SimpleGeo Blog

A few months ago we announced a partnership with Stamen Design, the best online mapping and data visualization company we know. It’s time to announce Polymaps, the first public milestone in that partnership, at http://polymaps.org.

We’ve been working with Stamen to provide visual analysis of the huge datasets that we’re working with, and how people can communicate this data in sophisticated ways. A first step toward that goal is the release of a free and open-source set of tools and map engines allowing people to perform relatively sophisticated operations on their data in the browser.

The project has been online for a while at http://github.com/simplegeo/polymaps, and you can download the source code there; what’s new is the addition of a series of example maps so you can demonstrate what’s going on, and human-readable documentation so you can use them for your own projects.

Some of the examples are straightforward, letting you do things like group points into clusters and drop scaled gradients on to map locations. Others are more robust, letting you do things like change which direction is north by rotating the map and visualize the quality of street surfaces in San Francisco.

Stamen has also been consulting with us on our API development and serving as alpha consumers of the datasets that we’re working with. The Polymaps project has helped us get clear on what parts of the API we’re ready to support in the near term, and which are going to require more work. Stamen is helping us identify new needs that the SimpleGeo service could fulfill; basically fleshing out the API methods that projects like http://crimespotting.org use to feed richly interactive maps over time, divide them up by administrative district, and so on.

The kinds of datasets that SimpleGeo works with are often on the scale of (say) a million Crimespotting projects, so the ability to do the kind of queries that come naturally to smaller projects doesn’t necessarily come free.

Working with Stamen at this early stage is helping us clarify and answer questions that developers will want to be able to ask when our service is out in the wild.