I developed this site to acheive two goals. I work with GIS daily, however my work is limited to the ESRI suite of software. I embrace open source software and wanted to learn more about the open source GIS tools available.
My second goal is to distribute as much geospatial information about the State of New Jersey as possible. For example, the State Plan map and the Census's journey to work information are two large, useful, and frankly intimidating datasets. You could easily become overwhelmed with the amount of data available to you. I hope that the tools and maps I provide here will help you get more out of the data that's out there. If you have any questions about the data or the programming behind the site, feel free to contact me.
The State Plan Map uses data from the Office of Smart Growth to visualize State Plan Planning Areas, Centers, Smart Growth Areas and Main Street New Jersey towns. Currently, the 2001 State Plan Map is being used. When the Draft Final State Plan Policy Map is released the application will be updated to include the new data.
The boundaries of the Main Street program are approximations denoting the general area in which services are provided by MSNJ.
This interactive map uses the Smart Growth Areas dataset from OSG's website and can be used as a Smart Growth Locator.
Journey to Work data visualization is based off of Census geometries and DOT's CTPP data. Additional resources for using CTPP can be found on TRB's website.
The CTPP information was retrieved in November 2007. Currently, the application shows only total commuter flow. I am currently working on displaying flow by mode and by income.
The Land Use Change map shows areas that changed to urban land uses from 1986 to 2002. Clicking on the map will bring up oblique aerial photography (bird's eye view) of the area you selected. This is work done in conjunction with John Hasse of Rowan University.
Another one of our mapping applications features Google's Traffic layer, along with a point layer on incidents reported on NJCommuter.com, NJDOT's real-time traffic site. You can also view NJDOT's traffic cameras from the map.
NJ State Atlas also hosts a Google Maps/USGS Topoquads mashup. The quads are pulled from good ol' Terraserver, and cached locally.
Some of the other map apps not quite ready yet are available for your perusal.
Updates to NJ State Atlas will be posted to the New Jersey Geographer blog, as well as on the facebook page.
This site should work in all modern, AJAX-capable browsers. IE6 is notorious for not being cooperative; you should upgrade or switch if you're still using IE6. I am a Mac user and don't thoroughly test the site on IE. Contact me if you come across any bugs, it'll be greatly appreciated!
NJ State Atlas uses map caching technology (similar to what Google Maps uses) to serve the GIS data behind the maps. Find out more.
This site is hosted on Dreamhost. They're one of the best hosting companies around, especially considering the fact that all of this is running off of a shared hosting account. Imagine the maps and data I could serve up if I had the money for dedicated hosting! Click on the images below if you'd like to host a site with them.
By the way, Dreamhost is a carbon-neutral hosting company.