Friday, October 31. 2008

Skyhook Tracking CNN Correspondents on the Magic Wall

A note from Skyhook's Rich Sutton pointed me to the video of John King below showing off not just "live locating" but also running correspondents' locations back in time and showing their recent "routes" which look just like airline routing maps found in the airline magazines.

What's unfortunate is that the CNN crew states that the app uses GPS.

Continue reading "Skyhook Tracking CNN Correspondents on the Magic Wall"

Using Flickr Images to Define Geoboundaries

Dan Catt at geobloggers (he works at Yahoo, which owns Flickr ) has a neat post showing how now it's possible to query the Flickr API to return shapes (not shapefiles, though soon you will be able to get real shapefiles) of areas as defined by Flickr's geotagging via WOE ids. Huh? Aaron of the Flickr team explains:

For every geotagged photo we store up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was taken: the neighbourhood, the town, the county, and so on up to the continent. This process is usually referred to as reverse-geocoding.

Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can.

This is yet another resource that depends on the masses to understand boundaries. I guess some where there is a visualization of the WOE ID boundaries (I couldn't find one on quick search); if I understand (at least vaguely) what's going on, this is just another one, powered by reverse geocoded images.

UConn to Close Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

"Centers" at the university are reviewed regularly to insure they align with the criteria defined in the university's updated academic plan. The Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Center for Health Promotion the only two of 13 to selected to close. Many factors (duplication of effort, small size, failure to contribute) are among those that can prompt closure. It's not clear what exactly tipped the balance for CGIA.

CGIA was a partnership between the staff of the Homer Babbidge Library and the Department of Geography geared to streamline geographic data and spatial analytic techniques for research at the university. Robert Cromley, UCCGIA director and professor of geography noted that the center was "no cost" and can't understand the logic of the closure.

- The Daily Campus (UConn's Paper)

Penn State Geography's Coffee Hour Turns 40

Now, the story I heard about the every-Friday afternoon Geography Department Coffee Hour was that it was intended to prevent the grad students from getting an early start on their weekend drinking. It seemed to work when I was in the department; nearly all the grad students attended nearly every week. Today, the venerable institution celebrates its 40 anniversary with a special edition hosted by two emeritus professors: Wilbur Zelinsky and Pierce Lewis. The topic: The Importance of Coffee Hour. I'm sure they'll offer some better reason for its existence than I did!

I do wish I could be on campus for it but I'll have to participate via the Web.

Thursday, October 30. 2008

Google to Sponsor, Provide Keynote for daratechPlant 2009

Daratech, based here in Cambridge, is known for its market reports on PLM, CAD/CAM, CAE, CDM, MPM and GIS. (If you don't know the first few acronyms, don't worry, the folks who do are not too savvy about GIS!) Today I see that Google will not only sponsor daratechPlant, an event focussed on "plant asset lifecycle management," Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist, Google SketchUp will give the keynote (press release).

Chopra will provide the daratechPLANT audience with an insider’s view on Google’s work in the 3D and geospatial arena, and what might be coming next. He will address how ideas like real-time collaboration, cloud computing and mobile access to information will affect the way companies deal with 3D data, some of the challenges involved in working with 3D information, and how they might be overcome.

So, it sounds like Google is delving further in 3D, beyond just 3D design into many of those acronyms introduced above. It's been my experience that Daratech events are very much "pay to play" so I'd have to guess that Google paid to get this slot. That tells me its even more likely the company will have something to say.

The conference is February 23 – 25, at the Hilton Americas in Houston, so many of the oil and gas folks are within driving distance.

New GPS Owners Confuse Tele Atlas

Many in the press saw and heard a presentation from Tele Atlas this week about how the company updates its data - now including TomTom satnav users' input via MapShare. Those updates now enters Tele Atlas Map Insight program and eventually can end up in the latest datasets. I only saw the slides as there were technical difficulties. But I don't think we were privy to this story Brady Forest tells at O'Reilly Radar that was shared by Patrick McDevitt's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe.

Map Insight is a work in progress and hasn't always anticipated customer behavior. People like to play with their GPSs update features. Last December, right after Christmas, the Map Insight servers started receiving a large amount of block/unblock updates. It turns out people were blocking their street to confirm the feature worked and then correcting the data afterwards -- not realizing the confusion it was causing at the Tele Atlas headquarters.

Clearly, there's still lots to learn about crowdsourcing and human behavior. I suspect this holiday season the folks at Tele Atlas will be prepared for such antics. Alternatively, they might try to dissuade users from these activities, though I can't think of a simple way to do that.