Posts from — May 2008

The California State Automobile Association produced its first road map in 1909, and will produce its last this year, nearly 100 years later, a victim to the shift to digital technology.

The auto club, which serves Northern California, Nevada and Utah, is phasing out its 12-person cartographic unit by year-end, a spokesperson said.

The AAA map has become something of a traveler’s icon over the decades, a no-cost product appreciated for both its utility and its beauty. In the tightly-knit mapmaking world, CSAA’s products are a yardstick by which other roadmaps are measured.

Fast booting paper maps will still be available for free to club members, but will be produced by AAA’s headquarters in Florida.

Read the full story here.

[tags]AAA maps, california automobile association maps, road maps[/tags]

No doubt we have each, in our own way, been touched by the recent disasters in Burma/Myanmar and China. I just finished reading an interesting article that outlines the ever-increasing role of cartographers and GIS specialists in aiding and enabling humanitarian relief efforts in disaster zones.

• Zero hour: Natural disaster strikes without notice, triggering international rapid-mapping responses
• Minutes later: Geographical survey centres, like the US Geological Survey, send alerts to relief agencies. A simple location map is put online, with the epicentre identified. Other agencies add basic population information
• Within hours: Relief workers carrying GIS (geographic information system) technology are deployed to the affected region. They begin to gather updated information from the affected scene
• Once aid workers are on the ground: An On-Site Operations Co-ordination Centre is set up to co-ordinate the relief effort. Mapping information from the field is collated there
• Within 48 hours: The latest field information is combined with accurate 1:5,000,000 “base maps” to form the first complete maps of disaster-zone data
• In following days: A daily routine emerges, with basic maps updated every 24 hours. Bespoke maps requested by relief workers can now be constructed within hours

GIS technology is advancing quickly, enabling non-governmental organizations like Map Action to respond rapidly with new maps, but the technology is still expensive and continues to rely on workers on the ground, as mentioned in a previous post.

[tags]mapping, GIS, cartography, disaster relief, China, Burma, Myanmar[/tags]