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Maps...meet your Maker!

Posted October 2nd, 2008 by Keene Haywood

The innovative group out of the Washington, DC area called FortiusOne has been hard at work on creating some great mapping tools. Yesterday, they announced their newest product, called Maker! which enables one to quickly make maps that one would normally expect to see coming out of a dedicated GIS. Its a slick implementation (the image above is a map of Facebook users in the US). There are a number of maps you can browse in the Maker! and then of course you can make your own, hence the name Maker!. This complements their existing service called Finder! which allows you to find and use analytical geospatial data with a miniumum of fuss. Maker! and Finder! are part of an effort called the GeoCommons that FortiusOne has been developing. They descibe it best...

GeoCommons delivers visual analytics thorugh maps; enabling non-technical professionals to view multiple datasets, draw conclusions, make decisions and solve problems without traditional GIS overhead

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Their services are a great go between full blown GIS and neogeography which is more the bailiwick of the layperson. Best of all, data accessed through the GeoCommons is free to use under the Creative Commons License. Nice!

For faculty and students who have little time on their hands but need some quick analytical mappage of their work, the GeoCommons effort can go a long way into making your life easier (and better looking). My hats off to FortiusOne for tackling how to make analytical mapping a little easier for everyone.

Keene Haywood (The University of Texas at Austin - DIIA)

Thanks for the heads up,

On October 2nd, 2008 Bill (not verified) says:

Thanks for the heads up, this is a great tool and i'll give credit where its due... awesome title for the blog.

reply

Thanks for the praise. We

On October 2nd, 2008 Kyle Henderson (not verified) says:

Thanks for the praise. We really appreciate the positive feedback. It has made all of our efforts worthwhile. Our goal with Maker was definitely to make mapping interesting information easier for everyone. Note, keep a look out for some additional functionality to be released in the coming months to Maker and GeoCommons, such as map embedding. Thanks again. -Kyle, GeoCommons Team Member