Friday, October 3. 2008

Quote of the Week

"There's a long way to go, but at least we now have a colour coded map."

Editorial in the Independent(Ireland), highlighting how a GIS-built map shows needed school places for 2015, but not how to get them built and funded. The editorial is titled, "Funds required, not fancy maps." Here's an article about the map, with alas, no map, nor link to the map.

Meeting Halfway

Reader Pedro shared a site he uses quite a lot: MeetWays.com. The idea is to find a spot halfway between two locations to meetup. You key in both addresses and the type of spot at which you want to meet (coffee place, pizza, etc.). It ideally provides the "exact" halfway point (crow flies? road miles? time? I can't say - the help link failed) on a Google Map and local points of interest that match your needs.

I was not impressed with the results of my search for a spot between my house and the local ESRI office where I used to work. It provided an address far west of both locations as the "half way point." Further, when I searched for a "coffee" place, all of them were close to either my location or the office location.

Here are a few more to test out from Free Geography Tools.

Podcast: Google Hearts Tele Atlas, Tagging the Real World

Note: Technical difficulties prevented distribution of the podcast on Tuesday. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Last week Google announced it would use only Tele Atlas data for its mapping applications, effectively dropping NAVTEQ, now owned by Nokia. Is there a data war? Or perhaps a browser war? Also: Microsoft reveals its vision for a tagged real world even as a Japanese company shows off its implementation of that vision. Is it time for real world geotagging? Our editors tackle these questions in this week's discussion.

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