Category: Google Maps

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Google Maps LBS neogeography

LBS and actionable content..

Like myself you may have been using the mobile version of Google Maps for the last year or so and it works very well, the application is well adapted to mobile devices – if you look carefully you will see that it uses a different rendering to the normal browser based Google Maps – mobile cartography needs to be different !!

Google Maps Mobile

This week a new version of maps was released in the UK which starts to really deliver on the potential of location based services, now like our American cousins we have up to date points of interest information available, so that if you try to search for a business you will actually find one now..

It’s not new or unique but what I think is really important here it that the content about locations is actionable, so if I search for a pub in London called “The Garrison” I am presented with a map, directions to the pub from where I might be, its address and telephone number which if I click on actually is dialled by the phone – remember the N95 and suchlike actually have telephone capability as well as GPS, WiFi, cameras, coffee machines etc. in them as well 🙂

Content that is actionable is key I believe to LBS finally taking off, a map on a screen is not enough, it’s still often easier to ask somebody for directions, but how likely is it that they will know a pub’s telephone number or its opening hours..

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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Google Earth Google Maps neogeography

Google LatLong blog

latlong blog

So you may have been wondering why I have not really written a huge amount about Google so far here.. well unlike my previous employer Google is well versed in the business of blogging and the Geo team have been working on a team blog which is now online at Google LatLong – Enjoy !

Don’t worry, I will still keep writing here 🙂

BTW make use of the “What we are reading section” these are links to some of the most dynamic blogs on the internet.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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Google Maps Thoughts

A new urban cartography online

Ok so my head is still spinning… but I just had to comment on the latest development to Google maps which went live yesterday and which provide a “2.5D” view of some major US cities and Tokyo – I just love the simpicity of this rendering, it povides the much needed sense of place, but does not make the existing information or user generated “my-maps” content any less clear..

Ny25D

I’m off on vacation with the family next week in NYC so I will put this to the test…

Now how cool would it be to see the UCL London city model rendered like this !

Sometimes less is more..

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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Google Earth Google Maps Thoughts

My new office…

You may have picked up on the rumors that I have a new job, well it’s true !!

This week I joined Google as the Geospatial Technologist for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and to say I am excited would be somewhat of an understatement.
Google Door

Google (and yes Microsoft and Yahoo as well 🙂 ) have had a massive positive impact on the traditional GI industry and are developing truly innovative ways of distributing and exploiting geographic information – and there is still much more to come !

The “heavy lifting” of the data providers and sophisticated software tools developers is still a very important part of the industry which after-all is data driven, but through the efforts of Google the information is getting into the hands of a new community of some 200 million users, when they need it, and how they need it.

It’s really important that the world of neogeography and the more established industry come together as there is much to learn from both ends of the spectrum, there is already much good working going on to integrate geoRSS and KML with existing OGC standards for example.

Google lives up to its reputation – I feel like I’m back at university, really bright people getting on and solving problems, but unlike most university departments or corporate research units, with all the resources needed to do so – and yes there are lots of Lava lamps, as much free food and drink as you could cope with, and a games room 🙂

I have been smiling continuously for the last week, but I can see life is going to get really busy !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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Google Maps Technology Thoughts

Google Maps api and GeoRSS

Great news announced at the Google Maps api blog today, that GeoRSS is now fully supported in Google Maps. It is now possible just to pass the location of a GeoRSS feed as a parameter to the google maps url to see the feed rendered as an overlay. So http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://edparsons.floo-net.com/?feed=rss2 produces a map of this blog.

Google maps and GeoRSS

Of course the map is also embed-able using the api, as in this quick and dirty example of this blog, and my past travels.

Many have been waiting for this capability, and as the Google api seems to be the most popular mapping api this is a great opportunity, GeoRSS is a really robust lightweight encoding which should now be able to reach an even wider community of users

It you are publishing simple geographic information on a regular basis why are you not using GeoRSS ?

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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GIS Google Earth Google Maps LBS Thoughts

How LBS should work…

Well somebody gets it !! Sometimes just surfing for some unrelated information brings up a really interesting nugget of information like this.

Clearly the guys in MV get it.. it’s all about context !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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Google Earth Google Maps INSPIRE web 2.0

Google search extended to KML – Wake up everybody

It’s been a couple of weeks now since Google announced that its main search engine is now able to search and parse KML files, the native file format for Google Earth. This was widely reported in the blogosphere but with little comment, I’m not sure most mainstream GIS users are even aware of the news..

They should be !!

It might not seem a big deal, after-all KML is a “Google” format, and you would expect it to be searchable in the same way that a pdf document is for example. But.. and its a big but, the Google search engine is parsing and understanding the geographical data within the KML and returning relevant results geographically in additional to all the every clever page rank stuff.

KML Google search

So if I chose to publish the KML file of my evening walk around Teddington on my web-site.., The Google spiders would find it and parse the content noting from the description tags that it is about teddington, but would also get the extents of the GPS track from the linestring co-ordinates.

Now anybody searching for content on Teddington would find the file and its content either from the term teddington, or if using Google Earth from it’s actual location encoded as geographic co-ordinates.

Ok now move beyond a simple walking track to a KML with a linked shapefile, or network link to an enterprise spatial database of agricultural information. The mechanism described would search and find this content just as well !

As Michael Jones points out in the excellent Directions interview, Google Earth and I guess potentially tools that understand KML like ArcGIS Explorer become browsers of Geographic content in the same way Firefox or Safari are browsers of document based content.

What does these mean for the GI industry – I think this is really important !!

To develop infrastructures of Geographic information (SDI’s) we are doing the “right thing” working hard on metadata standards, and discovery portals but it is taking a long time and may need a revolution in semantic techniques to actually work using even quite broad controlled vocabularies of terms.

But hang on… the rest of the web did not wait to develop metadata standards for page content, instead it could be argued they took the “dirty” route and chucked massive computing power and very clever search algorithms to solve the problem with great success – To Google is now mainstream language.

With INSPIRE now real, it’s interesting to think, is the solution to a practical and cheap to implement SDI, publishing KML files and a simple search box ?

Wake up everybody !!!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS Google Maps where 2.0

Neogeography defined

Neogeography shortcutIf you want a quick introduction into the new ways of creating and using Geographic Information, that has got such a lot of us excited, you could not go wrong by handing over $7.99 to the guys at O’Reilly.com for a copy of “An Introduction to Neogeography” by Andrew Turner the guy behind the highearthorbit blog.

As with the other O’Reilly Short Cuts this is a short (54 page) pdf primer to the subject which gives a great overview of a new emerging part of the technology landscape.

Read this and you should understand why the established GI Industry needs to be looking over its shoulder.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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Apple Google Maps LBS Thoughts

What the iPhone might mean for LBS ?

According to almost everybody on the internet, at 10am PST on the 9th January next year, at the Moscone Center Steve Jobs will introduce the iPhone, perhaps one of the most anticipated products ever from Apple.

There is much speculation as to what the phone will look like and its functionality, and this tends to focus of the “ipodness” of the phone – to me what is interesting are two things is particular, the potential that the iPhone will be should SIM free and that it might contain as well as a camera a GPS.

Actually I think the fact that the iPhone is likely to be sold SIM free and not tied to a network contract is the most important part of the whole iPhone story, – If this does turn out to be the case it will a direct attack on the already crumbling “Walled Garden” model of the operators – a major deterrent in the development of LBS so far.
iphone
In the walled garden, you buy a phone at a subsided price from the network operator in return for a service contract, and less obviously a set of applications and services selected and controlled by the operator. So if you want to make use of a music download service, you must use the operators one, likewise want to use LBS then you the one the operator provides.

Of course it is possible to buy phones today SIM free, but the marketing behind Apple and the buzz the iphone will create will I believe shift the market more towards an “open” model, where greater innovation in LBS applications can take place. There is clear precedent for this, just think what the online market might look like if we where all still accessing the net through CompuServe or AOL’s or even Apples eWorld (Anybody else remember that ?) environments.

A couple of months ago there was much excitement when hackers noted the latest version of iPhoto suggested support for co-ordinate metadata to be attached to photos – now what if the source for the photo was the camera in a “smart” iPhone and the metadata came from an onboard GPS chip-set – again this could lead to a future potential market of tens of millions of LBS capable devices.

Well it has me excited !!

Written and submitted from the BA lounge at Heathrow airport, using the BT Openzone wifi broadband internet connection.

Categories
GIS Google Maps

London: A Life in Maps

Newcourt map of London 1658

If you are in London between now and March next year I would recommend a visit to British Library exhibition “London: A life in Maps“.

This is a great treat for anyone who loves maps like the famous Newcourt map of 1658 (above) illustrating London pre the Great Fire. Other maps of great interest include Charles Booth’s map of “Wealth and Poverty” – a early neighbourhood or geodemographic classification layer produced 100 years before GIS.

Full marks to the British Library for making the most of modern mapping techniques, within the exhibition it is possible to see the London maps overlaid onto Google Earth, and on the British Library website there is a Google Maps mash-up indexing a range of the maps.

It is a shame modern OS mapping could not have been more prominent, no doubt some confusion over licensing.. it interesting actually how unimportant OS mapping has been in the development of London, as for much of its history the OS was underfunded and it maps not suitable for urban mapping.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.