Today, we’ve added more than twenty popular U.S. museums to our collection of over 10,000 indoor maps that we launched in November: the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cincinnati Museum Center, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and 17 Smithsonian museums—plus a zoo!
- Google Blog
Biking directions are being added to Google Maps for Austria, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom
- Google Lat Long UK Blog
And, 44 countries in Africa will get walking directions.
- Google Lat Long Blog
by Adena Schutzberg on 07/12 at 03:56 AM |
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One big issue related to the new Apple Maps app for iOS 6 relates to public transit routing. The best most people understand it, Apple is leaving integrating such data and apps to third party developers, meaning users will need to download potentially more than one app to have such functionality for more than one city.
Kevin Webb, a manager in charge of transit projects at the non-profit group OpenPlans Transportation (a division of OpenPlans, the folks behind OpenGeo and Civic Commons and other open initiatives) doesn't like that vision.
To demonstrate his point, OpenPlans will launch a Kickstarter campaign next week to solicit funds to build an iPhone app for iOS 6 to be launched at the same time as Apple releases the next version of its operating system. The plan is to integrate all of the public transit feeds that are currently available in GTFS across the United States and pressure agencies not making that data available to join other agencies that have. Currently Atlanta, Ga., and Phoenix, Ariz., only make that data available to Google, Webb says.
TechPresident via @rcheetham
by Adena Schutzberg on 07/12 at 03:54 AM |
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The cost was provided to an interested citizen via a Freedom of Information Act request. The requestor, Mr.WIlliam Hartnett describes the American FactFinder site as a "poo bucket."
If you dig into IBM's original team (it was the integrator) you'll find Oracle, Esri and the Census Bureau. The team even won an award back in 2000 for its work the site. The most recent IBM contract for American FactFinder I found was in 2007 for $89.5 million (WRAL Techwire). The tech design doc is here (pdf). I don't how to reconcile the two different numbers - maybe IBM didn't use all the money from that contract? And, It's not clear to me which Esri tech is currently used on the site. It was ArcIMS, but I can't imagine that's still in there.
A new (now in beta) Census API may change how the public access and visualizes data in the coming years.
- The Atlantic via @timoreilly
by Adena Schutzberg on 07/12 at 03:15 AM |
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