Tuesday, May 13. 2008

Where 2.0 Monday

Many product and company announcements have been made in just one day. I don't have all of them; it's surprisingly hard to track everything, even with many bloggers and journalists there. I've ranked them 1-5 for impact on geospatial professionals. 1 means little or no impact, 5 means quite a lot of impact.

Nokia will add Ovi support to its mobile mapping offerings. Ovi is Nokia's portal for Internet service and content sharing content. Later this years users can download maps (from the Internet I believe), mark them up and sync them to their phones. They'll also be able to capture routes while driving/walking and upload those to Ovi. In time users can share those maps with others and further enhance them with mashups of content from user generated content sites such as TripAdvisor. The app is expected, close to complete, in September. (Infoworld, Wired [with graphics])
Impact: 2 This is likely to be in the short term more of a social networking type of sharing.

Continue reading "Where 2.0 Monday"

Update: Google Maps Organizes More of Google's (not the world's) Information

Update 5/13/08: It seems The VentureBeat folks were ahead of the game. This new option is now seemingly more widely available. If you are not finding the option, try searching on Boston.

------- original story 5/9/08 -------

Now there's more to find when searching on Google Maps - including images (Panoramio not Picassa), user generated maps (MyMaps), videos (YouTube). The limitation, reports VentureBeat, is that only documents from Google properties are included.

Yahoo's New Internet Location Platform

I read a few news article about this new platform, the Yahoo Internet Location Platform, including Dan Katt's blog post but I didn't get it. Those articles, I think, are written for programmers, the folks who'll use the platform. Still, this is it's very cool and I think the rest of us should know what it does! And, frankly, I think too many people are too wrapped up in other platforms to see what's going on at Yahoo. I think Fire Eagle is killer, but I keep talking to people who don't know what it is. I don't want that to happen with YILP, so here's what this new platform is, as I (a non-programmer) understand it.

Yahoo has and uses a big database of location information. It's got points (places of interest), towns and cities, states, and countries in it. Each has an ID, called a WOEID (Where on Earth ID, Yahoo acquired WhereOnEarth a London company in 2005). Yahoo has opened up that database to the world complete with an API (application programming interface). That means programs can ask questions of and receives answers from this big database via a Web service.

Like what? Like:

Give me the WOEID of Boston, MA. (Why? Because maybe you to find pictures of Boston from Flickr. You'd use that value to ask Flickr for the pics.)
Give me the location of 2507854 (Where would you get that? you could get it from Fire Eagle!)
Give me the "next level up" (parent) geography for my point of interest, or in other words, in what city is the Eiffel Tower?
Give me the neighboring ZIP Codes to 12795711 (the WOEID of a ZIP Code).
Another cool one - the ability to ask for the name of a place in a specific language!

Many have already asked for a comparison to Geonames (a free online database with services built on it used by many location-based services to do some of these things). My sense is that Yahoo will tap into the wisdom of the masses to grow this database, just as Geonames does. And, since Yahoo's already aligned with OpenStreetMap, perhaps it can play well with Geonames? Could this database end up as the worlds single place coding database?

SPOT Beacon Used Successfully; Interesting Message Sent

The Herald (UK) tells the story of a senior walking in Scotland. He got sick and used his SPOT beacon, a satellite communications device that sends the location and asks for help. The plea was heard in Houston, TX and help was sent. The walker is in the hospital and doing well. Great story and use of technology.

The interesting part for me is the text of the message sent: "Help message. I'm immobilised but okay and cannot reach you by phone. Find GEOS on Google map and send help."

I did what it said - tried to find GEOS on Google maps - but found nothing relevant. Hmmm.

A bit of research shows that GEOS, actually the GEOS Alliance, is the name of the response company that receives the alert messages from SPOT. It's in Houston. Without searching on GEOS 911 or GEOS Alliance, I'd never have found it. The help messages sent from SPOT, like the one above, are sent to GEOS who in turn contact those people you've asked to be contacted with the message. In this case, the idea would be to confirm there is an emergency (that the person is indeed in the wild and subject to using the device, I guess). So, I guess the "find GEOS on Google maps" is redundant. BTW, if there's no answer from the contacts "at home" the service will contact emergency response personnel.

Save Gas...3D Data Drives Cruise Control

In reviewing the 2007 annual report from Intermap Technologies (IMP), I came across a tidbit of information about how the company is supporting research at Auburn Univeristy to study fuel efficiency by using 3D vector data derived from their NEXTMap core data. The objective was to develop simulations for predictive cruise control and automatic gear shifting to calculate optimal vehicle speed and gear selection. The results of the simulation showed an increase of fuel performance of 3% and a potential reduction in diesel fuel consumption of 1 billion gallons annually in the U.S. if every truck used this technology.

Podcast: Four Technologies That May Soon Impact Geospatial...Are You Ready?

The editors look outward to find technologies that will impact how geospatial products and practices will change in the next 12 to 24 months. Some of the suggested technologies are already appearing in cutting edge products, others are not yet implemented in geospatial solutions, but we expect to see them soon.

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