Vizzuality is the NYC-startup behind the impressive interactive election results map on the Wall Street Journal’s site. To be more precise, their product CartoDB is doing the actual heavy lifting. Vizzuality also has a few other offerings, all geo oriented, in their portfolio.
CartoDB is based around a table metaphor in which geo data and other attributes are stored in rows. And in fact there’s an online table editor that lets you enter this data manually or import from csv files. I spent part of the evening (with one eye on the election results) inserting various polygon coordinates from zip code files that I’ve accumulated in the TvB vault. Shapes and points, by the way, are based on GeoJSON formatting rules.
One thing you notice right away is that it’s pretty easy to get meaty results with just minimal work. There’s also a CSS-like styling language called Carto for fine-tuning colors, opacity, and other graphic attributes.
Once you’re satisfied with the visuals, you use their SQL-like interface to both query and update the CartoDB table. In other words, CartoDB table is a data cache for holding the real-time info. To square it off, there’s a shareable embed code for displaying the maps inside websites or blogs.
CartoDB reminds me a little bit of Google Fusion Tables, but with more powerful capabilities.Before I forget, there’s a Google Maps integration so you can pull your map tiles into, what for many, is a more familiar programming environment.
The folks at Vizzuality tell me CartoDB was first launched in April at the Where Conference. Besides WSJ, they’ve signed up Harvard, NASA, Yale, Stamford, and Daily Beast / Newsweek.
I’m incredibly intrigued by CartoDB, and I have just barely delved into the documentation and examples. You’ll be hearing more about it in future posts.
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