SpatialKey Technology Preview

Cyril H. — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:07:45 +0000

Doug McCune and Universal Mind just announced the launch their new baby, SpatialKey, a geospatial information visualization product.

If you have enough of those markers on web-based maps, you will love SpatialKey : you will be able to render heatmaps, heat grids or graduated circles by just uploading a simple CSV files ! As a technology preview, we have only access to a small part of the capabilities of SpatialKey, but it’s already so AWESOME !

The demos include four visualization templates : Animation/Playback, Map Comparison, Drill Down and Temporal Heat Index. I was really impressed by the Wal-Mart store openings (1962 – 2005) demo (just click the play button ), the Sacramento crimes (November 2007) drill down demo but also the BrightKite check-ins (April 28 – May 19, 2008) demo. Check the Gallery.

There will be different solutions available :

SpatialKey Personal, that will let you easily import your own data.
SpatialKey Enterprise, that will let you load a data set of any size.
SpatialKey Law Enforcement Dashboard, enterprise version of SpatialKey specifically targeted toward police departments.
SpatialKey Custom Solutions

For more details, read Doug’s blog post, go to the SpatialKey website (join the beta !) and read their dedicated blog. I cannot wait to be able to use my own set of datas especially when I read [...]

Early this Fall, we will release a desktop AIR application that allows you to load your own geotemporal datasets (through an importer that geocodes addresses if necessary) into the visualization templates

A lovely way to group dates

Cyril H. — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:37:59 +0000

In my current Flex project I need to create an interface that will replace the email client of the users. Many of them are using Outlook, so I would like to reproduce the same look and behavior. The new advanced datagrid in Flex 3 will come in handy to achieve the task, but there is one specific behavior that I would like to reproduce, it’s the way Outlook is grouping the dates : it creates the following groups :

Today
Yesterday
- if in the same week as the current date
Last Week
Two Weeks ago
Last Month
Older

It’s also easily expendable to the Future (Tomorrow, In two days…). So I created an Oracle function which generate the correct group label for a given date.

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE TRIS_UTILS AUTHID CURRENT_USER AS
/*******************************************************************
NAME:      TRIS_UTILS
PURPOSE:   Utilities functions.
REVISION:  Ver        Date            Author          Description
          -----     -------     ---------------  ------------------
           1.0    15/07/2008    Cyril Hanquez    Creation  
*******************************************************************/
 
/* compare a_date with sysdate and return
    the corresponding group label            */  
FUNCTION get_grouping_date_name(a_date IN DATE) RETURN VARCHAR2;
 
END TRIS_UTILS;
/
 
CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE BODY TRIS_UTILS AS
/*******************************************************************
NAME:      TRIS_UTILS
PURPOSE:   Utilities functions.
REVISION:  Ver        Date            Author          Description
          -----     -------     ---------------  ------------------
           1.0    15/07/2008    Cyril Hanquez    Creation  
*******************************************************************/
FUNCTION get_grouping_date_name(a_date IN DATE) RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
 
return_var VARCHAR2(50);
 
BEGIN
 
CASE
   /* In Oracle date1-date2 returns a number of days
      It's equivalent to DATEDIFF(day, a_date, getdate()) */
   WHEN TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date) = 0
       THEN return_var := 'Today';
   /* parameter 'IW' is returning the Week of year
      but we must also verify that we are in a valid period */
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = 0 AND
            /* between -6 AND +6 would be enough
               7 days a week -1 because today returns 0
               equivalent to ABS(TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date)) <= 8 */
            TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date) BETWEEN -8 AND 8)
       THEN
       CASE
          WHEN TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date) = 1
             THEN return_var := 'Yesterday';
          WHEN TRUNC(SYSDATE - a_date) = -1
             THEN return_var := 'Tomorrow';
          WHEN ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) > 1
             /* We are returning the Name of day here */
             THEN return_var := INITCAP(TO_CHAR(a_date,'DAY'));
       END CASE;
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = 1 AND
           /* <=13 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 15)
      THEN return_var := 'Last Week';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = -1 AND
           /* <=13 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 15)
      THEN return_var := 'Next Week';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = 2 AND
           /* <=20 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 22)
      THEN return_var := 'Two Weeks Ago';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = -2 AND
           /* <=20 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 22)
      THEN return_var := 'In Two Weeks';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = 3 AND
           /* <=27 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 29)
      THEN return_var := 'Three Weeks Ago' ;
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'IW')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'IW')) = -3 AND
           /* <=27 would be enough */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 29)
      THEN return_var := 'In Three Weeks';
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'MM')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'MM') = 1 AND
           /* current month + 1 month so a maximum of 62 days */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 62))
      THEN return_var := 'Last Month' ;
   WHEN ((TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'MM')-TO_CHAR(a_date,'MM') = -1 AND
           /* current month + 1 month so a maximum of 62 days */
           ABS(SYSDATE - a_date) <= 62))
      THEN return_var := 'Next Month';
   /* in other cases just check if the date is in the future... */
   WHEN SIGN(SYSDATE - a_date) = -1
      THEN return_var := 'Further';
   /* ...or in the past */
   WHEN SIGN(SYSDATE - a_date) = 1
      THEN return_var := 'Older';
   /* if the date is null, do something */
   ELSE return_var := '---';
END CASE;
 
RETURN return_var;
 
END;
 
END TRIS_UTILS;
/

Now that we have our group labels generated, we should take care about the sorting. Its quite easy in fact, just use the DATEDIFF. To test it just use the following SQL :

SELECT <your_date> AS MY_DATE,
TRIS_UTILS.(get_grouping_date_name,<your_date>) AS GROUP LABEL,
(SYSDATE-<your_date>) AS DATE_SORT
FROM DUAL

In a next blog post I will share the Flex code that I wrote to generate the “Outlook like” interface. Feel free to comment and suggest any enhancement

Cyril Hanquez » User Interface

SpatialKey Technology Preview

A lovely way to group dates