Grasshoppermind

No time to check this out in detail yet, but the blurb is interesting…

geoTract.com provides a central commonplace to share experiences and interests in the form of maps mashed with chatting, blogs, friends lists, favorites lists, and general locations. On geoTract users have the ability to open their opinions on restaurants they have visited, post photos of their friends at the club they went to last weekend, or even provide a reference to their favorite nature trails or hikes they have at their favorite camp ground. These experiences are then plotted on gMaps a Google API that allows the placement of markers based on coordinate systems generated by the API. Once a marker has been placed, or as we call it a “Tract” created, users can then share that information with the world, or maybe just their friends and relatives. They can write about their experiences within that geoTract Blog, and post pictures that correlate with that particular area or experience.

Slightly different tack but similar to Plazes maybe?

Readers of this blog will understand my interest in all things “geo”. Until recently this has mainly been theoretical and an interesting personal journey of understanding. Well theory will get you through the winter months, but practice is required when the sun is shining.

So after bolting my GPS unit (Magellan 320) to my bike I started recording tracks for the Openstreetmap project. This led me to a greater understanding of tracklogs, the mad amount of proprietary data formats used by GPS manufacturers. The hoped for standardisation, GPX. The amazing conversion utilities, GPSBabel and GPSVisualizer. And as an added bonus the creation of KML files for use in Google Earth. So after all that I think that I now understand tracklogs.

OK but that still leaves navigation.

So there’s a sport called geocaching, which involves navigating from one clue (or geocache) to another. If you liked treasure hunts when you were a child, you’ll love this. After initial hiccups, like using the wrong map datum,
I’ve learned to use landmarks, bearings, routes, and goto’s. Plus I’ve learned a little basic encryption along the way. I think there’s still a lot to learn about navigation, but now I know enough to get by.

A quick look at my blogmap (on the right hand sidebar) revealed that my location is somewhere in the sea, oops. It never used to look like that, so what changed?

It seems that Chandu Thota (the creator of Blogmap) has updated it again. Well actually the company he works for, Microsoft, have made a huge improvement in their mapping data for the rest of the world. This means that for the first time we in the Isle of Man have access to street level mapping.

It’s impressive stuff, and compared to the tracklogs I have been creating for the OpenStreetMap Isle Of Man project, it’s accurate enough for most purposes.

Using this little utility from clustrmap you can add a small image to your website that shows where your visitors are from. I’ve only added it to this particular post for now, but it’s easy to add to the main page of your website.

Registration is free (for low bandwidth users) and of course in best Web2.0 fashion it’s a beta.

How does this work? well the people who created it don’t give a lot of clues on their website, but my best guess is that they look up the location of the IP Address of each visitor to your site using a technique known as geolocation .

Found via Trendhunter Magazine

The British Computer Society just announced the creation of a Specialist Group for all things Geospatial.

The increasing ability to integrate geospatial technology into a wide range of IT systems, and the increasing visibility of it to business and the public, makes this an appropriate time to form a specialist group within BCS so that members may be well informed and understand the issues and best practices associated with the technology.

It has often irritated me to see the contrast between the American and British approaches to geographical data. So much American data is free. So much British data is very expensive and it’s usage severely restricted by license in some way. So it’s great to see resources like Openstreetmap and Freethepostcode taking a grassroots approach to addressing the issue.

Openstreetmap is enlisting the help of enthusiasts armed with a handheld GPS to create an opensource, freely available, streetmap of the entire world.

This may take some time.

Especially as their homebrewed server rack oftens creaks under the strain and this makes editing a somewhat frustrating affair. But this is the early adopter zone and these issues tend to go with the territory (pun intended) .

Dan Karran and I have launched our own attempt to map the Isle of Man and to get the data onto Openstreetmap, so any Isle of Man readers who would like to assist, please get in touch.

Every UK reader with a GPS should visit Freethepostcode at least once and put in your Postcode and your Latitude and Longitude coordinates. Do your bit to create a free UK postcode coordinate list.

via Techkwondo, who points out this amazing art installation by Seyed Alavi

This must be quite alarming to walk on! Imagine the effect of too many Gin &Tonic’s plus Jetlag, then you get to walk over this. Stunning.

Elsewhere in this blog I commented on the 3 Megapixel Ricoh GPS enabled digital camera . Now via The Maproom Blog we find this example of a GPS with a Camera. Whatever will they think of next? As I’ve wished for before, a GPS enabled video camera would be nice. Apparently according to commenter Rimma on this blog, NEC have filed and been granted a patent for this. I too cannot wait for this. I can now imagine video-enabled tracks on Google Earth!

Back in November 2005 Manx Telecom announced their plans to rollout one of the first HSDPA networks in the world. Those of you who read this blog will be aware of my interest in all things geo and map based. So naturally I was interested in being able to be online at broadband speeds anywhere I went. I went to a demonstration of the technology last week and although it doesn’t work too well within steel framed buildings (faraday cage effect?) the performance outdoors is superb.

BUT

according to one of the slides I saw at the presentation, the coverage and speeds available away from urban areas fade away to nothing. So the idea of being on-line at the top of a mountain, broadcasting geolocated live video feed straight to the net is a little way off yet.

However the target market for this type of technology is largely urban based, so I can forsee developers making use of the extra bandwidth to get very creative with their video/map based mashups.

We have seen a couple of examples now of Digital Cameras with built in GPS. These cameras store the location that the picture was taken within the picture metadata itself.

But how about Video Cameras with this capability? The ability to track location on a frame by frame basis might also be very useful. Does anyone know of an example?

A little while ago I asked SRI International what had happened to their Digital Earth project. This project was one of the primary reasons that we now have Google Earth, Worldwind, Virtual Earth, etc., and I was interested in knowing a little more about the history. Well, Aaron Heller, who is a researcher at SRI, responded and pointed out this publications list as well as this bit of background:

SRI’s Digital Earth effort was funded by DARPA under a few different research projects over the course of 10 years from 1992 to 2002. The final report shows just how much of what is Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth, NASA Worldwind (and more), was originally done on the Digital Earth project. After 10 years, DARPA felt that their work was done and it was time let NGA take over geospatial research. NGA’s approach to is to support work in setting interoperability standards (as with the Open GIS Consortium) and working with commercial companies to develop products that NGA can license and use (e.g. Keyhole, which became Google Earth).

Some of the numbers from the final report are pretty impressive, for example, their proposed Digital Earth allowed for a scaleable tile based distributed storage system that could cope with color imagery of the planet at 1cm resolution requiring 1 petabyte of storage. This is way more that you currently can see on Google Earth and its rivals, although it probably indicates the kind of capabilities enjoyed by the intelligence agencies even now.

They also envisaged a number of different “Geoweb” Clients:

Text Based: …in addition to entering a search criterion, the user would also enter a location for the search. This could be a latitude/longitude coordinate or, more intuitively, a street address or a feature name that can be translated to a geodetic coordinate by using a gazetteer service…

Map-based:…a client that lets users search over a particular geographic region and return the results as a map image with various icons overlaid…

TerraVision: …allows users to navigate in real time through a 3-D graphical representation of a real landscape created from elevation data and aerial images of that landscape…

Geoster: … lets users index photos from around the world and share these with the rest of the world…this type of client could produce a large interest in geographic search…

You should recognise todays descendents easily.

Found at Mobiledia, Google have released yet another beta.

Combining directions, maps, and satellite imagery, Google Local for mobile is a free download that lets you find local hangouts and businesses across town or across the country — right from your phone.

Google Local for mobile works with most Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones. You don’t need a GPS enabled phone! The downside (for me at least) is that it’s a US only service at present.

Google are really getting into this location thing aren’t they…

I wonder whatever happened to SRI International’s Digital Earth project? Now that ESRI, Worldwind and Google Earth are up and running, is the project dead?

Jonathan Stott has created this Location Finder for finding the Latitude and Longitude of any place. Navigate to the location you are interested in via a Google Maps interface, double click on the map to place the cross hairs, then click on the Location button. Lat and Long are displayed, along with the OS reference for good measure. Easy.

Jonathan has also created a couple of related services you should check out as well.
The Height Finder: Displays the hight of the location selected.
Sunrise/Sunset Times: Does exactly what it says on the tin…

Finally, Jonathan is also working on a PHP coordinate conversion utility called PHPcoord:

PHPcoord contains the following features:

* Calculate distance between a pair of latitudes and longitudes
* Convert between an OSGB grid reference and latitude and longitude using either the OSGB36 or WGS84 data
* Convert between UTM reference and latitude and longitude

With Google of course! Here’s a quick tip from Mark McLaren’s weblog. When Mark first wrote this post on July 23rd 2005 there were only 5290 KML files found, as of today there are 165000. That’s an amazing growth rate.

Can I have geo with that please?
There has been such a lot of buzz about Google Earth, Mapping Hacks, Location based services and Geo ‘Everything’, that I think it’s time for a quick list of definitions and related links to benefit those who are new to this field. Please feel free to add comments if I’ve missed anything, or you have a link to a better definition.

Please note: this post is regularly updated with new information, please check back again. If you would like to add something to the list, please comment. Last update 10th Nov 2005.

Geoadvertising

adverts displayed in the geospatial/mapping world. [from Geobloggers]

Geoblogging

attaching location metadata to blog posts resulting in articles being associated with a specific location or locations.

Geocaching

Geocaching is an outdoor sport that involves the use of a Global Positioning System (”GPS“) receiver to find a “geocache” (or “cache”) placed anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small, waterproof container containing a logbook and “treasure”. Geocaching is a unique take on an earlier game called Letterboxing in that it uses two recent technologies, the GPS and the Internet. Participants are called geocachers.
[from Wikipedia]

Geocasting

1. In networking - Geocasting is the delivery of packets to nodes within a certain geographic area [from arxiv.org]

2. podcasts associated with geographical coordinates

Geocoding

the process of assigning geographic coordinates (e.g. latitude-longitude) to street addresses, as well as other points and features. With geographic coordinates, the features can then be mapped and entered into Geographic Information Systems (GIS). [from Wikipedia] [Google]

Geolocation (Geotracking)

1. the technique of determining a user’s geographic latitude, longitude and, by inference, city, region and nation by comparing the user’s public Internet IP address with known locations of other electronically neighboring servers and routers [from Linuxjournal]

2. A method of determining a location of a mobile-station (cell-phone, mobile phone) [US Patent 6950664]

Georeferencing

1. A GIS term to describe the process of scaling, rotating, translating and deskewing an image to match a particular size and position.

2. Synonym for Geotagging [from Stephan at Ogle Earth]

Geospam

location based SPAM. In map based interfaces, popular locations may attract Spamlinks [more on this at Geobloggers]

Geotagging

the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds or images. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though it can also include altitude and placenames. [from Wikipedia]
[Google]

Geotargeting

advertisements targeted at a specific geographical region, area or location. [from Masternewmedia]

Geovlogged

a tag proposed by vlogmap.org for identifying geotagged video clips

Geovlogging

Videoblogs linked to geographical coordinates

Geoweb

The internet incorporating geographical metadata or location based references. [From the Geoweb blog]

I recently asked Rev Dan Catt of Geobloggers to add a date filter to the output from his site. I had a few reasons for the feature request but I don’t think I could put it as well as this…

…What happens to all the stuff we leave anchored to physical places but floating in virtual space year after year?…
…Think about all the tourists that come to take pictures of the Duomo, once they start tagging their pictures with that location, we’ll end up with thousands of pictures tied to that place. Now imagine that ten years down the road, someone visits the Duomo, would that person be able to say, find the photos their father took at that location?…

Better still, broaden geotagging out past just pictures. Include recordings (podcasts?), articles, impressions, diaries, emotional responses, videos, poetry, literature, related links. I want a rich, multi-sensory experience linked to a location with a history. My location aware device (of the near future) will be able to present this to me as I choose.

The developers of Tagzania have been busy adding new features since their launch earlier this year. One of their latest offerings allows you to easily paste maps into your blog or website. This is useful if you want to display the location of an article you are referring to. You can also resize the map to fit your site easily, e.g.

Although you probably won’t want to go smaller!

On September 8th, I wondered when geograph.co.uk would provide KML output of their incredible photo database of almost every square kilometer of the British Isles, so you could browse via Google Earth.
Well Barry Hunter kindly pointed me at a few links back then, but now things are a whole lot easier to use because of this page. Use Geograph with Google Earth.

A couple of weeks ago John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing advised his readers thus:

Look, I’m not going to waste too much time trying to convince you that people are searching for every kind of business, right there in you hometown, using the Internet. Every major search engine is rushing to become the next local phone book and you need to get your business listed now, while it’s still free.

So, without further ado, can Google Local, Yahoo Local and MSN Local let the rest of the world (outside the US) register their businesses?

Please?