Posters

[chaffed]

I did a quick search but did not find my answer. I hope there is not another thread discussing this.

I was playing with MapPoint 2002 using WIGLE data for King County here in Washington State. I was able to render the data into density maps showing where the most dense consintrations of AP's are. This could also be used in many other ways such as density of unsecured wireless networks in given areas.

One of the uses for presenting data like this is posters. Everyone loves posters. These posters would be like posters of the internet found on thinkgeek. Would it be possible to create professional posters using WIGLE data for Geographic locations like North America and Europe? I have attached one of the maps a generated for my county. Light yellow being fewer networks per census tract and dark red being high density per census track.

[Sith4dmin]

One of the problems with creating posters of network data is that unlike the "Map of the Internet" snapshots that Thinkgeek used to sell which used a supercomputer to pinpoint every part of the internet it could reach in a limited time frame, such wireless network posters are just a record of networks a few amatuers happened to find, mostly in the urban U.S. I found over 1000 APs just last weekend in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Seattle that were not recorded before. A poster printed two weeks ago would have shown that area (if it were so detailed) as a wireless dead zone, even though it is, in fact, burgeoning. This is not to say that nobody would buy such posters, but the record is so incomplete and arbitrary that printing posters of it would be somewhat intellectually irresponsible/dishonest.

What one could do is make posters of data collected under known limitations, such as the yearly World Wide Wardrives. It would be understood that such data was collected by x number of people between y and z dates.

[chaffed]

Good Point! The individual WWD's by themselves are limited in data. So maybe every 10 WWD's would work? Combine the data from the 10 into a map.

[Sith4dmin]

That would of course put the first poster release date sometime in the year 2010. I think there is something to be said for posterizing each year's results by themselves. but in the end it would be up to the WWWD team anyway.

[bobzilla]

Also note that we don't have map data for outside the U.S.
http://wigle.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=320

[izzy4505]

If anybody is interested, I'd be willing to make posters for you... we've got a massive plotter down in my college's tech building. It's kinda expensive though, I think they charge $4 per sq. foot for glossy paper, and $3 for regular. Then whatever the cost to send it to you would be. I think though that bobzilla or uhtu said this didn't fall under their EULA, the last time I checked into this. I don't really remember though I might be wrong. Maybe one of the WiGLE admins could clarify or correct me on that?

[uhtu]

the EULA is very clear on this.
No Commercial Use of the data.

if you want to make posters for yourself from the data, and not use them commercially, or sell them for money, that's well within the limits of the license.

so just be really nice to izzy and tell him how fun his radio show is, and perhaps he'll make you some nice x-mas presents ;-)

[izzy4505]

How about not for profit? I wasn't planning on making $$ off of this, I was going to do it for cost. Lol, I'd love to mail everybody posters.... Hmmm maybe I need to make some friends in the IT department to score some free printouts.

[ax0n]

Or... someone could simply render it and host it somewhere for us to print out.

Of course, at that point it would probably look a lot like this:

http://www.wigle.net/images/national.png

[izzy4505]

An idea I toyed with for awhile would be combining the image of a DOQ from terraserver and a WiGLE TGR mappack. The issue the comes up regarding projection formats and datums. However I think if somebody knew the area, they could adjust the image manually to make everything line up.