NACIS 2019

How to Make Beautiful Maps for Any Screen
Presenter: Mira Rojanasakul, Bloomberg News
Co-presenter: Jeremy Lin, Bloomberg News
Making maps informative, responsive and beautiful for screens presents many challenges – can the Grand Canyon fit into 300px? Will my detailed hillshade load over 3G? But we're reading online now more than ever – and working digitally affords us the opportunity to create innovative narrative experiences. With proper UI, each device can act as a window into vast geographies. By manipulating scrolling and animation, we can guide readers through densely layered information in focused bite – building arguments and revealing spatial relationships over time. In this session, we'll discuss how the Bloomberg graphics team takes advantage of web maps as a tool for storytelling.

Protecting Privacy in Maps Using Geographic Masks
Presenter: David Swanlund, Simon Fraser University
Co-presenters: Nadine Schuurman, Simon Fraser University; Mariana Brussoni, University of British Columbia
Recent research has clearly demonstrated that individuals' geoprivacy is routinely violated due to sensitive data being published in maps. These privacy violations are easily avoided by using geographic masks, which anonymize sensitive data such that it can be published safely. Adoption of these methods, however, remains limited. This presentation will describe an open-source web application that geographically masks users' sensitive spatial data in mere minutes such that it can be shared safely. It operates completely on the client-side using Javascript to ensure full confidentiality, and offers researchers and data stewards vital privacy methods that may otherwise be inaccessible.

Turn right at the Dunkin Donuts? Branded points of interest in mobile map navigation
Presenter: Craig Dalton, Hofstra University
Mobile Map applications, such as Google Maps and Waze, are increasingly common tools for everyday wayfinding. Such applications employ myriad points of interest (POIs), most often businesses, in direct connection to the parent company's targeted advertising strategy, and now in turn-by-turn directions. How does this new economy of data impact the kinds of features users employ in as they situate themselves and navigate? Does the emphasis on business POIs on the map subsequently make those locations more prominent in users' understandings of the geography around them? This paper presents initial results in the midst of a larger study.

Visual Hierarchies in Interactive Web-based 3D Mapping
Presenter: Ondrej Prochazka, Melown Technologies SE
Modern WebGL-based representative 3D mapping has taken little notice of time-proven rules of cartography, as if arbitrary viewing angles could somehow obliterate the need to convey a clear hierarchy of features. In this talk we will show how that long-standing shortcoming may be overcome using solely open-source software. From the choice of a basemap through the definition of intellectual and visual hierarchies to the coding of visual style, we will show how to produce 3D maps which aspire not only to the aesthetic appeal but also to the information value of a real cartographic product.

Offline Maps for Mobile – Making Maps That Are Mobile First
Presenter: Rob Chohan, RobLabs.com
Our mobile maps are designed with mobile in mind from the beginning. "Mobile First" means that all map data is embedded in the app and the customer's experience is great once they download the app. "Mobile First" also means that the map data is presented without a server; truly serverless maps. If the application is backcountry hiking or search and rescue, then the customer is ready to "go well prepared" We use OpenStreetMap data and other open data such as Authoritative Trails data from the US Forest Service and US Geologic Survey.