Category: GIS

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GIS Google Maps opensource

If Dr Who needed a mash-up…

One of the topics which most often comes up in conversation when talking about creating new maps, is how historic information is recorded and displayed. Spatio-Temporal data modelling is a big and scary topic which has occupied the GI Research community for a number of years, and will do for a many more.

Today a simple and pragmatic approach to the problem has been introduced with the launch of the Time Space, which links a wiki database of historical events to their locations. This is not the first example of this type of web application, but the first in my knowledge to really exploit the potential of the community at a global level to contribute.

Timespace map

It will be interesting to see how this added dimension to user generated geodata develops, I can think of many potential applications, and it will be interesting to see how social history is represented compared to the big historical events.

Written and submitted from the Googleplex , Mountain View.

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GIS

Here comes 2008 !

So roll on 2008, it’s a great time to be involved with geospatial technology in all it forms, and for its great to be part of an industry that is touching so many more peoples lives…

Part of the excitment I feel is due to the fact that the industry is changing to finally better suit the needs of a wider community of users rather than just the professional GIS users. Some indication of this rate of change can be seen in a simple analysis of the search terms used in our favourite serach engine and how these have changed over the last few years.

Using the Google Trends tool it is possible to track how often a term is searched for, and to compare this over time.

OS Trends
Search for “Ordnance Survey”

For example it is interesting to compare the decreasing trend for “Ordnance Survey” with the increasing trend for “Tele Atlas” and “Navteq”.

navteq_graph.png
Search for “Navteq”

The change reflected here I would suggest is the change is focus of users away from local data provders to international suppliers and of course the move away from paper mapping to electronic mapping for many consumers.

Of course it’s easy to read too much into these trends, but as a measure of interest or attention amongst internet users these trends are interesting, I’ll leave it up to you to stop other geospatial search term trends, but look forward for another 12 months of upheaval as the structure and focus of the industry concerned with geographic information continues to change and broaden its appeal beyond the professional (paleogeography) market.

Happy New Year !!

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

Categories
GIS

Google Earth PhotoOverlay tool

mosque.jpg

Seems that everytime I’m in Mountain View, Andy and the guys at CASA build a really useful tool, (so I need to do this trip more often) their PhotoOverlay tool, is a great help in exploiting my favourite feature of Google Earth 4.2 as demonstrated by one of my holiday pictures above.

Now if someone could come up with a method of automating the calculation of the bearing a geocoded photo was taken on, we could have millions of these PhotoOverlays available to us.

Written and submitted from the Googleplex , Mountain View.