Category: Google Maps

Categories
Google Maps StreetView

The other pin on the web..

When talking to people about Google Maps I always mention the unique ability of Street View to provide a sense of place, the final level of zoom of Google Maps takes you beyond the abstract world of Cartography to “standing on the street corner”. Images are incredibility powerful often bringing back memories of places we may have visited.

This year marks the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II,and to commemorate this Google has worked with Historypin to launch an interactive online gallery filled with memories of her time as Queen.

The Pinning The Queen’s History project will be made up of photographic images, videos and audio clips pinned directly onto a Google Map on the dedicated Historypin site.  There is a crowd-sourcing element to the site as users are invited  to submit photos, videos and other memories of the Queen during her many visits around the UK and the rest of the World..

Of course the most interesting images will be the ones local to your neighbourhood for me, my favourite so far is this one taken in Kew Gardens !

So go search under the bed for your shoebox of old photos and get scanning !

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Google Maps StreetView

Universally.. If it’s good for Guildford

 

 

 

 

When talking about Google I often mention the mission statement that dates back to the earliest days of Google and has remained a constant despite all of the changes and innovation that have happened since 1998.

The statement is actually still fundamental to what happens at Google and is for me a rich source of material to talk about.. for example the meaning of “useful” or “accessible” is key to understanding many of Google’s Geo products and Services.

Along these lines “universally” I think has two key meaning, universal in terms of who and where the user looking for information is, and universal in respect to the very geographical concept of coverage.

Since 2005 Google Maps coverage has expanded to cover (with a few exceptions) every country with both imagery and street maps. For the last 5 years Street View coverage has also expanded and as of this week the team has begun collecting Street View imagery in the wonderful African nation of Botswana.

Capturing and processing Street View Imagery is a huge task far more complex that creating street maps, but you only need to ask anyone who has used Street View how useful it is.. so if is useful to a user in Guildford will it not be as useful to a user in Gaborone ?

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

 

Categories
Google Earth Google Maps INSPIRE Thoughts

So you want to use Google Earth to…

One of the most common questions people ask me, is “Can we use Google Maps to do xxx” , or “Can I use Google Earth in..” in most cases the answer is usually a resounding “YES”, but there are usually some conditions on use and for some uses the answer I’m afraid is no. For the past few years I have pointed people to the Geo Permissions website, which has been updated to now include a Permission Tool , a wizard interface to take your step by step through the permissions process.

I was at the INSPIRE Conference last week discussing amongst others things the licensing of geospatial data for shared Spatial Data Infrastructure projects, I made the point that increasingly data would be made available via online services and perhaps an additional way of reducing complexity is look at similar tools to explain access via future online services – the key insight.. to be user rather than producer focused !

Written and submitted from the Novotel Hotel Vienna, Austria (48.213N, 16.383E)

Categories
Data Policy Google Maps Thoughts

Evening all, what going on with these crime maps then…

So initially the  moral of this story seems to be, if you are launching a Government website across the mass media, make sure you do the load testing with 100x what you expect.

The real issue is that despite having best intentions and a commitment to transparency, it’s very easy to confuse, mislead and lose credibility with poor crime mapping.

One of the  key positives of UK police website is the availability of the data behind the site which can been downloaded or accessed via a REST based API, secondly and something which few commentators have mentioned a link to local police teams who are ultimately responsible for reducing crime at the local level. Of course one years aggregated data is of little value here, allowing only relative comparisons between locations to be made, the real value will come in the future years when trends are identifiable and hopefully may be linked to local policing initiatives.

Many have commented however on issues with the mapping where the site designers have tried to offer more detail than the previous ward level statistics by moving to reporting the actual location of crimes, as commonly found in American crime maps.

While this is something I personally think should be made available, the map is not actually shown the real locations.

Many crimes are not accurately located in the first place, and because of privacy concerns expressed by the Information Commissioners’ Office some locations have been modified, moved or aggregated so that the points displayed on the map do not actually represent the actual location of the crimes but are indicative of the location.  I think it’s clear that perhaps an American style crime map was intended but what have ended up with is an uncomfortable and misleading compromise.

The fact that the points don’t actually represent the locations of crimes is at one level understandable, but to most people a point on the map represents the location of something, so much of the uproar in the press calling into question the accuracy of the maps can be understood.

However because the underlying data is available, budding data visualisation experts and cartographers can get to work and attempt to produce maps and other visualisations that perhaps better represent the data, already Jonathan Raper’s team at placr have come up with this different visualisation, using a multiresolution grid rather than the less obvious neighbour/street locations.

I hope the Home Office is not put off by the criticism of this first attempt, if Government is really to be more open and make use of the web in tackling complex issues such a crime and the local perception of crime, they must follow the web philosophy of constant iteration and development.

So they must dust themselves down, listen to the criticism, and make the next version better; and the following version even better… but quickly !

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

Categories
StreetView Thoughts User Generated Maps

Google Maps gets the measles ?

Google Maps : Dear Dr. Ed, I seem to have developed a rash or well at least I’m completely covered in spots.

Dr Ed : Don’t worry Maps, it just a new way of finding geocoded images contributed by the photographers of the web.

If you have looked at Streetview ( by dragging the pegman) recently outside of the existing areas of coverage you may have noted spots of streetview coverage, this is not the result of a very disorganised group of streetview car drivers, but is a way of exposing other geocoded imagery where it is available.

Although the Google Streetview cars are once again driving the world bringing Street View images to many new countries in the meantime you can find suitably moderated and attributed user contributed images from Panoramio.

The example below is from Karon, the beach resort in Phuket, Thailand which brought back happy memories of my honeymoon, which was contributed by panoramio user bareman

The interesting point to ponder is as more and more geocoded images are published and indexed on the web, at what point if ever in the future will it be possible to replicate the complete coverage of Streetview with user contributed images ?

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
Categories
Data Policy Google Maps

Live Tube Map

A great early example of the value of the new TfL train prediction API, a map of the ‘Real time” locations of Tube Trains.

Produced by MySociety ace Matthew Somerville a really neat demo and another example of the value of releasing government datasets, and in this case an example of an occasion where an API is more useful than the raw data.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

Categories
Google Maps Thoughts

Mapnificent cartography

Mapnificent LondonI have for a while called out for some new cartographic approaches to communicating information which make use of the radically different capabilities of electronic displays compared to paper. To be fair I suppose the palette of tools available to the online cartography have been limited, and the state of the art was probably some of the renderings of OpenStreetMap data developed over the last year or so.

With the release at Google I/O this year of the V3 Maps API and styled maps functionality these tools are becoming more accessible, and one of the early results is a beautiful map produced by Stefan Wehrmeyer in Berlin. His Mapnificent London map uses the styled map API to show London by night, and then with full credit to the famous mapumental map, dynamically displays journey times if you used the extensive London night bus network.

The dynamic aspect makes this map really interesting by simply dragging a time slider bar you are presented with a great deal of information is a clear and simple way, something which would be difficult to achieve with traditional static cartographic techniques.

Hopefully the first of many new dynamic maps..

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

Categories
Google Maps Street VIew

From the Earth to the Moon

Today some 230,000 miles of Street View coverage has gone live in Google Maps, which represents arguably the most detailed map of the UK every produced. I say this because of the amount of information contained in each panoramic photograph is simply massive.

Yes it may not look like a conventional cartographic map, but it is nevertheless rich geospatial information and represents the next evolution of maps.

Street View images contain both quantitative information, parking restrictions from signs, opening times of shops, the type of tree most common is the surburan streets of Manchester and qualitative information, the “sense of place” something  very difficult to represent using traditional cartographic techniques.

Street View imagery in the UK will I hope become a valuable resource to academics researching the state of the nation at the beginning of the 2010’s, a image taken every 10 metres or so for 238,000 miles a distance equivalent to travelling from the earth to the moon, must represent one of the largest archives of photographs ever collected.

It is disappointing that the raw images used to create street view will have to be destroyed at the request of the European Union Data Protection Working Party, leaving only the privacy blurred published versions for future generations to accesses, still that is the balance we need to achieve between providing useful services and protecting privacy.

When I was running around Covent Garden in the early 1990’s creating a “hypermedia” map using a video camera and Apple’s Hypercard, I had a vague idea that such a database of navigable scenes might be extended to other parts of London, but National Coverage… that would have been Science Fiction !

But then again so once was putting a man on the moon !

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Google Maps Thoughts

Like your map mate!

This is a bit of fun, we have a great team of developers in Sydney who work of the Maps API amongst other things and yesterday launched for the worlds enjoyment a bunch of Labs features to Google Maps which basically allow you to do cool stuff.

One tool allows you to flip you map, making any of the four cardinal map directions top of the map, so here is the Aussie view of Southern England with South at the top.

We are used to maps orientated to the direction of travel within SatNavs, usually in a perspective projection, but a simple reorientation of a small scale map like this still “just does not look right” to me.

Amazing the power of convention when looking at maps. For the geeks amongst you, you will also recognise that this is also a visible manifestation of a new way to render maps..

Check them out by clicking on the green lab flask icon next time you use Google Maps..

Written and submitted from Zurich Airport  (47.460N, 8.554E)

Categories
Google Earth Google Maps

Help wanted !

googlebigbenlogoWe need helping selling, Google GEO solutions to Enterprise customers in the UK, if your are interested  and have the appropriate experience details are here, feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)