Summer Internships: Mapping in Oregon

Jacob Wasilkowski
GISDE, Class of 2013

As a GISDE student, some my main interests lie in communicating geospatial information and involving myself with new developments in cartography.  I feel lucky to have found an internship doing just that.  Right after the semester ended, I flew out to Oregon State University to work with Dr. Bernhard Jenny in his Cartography and Geovisualization Lab.  I have been assisting with two main projects, particularly "Pseudo-natural maps" and "Scale-adaptive web maps".

I feel it's best to explain the purpose of the first project by quoting the website description: "The aim is to develop a more engaging and expressive map style that web mapping services can offer in addition to their traditional vector and satellite mapping modes."  I have been testing out some map designs in Adobe Photoshop and also finding ways to automatically build maps from data available at http://www.openstreetmap.org/  This is a large-scale project that will certainly continue to develop and progress after I return to Worcester.

The second project focuses on providing dynamically changing map projections for web map users, and I have been helping to test this functionality on mobile and tablet (e.g. iPad) browsers.  Though there aren't any public demos available right now.

Here are a few links to the projects I mentioned:

Pseudo-natural Maps: http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/pseudo-natural/index.html
Scale-adaptive Web Maps: http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/scaleadaptivewebmaps.html

Additionally, they provide free downloads to software that's been created within this lab group, which is great for anybody interested in geography and mapping:  http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/software.html

- Jacob Wasilkowski, GISDE 2013