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MySQL is offering a white paper (registration required) called "MySQL Cluster for Presence & Location-Based Services." The abstract notes, "This whitepaper explores the different types of services that can take advantage of location and presence awareness, and considers their unique requirements for data management."
AT&T has released an app - Mark the Spot - for the iPhone for users to submit location-based complaints about service and quality issues. It’s free, though I’m not sure how well it will work where this is no service! AT&T says the app is not related to the ad war or the recently dropped law suit.
- CNN
This is great! Open comments and folks commenting and correcting a reference to GIS that should likely have been GPS! Of course, UW-Madison does have a great geography department and GIS faculty and students; perhaps they are involved.
Innovative Mapping collected up public data on San Diego, CA and knit them into an online interactive map.
I think this is another step in making online mapping more desktop GIS-like. This is very much a rich Internet experience. I was most impressed that before you even look at the map you are presented with all the layers and metadata for each. Unfortunately, since the data comes from different sources, the metadata is not in a consistent format. Still it’s there and put out right in front. Hooray for metadata!
The “why” tab on the main page of the site states: “Mapping San Diego was created to share public data with the public. Most of the information displayed on this website is freely downloadable at SanGIS.org and SANDAG.com. In order to view this data, specialized software and training are required. All background information provided by ESRI.” The app itself is built on ArcGIS API for Flex. I was disappointed the source of the basemap data is not clearly noted on the map, what with all the attention paid to the metadata for the other layers. I think the real “why” is to show off the prowess of Innovative Mapping Solutions, a company run by Aaron Sutton. Note to Sutton: It’d be ok to say that if it’s true.
The interface requires some energy to understand. The data layers are organized by category and you swap one to the other in a “chooser” above the table of contents (TOC). When a layer in a category is checked “on” it’s legend is displayed below the TOC along with a link to its metadata. Unfortunately, you can only see the legend of one layer at at time, though more than one in a category can be on at one time. I was unable to turn on two different layers in two different categories at the same time. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be possible.
While an address search is available (street, city) you can also search on POIs (though I didn’t see that documented) - I found the convention center, for example. An “identify” yields a block of the raw attribute data - complete with undecipherable field names. It took me a while to figure how to dismiss the identify information: you click identify again.
The navigation tools, in a row of buttons across the top, are confusing. Zoom in and out both require the user to draw a box. The pan tool only changes the cursor to a “hand” when you click to pan, not when the tool is the “active” tool. StreetView only works in areas where Google StreetView is available - and there’s no way to know where those are. It’d be great to have that button disabled when the view does not contain any StreetView data, but perhaps that’s complex to do.
The only “help” is in the form of three short animated tutorials without sound. I found they went a bit fast for me to read the explanatory text. There’s an unfamiliar “blue marble” logo on the videos. Perhaps that’s the video capture software?
Finally, a “too long” list of Google ads on the right side of the map seems to create dead space below the map. Perhaps that could be shortened or sized to the browser situation, so no scroll bar appears in the browser.
- press release (curiously titled: “Save Time and Money Researching Properties in San Diego County with a New Online Mapping Tool”)
