NACIS 2017 videos are online!

If you weren’t able to make it to NACIS in Montreal this year, the first round of videos of the talks are now online!

We found a few talks especially interesting:

Mapzen had a number of speakers across a breadth of topics:

Tuesday, Oct 10 - Practical Cartography Day

Ekta Daryanani - The UX of Navigation: A Road Trip from NYC to NACIS

Let’s take a drive from NYC to Montreal and think about what your typical navigation app shows and tells you to do as you drive. The objective is to never have to glance at a screen for more than a couple of seconds, coz accidents!

Hanbyul Jo - Getting Crafty with Vector Tiles

I have been making tools for digital fabrications (3d prints, pen plots, laser cuts) with map vector tiles. I want to show what kind of fabrication is possible and the tools that people can use for their own crafts.

Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso - Back to the Desktop

Vector maps have enabled a new generation of map rendering and dynamic styling for the web and mobile applications. But how can you get at those vectors and use them in desktop map projects? I’ll demonstrate a direct to Illustrator workflow and another using QGIS and Mapzen’s vector tile data.

Wednesday, October 11 - Cartographic Applications II

Aaron Staup Cope - Who’s On First Two Years Later - Theory, Practice and Gotchas

The Who’s On First (WOF) project was launched by Mapzen in 2015 with the goal of being a robust and openly-licensed gazetteer with global coverage spanning continents to (20 million and counting) venues, and everything in between. WOF is used by Mapzen for many of its own services but has been designed and architected to be portable, durable and as infrastructure-agnostic as possible.

This presentation will outline the project’s original motivations and its current state of affairs, discuss some of the challenges we’ve faced along the way and review what we’re focusing on next.

(We turned Aaron’s talk into a blog post.)

Geraldine Sarmiento’s lightning talk on Visual Language in Cartography is not up yet, but in the meantime, explore lines and forms with the Morphology tool!

See you next year!