The effort called Exercise 24, ran over last Friday and Saturday. It was organized by SDSU’s VizCenter and InRelief.org and included the participation of many georelated orgs including Geosemble, GeoWeb 3D, Crisis Commons and Nordic Geospatial Consulting. The idea was to see how information moved through social networks and how the social media tools could be used in emergency situations.
Numerous advancements in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief tools and technologies were successfully utilized during the Haiti Earthquake Response, Mexicali Earthquake, and the Gulf Oil Spill Response. Many of these tools are low-cost or free to the public. Exercise24 (X24) is a two-day international collaborative multidisciplinary exploration of these capabilities that support communication, logistics coordination, and response to a significant seismic event that generates an off shore oil spill, tsunami, displaced communities requiring shelter, damage to critical infrastructure inland, and environmental impact.
Somehow that event turned into a story in the Denver media about Esri’s mapping social media. Esri however did not seem to be involved. As I’ve suggested before, this is Esri’s current positioning in the main stream, and sometimes, the tech media: “we map social media.”
Related: Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on Friday will host the second annual International Conference on Crisis Mapping: Haiti and Beyond with the International Network of Crisis Mappers (CM*Net).
- Tufts Daily
by Adena Schutzberg on 09/29 at 08:00 AM |
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Enhancements to the ISRO app include:
- 2D version, so no install is required (still required for 3D)
- integration of Rediff Maps (but no other Indian data)
- collaboration (chat, annotate the terrain with text labels and share free hand drawings, point using a virtual cursor, and synchronize their flight)
- API
- crowdsourced data (only in 3D, apparently)
- more data (land resources, Agriculture, Soil, Water, Ocean sciences, Ground water potential, Eco systems, Bio diversity)
- more browser support
- Hindi support (perhaps not yet operational)
- Medianama
by Adena Schutzberg on 09/29 at 07:42 AM |
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First off, who is Appcelerator? It’s a company that offers a development environment called Titanium, of particular interest to mobile devlelopers. You program once and it makes the code for other platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android…). Appcelerator uses a freemium model, with a basic free version and two levels on top of that with more functionality (details). One app you may have heard of that uses it: Oil Reporter, which I noted earlier this year.
Appcelerator’s users (some 71,000 developers - but remember many are freebie users) were looking for more information on how (where, when and how to be exact) their apps were being used. That would in turn, help them market them better. Hence the deal with FortiusOne to build and offer “Titanium+Geo.” The new addition to the dev platform is a dashboard (for now just a map) that locates end user interactions with the app. It, for example, places a dot on the map and a time stamp when and where a user requests a coupon or redeems a coupon, etc.
The data is anonymized (remember FortiusOne serves the DoD and is already good at that) because what the developers are really looking for are patterns. Are there lots of requests for coupons in areas where there are no stores? (Often yes, since couponing apps don’t necessarily use location as a factor.) When are the key times of redemption? What days of the week are slow? Would a promotion help push business then?
The interaction data can be overlayed with social media data (Tweets about the topic of the app - such as pizza or coffee or folks dancing) and demographics. The data can be animated to show the patterns across a day or week. Says CEO Sean Gorman, the animation is what helps these ideas “click” with analysts and developers, people who may be new to this vision of location intelligence.
The big challenge for FortiusOne was managing the huge inflows of real time data and digesting it into meaningful maps. For now there are only maps in the dashboard, but in time other visualizations (charts, graphs that are already part of FortiusOne’s GeoIQ platform) will be added.
The new features will be added to the Titatium platform in Q4. Video after the jump. Live demo.
- press release
Continue reading...
by Adena Schutzberg on 09/29 at 06:17 AM |
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The September issue of Academic Commons, “Charting the New Knowledge Terrain” introduces the work of the NITLE May 2010 Community Contribution Awards winners: three scholars whose insightful and creative uses of visual pedagogy illustrate the full potential of digital cartography to engage and empower learners.
- NITLE Blog
Measurements of every usable space in downtown Astoria will soon be taken by a Clatsop Community College intern, hired by the city of Astoria. Oregon. The idea is part of a drive to fill empty storefronts. Dale Espelund will be collecting data, in a joint effort to build a database, in part by the city, college, and the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association (ADHDA).
- Daily Astorian
The full-day workshop, entitled “GIS For Public Gardens: Getting Started,” will guide participants through the process of creating GIS for public gardens and similar institutions using Esri ArcGIS and the Alliance for Public Gardens GIS (APGG) public garden data model on individual work stations. GIS experienced is preferred but not necessary per the announcement. (My gut feeling: you’ll want some!)
- U Daily
Auburn University and Auburn University at Montgomery have been jointly awarded an Emergency Management for Higher Education grant by the U.S. Department of Education. Among other things “the grant will provide for the mapping of buildings on both campuses into Virtual Alabama, a 3-D geospatial imagery toolset based in Google Earth technologies, which serves as the state’s common operating platform for disaster planning, response and recovery.”
- press release
by Adena Schutzberg on 09/29 at 06:00 AM |
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Not all Foursquare campaigns are hits. A rundown of five efforts notes two “tepid” efforts with little return.
- ClickZ
Apple’s Maps application on the Chinese iPhone 4 will only show government-approved maps, unlike previous models.
- InformationWeek
MapQuest now offers an Atlas. It’s “an online encyclopedia-like service for educators and students, as well as for the use by the general public.”
- MapQuest Blog
by Adena Schutzberg on 09/28 at 12:36 PM |
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