Safety Map: Planning Ahead for Disaster

You may have read about Depiction's Depiction Prep (APB coverage, press release). Safety Maps is another offering in the same space: a solution for coordinating in case of a disaster. But it's different. Why?

1) It has some serious geo/carto power behind it in its people:

Safety Maps is an initiative of Do projects, a flexible "platform for collaborative making" with a shifting roster of collaborators. For Safety Maps, Do consisted of Nurri Kim, Bloom’s Tom Carden, and Stamen’s Michal Migurski, with Urbanscale’s Adam Greenfield. 

2) It has open source goodness.

Safety Maps is built on top of a variety of open tools and data, most notably OpenStreetMap, Python, PHP, and MySQL. From one perspective, these are resilient solutions. "The properties of open technologies that make them cheap and accessible also make them flexible and adaptable," says Migurski. From another perspective, reliant as the whole system is on working servers and stable network connections, this arrangement is fragile. This is why the final output is paper.

Depiction's solution also uses OSM.

3) It's free.

- Co.Design

Most Interesting Press Releases of Last Week

I admit it, I look at the headlines of press releases and if interesting, the first paragraph. But three press releases from last week required a revisit because the topics were so...interesting. 

First off, Depiction, which offers a "what if" visualization tool announced (press release) at State of the Map apparently (I'm not sure why but I guess it uses OMS?) a new product: DepictionPrep. The idea: it's software to help you and your neighborhood prepare for an upcoming emergency. No details on pricing; it's coming this fall. I have mixed feelings about this and note that Glenn just shared another related offering: Safety Maps which creates a custom "we'll meet here in case of emergency" map for free and is built on OpenStreetMap. And licensed under CC.

Second, Fox, the bike shocks folks joined the Ant+ alliance teamed with and Garmin the GPS folks (press release) to walk users through setting up the suspensions on the their moutain bikes. It's a proof of concept that does not require GPS. As I undrstand it, sensors in the pumps (that serve as shock absorbers best I understand, I'm a road biker) talk to the Garmin Edge and walk the user through the process. You can then save different settings for different terrains. I wonder if this is a solution in search of a problem. I'll have to ask my mountain biking friends.

Finally and this is the most big brother of them all: CrowdOptic (press release) has a platform to keep track of where cell phones are "looking" during an event like a football game or a concert. Then, that information can be used to feed more info (say stats on the player) or ads (Time for a coke!). The release does not say but I'm guessing you'd have to give the company access to your location and compass info. Sadly, this also suggests that at such events people spend a good deal of their time taking pictures from, lookng through or looking at their phones.

Indoor Positioning and the Navigation of Small Spaces - Presentations from the OGC workshop at COM.Geo #comgeo

Indoor navigation comprises the collection of 2D mapping data, building information models (BIM)  and 3D visualization. Presentations delivered at COM.Geo this week nicely framed these issues.

Carl Smyth, director at MobileGIS Ltd, characterized the situation by stating that small scale spaces are inherently 3D, but for true navigation applications, human cognition is challenged. Applications must consider that the obfuscation of objects is prevalent.

Perfect knowledge models break down because there might be too much detail; too many sources; no consistency; and details are incomplete. In contrast with large spaces, most small space features are "areal" and not "linear." So, how does the paradigm change for indoor navigation? Smyth suggested these principals:

• Pay attention to human cognition.
• Incorporate mobile device sensors.
• Offload "hard" conversion, mining, rendering, image processing, or line of sight remotely to a cloud service.
• Agree to work with partial and contradictory information from multiple sources.
• Build on a self-sustaining web of consumed and created resources.

Not surprisingly, the company that has invested so much in vehicle navigation, NAVTEQ, is looking closely at facilitating navigation to objects as well, or what Paul Bouzide of NAVTEQ calls "highly-context-focused 'around me' use cases." Citing the not always obvious issue that geospatial features and properties are dynamic. He mentioned that in the case of building models, walls and fixtures change, color schemes and décor change and signage can be altered both purposely and otherwise. Any change can matter crucially to the contextual behavior of the application and to maintaining believability and realism. Most changed features or properties exist in relation to others and can depend on prior changes for consistency. NAVETQ also considers adjuncts to road navigation such as parking spaces, road edge, or sidewalks as a component of small space navigation

Geoff Zeiss, Autodesk's director of the Utility Industry Program, discussed how BIM has significant cost savings not just in pre-construction visualization but also during the entire constricution process so that project managers can keep the project on schedule. But Zeiss pointed out that the biggest use is in operating and maintenance management after construction where, as mentioned above, objects properties change and keeping track of these changes is critical to good building maintenance. Zeiss truly feels that BiM may represent an inflection point in engineering design.

Dr. Eyal Ofek, a principal researcher at Microsoft on the Bing Maps team demonstrated how the problem of "data freshness" and currency can be mitigated by using crowd-sourced information like photos. Microsoft Photosynth has been used to illustrate changes to both indoor and outdoor environments.

Michael Loushine, a senior scientist with Telcordia Applied Research presented information about how to "Move E911 Indoors" thereby extending the scenarios we use for emergency response to indoor situations. He said that standards are being used to Improve situational awareness in e911 prototypes such as those from the OpenMobile Alliance (OMA), 3GPP, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Presence Information Description Format Location Object extension (or PIDF-LO) and the OMA Secure User Plane (SUPL) to perform network-based position determination and context. However key to any implementation would be also based on OGC specifications and the use of CityGML would be important.

Summarizing this session that was organized by the OGC was George Percival suggesting that from here, much collaborative development needs to occur to expand the Geoweb to an "Internet of Things." While the session focused more on the platform development rather than the positioning device environment (i.e. RFID tags or other RF sensors), sensor web enablement (SWE) was a central theme to the entire discussion.

See also OGC's resources.

Local GIS (Town/City/State) Tidbits

The Virgin Islands was selected as a beneficiary member state to receive the results of a Geographical Information Systems (GIS-based) Flood Early Warning System (FEWS) Project as part of the regional Comprehensive Disaster Management (CDM) Strategy and Framework 2007 - 2012. The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) is currently implementing major Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) initiatives aimed at reducing the vulnerability of its participating states to hazard impacts. A two day GIS-based Flood Early Warning System Workshop will develop the operational Flood Early Warning Systems Protocol and to demonstrate the uses of GIS in enhancing field operations during the planning and management of flood evacuation.

- BVI Platinum

There's a little profile of  David Wyatt, GIS manager for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who was recently appointed serve on the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC). "The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians received a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award from ESRI in 2010. The Tribe was one of 125 awardees internationally from hundreds of thousands of entrants."

- The Cherokee One Feather

Ward County, ND is flying LiDAR for flood prediction and management. "The information will be made available on the county Web site when design work is complete. By clicking on an icon that identifies a certain river elevation, the areas affected would be shown on a computerized map. The data isn't guaranteed to be 100 percent accurate as it is based on modeling, but critical infrastructure can also be better monitored using the tool, Larsen said."

- Minot Daily News

The San Juan County Commission [NM] voted Tuesday night to invest $21,000 to host a training session for data providers who make detailed maps for 911 dispatchers and emergency responders.The county will be reimbursed by the Department of Finance after the training sessions, said Nancy Smith, the county's rural addressing coordinator. ...Individualized training from the company is expensive and some smaller governments can't afford it, she said.

The goal is better, standards based data from contributing jurisdictions, many of which are small and rural.

- Farmington Daily Times
 

Last Friday was Philly Data Camp, a hack day co-hosted by the seven Code for America fellows and Azavea. Best bit for geo:

Perhaps the most actionable of the projects was to create an API that sets loose Philadelphia-specific GIS data for developers, in a project led by CFA team lead Aaron Ogle and Voxeo open gov rep Mark Headd, who is organizing the April BCNI Open Gov Hackathon. To give a simple example of the PhillyAPI, the group created a basic application that allows a user to enter an address and get sent the locations of libraries up to one mile from their given location. To try the service, text your address, including “Philadelphia, PA” to 267-702-4999 or IM — via Jabber — .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). You’ll hear back.Easily applicable to other data sets, such as locations of police stations and polling places, the program is meant to free up the city’s 311 service and help people who have cell phones but limited or no Internet access.
“A single call to 311 costs the city $3.30,” explained Fecteau. “We’re helping to free up money and agents in the city.”

- Technically Philly

The Atlanta Regional Commission and its survey partner, NuStats, will survey 10,000 households at a cost of $2 million to determine their travel habits. It will use GPSs, some on cars and some on people. The survey is funded by ARC and the Georgia Department of Transportation. It will be used to determine future transportation projects and plans.

- Decatur Patch

...The TownStats Project, organized by The Independent Center, a non-profit public policy organization, and funded by members of The Fund for New Jersey, based in New Brunswick, and The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, which both allocated $25,000 of initial seed money to launch townstats.org, a "non-profit, non-partisan online database designed to give you access to important information on your town, its budget, and its taxes in a format that makes it easy to make comparisons with other towns," according to the website, currently in the Beta stage.

- New Milford (NJ) Patch