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WV Tax Assessor sues to remove state tax maps from website
According to a story in Ars Technica, a tax assessor in Kanawha County, West Virginia has filed a lawsuit to stop a company called Seneca Technologies from publishing tax maps of the whole state of West Virginia online. The tax assessor is citing a state law that prohibits individuals from copying and redistributing tax maps without the county tax assessor's permission and enables tax assessors to sell paper copies of the maps for $8 each. She asserts that the online maps constitute copyright infringement and have caused her to suffer financial damages.
Seneca Technologies has already battled with the state tax department about the project. Seneca got the maps through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The state tax department tried to force Seneca to pay $8 for each of the 20,936 TIF images (a total of $167,488) and Seneca sued to force the agency to comply with its obligations under the FOIA. The Judge ruled in favor of Seneca, noting that the state law requiring payment applied only to paper maps and not digital copies. The tax department was forced to provide the entire collection of maps for a single payment of $20 to compensate it for the total reproduction costs. Seneca then made the maps freely available online so that they could be accessed by the general public on their website (called FOIAmaps). Seneca plans to use indexing technology to create a search system that makes it easy for users to correlate information from the tax maps with other data stored in Seneca's databases.
Secret Army Field Manual on Map Reading
Secrecy News has made available a PDF of a A U.S. Army Field Manual that explains the rudiments of map reading. Distribution of the manual is restricted, and it has not been approved for public release. Maps and Legends Secrecy News, December 28, 2007.
- MAP READING AND LAND NAVIGATION. FM 3-25.26 January 2005 HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY Washington, DC, 30 August 2006
Mind the Gap with Gapminder
Did you know that in 2000, 20% of the world's population made less than a dollar a day? And that in that same year, 66% of Africa earned less than a dollar a day? These are the kinds of figures that Gapminder illustrates. Gapminder is a foundation that develops software for visualizing global development data. Gapminder projects create visualizations of data such as health, income, child mortality, income distribution, and other topics covered in reports from NGOS's like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), public agencies, and universities. Visualization is a powerful way to convey the meaning behind data and Gapminder does it well. Take a look at their 2005 Human Development Trends presentation, for example. Sure beats the set of pdfs.
Continue readingMapping Human Rights
Some stuff for us map junkies:
The World Freedom Atlas uses Flash to mashup data from the Quality of Government Institute with maps.
GeoRSS is a new standard for encoding location information into RSS feeds.
You can get prebuilt GeoRSS feeds or build them yourself in ShapeWiki.
Continue readingMap Scanning Registry and online map collections
Scanning Registries Map libraries across the country have been scanning maps for many years. Scanned maps are distributed to patrons, printed out for patrons and in recent years, are being posted online as digital collections (all depending on copyright restrictions). Many libraries are working with state agencies to scan large topographic map collections while other libraries scan their rare and unique maps as a measure for preservation as well as access. Map librarians struggle to keep track of who's scanning what and so two professional organizations have created map scanning registries to track major scanning efforts. ALA Map and Geography Round Table (MAGERT) Map Scanning Registry goals are to:
- Find out what scanning is being planned, in process, or complete for a particular geographic area
- Head off any duplication of effort
- Provide a resource to use for finding a particular digital image
- Provide a resource for reviewing the various technical parameters used in different projects
- American Geographical Society Library, UW Milwaukee
- Another AGSL, UWM Collection of Wall Maps
- Map Collection at Gettysburg College
- University of Chicago Map Collection
- University of Illinois Library & the University of Illinois Press Historical Maps Online
- University of Utah, J.Willard Marriot Library Sanborn Fire Insurance maps
- University of Tennessee online historic topographic maps
- New York Public Library American Shores: Maps of the Middle Atlantic Region to 1850
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