Monday, August 10. 2009

Whose maps serve India the best?

Ajay Shah asks that question in an article in the Financial Express. Here's that state of things and a suggestion on how to proceed:

Thus, three strategies are now in play in India: a high quality solution which is a public goods effort (Openstreetmap), a good solution which is owned by a corporation (Google) and a poor solution which acts like a corporation (Survey of India). The users of maps are flocking to Google, Nokia and Openstreetmap.

From the viewpoint of the government, the first best strategy is to shift Survey of India into the mode of uncompromisingly releasing maps data in the public domain, matching the release strategy of the US government on openness.

Exponare (MapInfo Web Mapping) in the Wild

I don't believe I've seen (or know I'd seen) an Exponare local government app in recent memory. But an article in GCN highlights the use of GIS in Cumberland County, NC and notes it's in use. So I had a look.

The app offers quite a lot and if you've seen MapInfo it's a very familiar interface. There are three columns in the legend for visible, selectable and labelled, for example, that you don't see too often in desktop or online apps, for example.

One particular item that struck me - across the top of the map window are buttons labelled "Virtual Maps," "Outlook" and "Word..." which allow viewing the data in Google Maps/Bing Maps (note to developers: need to update that from Virtual Earth in the mouseover text), and pasting the map in Outlook or Word respectively. I can't be sure what these do as I don't have those apps on my Mac.

I also like the print options which included different layouts (with and without the map) and the opportunity to title the map/report as you like. (My students just finished an exercise on Web map printing and were not too happy with the sites they explored.)

I did find two disappointments. First, the app window fully refreshed far more often that I would have liked. And, second, I could find no "help" or "tutorial". After some poking around I did find a tutorial: it is noted on the main mapping page for the county - but the link is not highlighted. Suggestion: make that link more obvious and include a link to it from the mapping app itself. The tutorial includes several Quicktime movies that I was unable to run - but that could be because I was using an unsupported browser (Safari).

Don't Track Kids, Track the Folks Checking Up on the Kids

Florida is among the first states to use GPS, digital photography and cell technology to insure that case workers responsible for the state's challenged children are doing their jobs.

The Florida Department of Children and Families new Blackberry app upload information directly to the state database in Tallahassee at each home visit. Social workers snap the child's picture which is sent on to the database stamped with a date, time and GPS coordinates. That helps document visits and keep workers safe in rough neighborhoods. It may also prevent some false records that led to children being lost forever.

For now the app is in use in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties now, with a rollout to the entire data planned for October.

- Miami Herald

Google Transit's Roots in Boston

To celebrate the recent addition of Boston's MBTA (Mass Bay Transportation Authority, aka public transit org) to Google Transit, Boston.com (that's the Boston Globe website) offers and article about how a local was involved in Google Transit's creation.

I've always been a fan of the MBTA's own Google Maps mashup, so I'll have to remember to use Google Transit.

And if you want more transit mapping news: the Philadelphia Inquirer profiles how HopStop (can't get that right without much effort!) is now in Philly offer its brand of public transportation routing.

Steve Coast of OSM on FLOSS

Leo Laporte's FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) show interviewed OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast earlier this week. The podcast is online here.

We are excited to note Steve as one of our speakers at this year's Location Intelligence Conference.

Quick: Move the Servers to Save on Taxes!

You can file this under "Geography Matters": cloud platform providers are getting savvy about chasing the best tax benefits. If they should end in one state, they can ship the servers to another with better incentives. To that end Microsoft is packing up the Windows Azure platform (Platform as a Service in cloud speak) and moving it out of Washington State since breaks on equipment are no longer available.

I guess Sun had it right when the started thinking about packaging computing power in shipping containers.

via Slashdot via reader Larry