and the many receivers in the world that pick up and share the data.
MarineTraffic - Ships at sea! This is thanks to the Automatic Identification System that ships broadcast.
Trains in the UK - mostly commuter trains.
I’m annoyed that NYC’s subway doesn’t have a map, very few sections of the system even use modern train control methods that know the exact position of trains. It seems at best they know which track blocks are occupied.
I can’t find anything about freight trains in the US or anywhere else =\
Earth and Space stuff
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