Jul 20
According to GWB a StreetView car was seen in Vienna. Maybe we can soon walk through Vienna virtually. Of course the faces of people and country code plates will be blurred to ensure privacy. But there are still some criticism about this service. Until now this message was not confirmed with a photo. So we will see when StreetView is coming to Austria.
In France Streetview was already launched and StreetView cars are seen in several other European cities including Milan, Berlin, etc.
[via GWB]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Jul 15
An open and downloadable address dataset is useful for many geospatial applications. Therefore the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz has developed a platform where users can enter own addresses for benefit of the whole community. Recently FH Kärnten has adopted this idea to create a address dataset for Austria. Until now less than 100 addresses are stored but this could change soon. You can add addresses at the homepage of the portal: http://www.openaddresses.at
Since Google provides a very sophisticated geocoding function including most of the addresses in Austria the success of this project is questionable. One advantage of OpenAdresses is the possibility to download the dataset as CSV or XML. We will see how big the growth of will be.
The Idea:
In the last few years web applications have integrated users more and more in the design, the processing and gathering of information.
Some of the these applicatins are Wikis and famous sites such as youtube, etc.
We had the idea at our institute of launching an experiment to collect a complete set of geocoded address information for Switzerland. This data is supposed to
- be freely available to all interested companies or private persons and may be used at no license fee
- be captured and maintained by the Web Community
- store not only the details of an address but their co-ordinates as well.
Of course there is already a complete geocoded address dataset for the whole of Switzerland - but it is fairly expensive. With the OpenAddress idea we want
to investigate whether it is possible to create such an comprehensive dataset based both on the most recent technologies and the Web Community.
We believe that the more people there are who join in, the less the effort of each individual will be. If many, many people help with their very local know-how, we will be able to achieve this goal.
Besides: it is very easy: just click on the map and enter the details of an address - that’s it. Or use a list of addresses and go sequentially through it.
Of course we would like the individual to collect and enter more than just one address:
This could be: Addresses of the places where you work, you live, meet your friends, have your hair cut or your teeth checked, the most famous restaurant, as well as the most famous restaurant and other popular locations etc.
A few comments:
- Whoever needs many addresses should collect and enter many. This is especially meant for companies who will use this data in a commercial environment.
- The project is based on trust: We neither check nor log what is collected and entered.
- The project is based on the “open” philosophy which also works in the area of open source software: the community is responsible for quality and completeness.
- Do invite colleagues to join in and help - the more the better!
- Keep informed and use the ’statistics’ option to follow the progress.
As stated before: it is an experiment. But we believe it will work - with your help!
What will this address information be used for?
Many applications and solutions in the area of geographic context need highly detailed data. Full address data including georeference is part of it.
[via: http://www.openaddresses.at]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Jul 11
Open Source GIS solutions gain more and more attention in the Geoinformation sciences community over the past years. Now there are numerous usable and stable Open Source libraries and tools for spatial data management, customization and visualisation available. Open Source in general has a very strong relation to topic of Interoperability and Open GI Standards (e.g., Standards specified by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)).
The OpenRoutingService.org initiative has worked on the OGC Specification “Open Location Services” (OpenLS) Before the implementation of OpenRoutingService.org several other services based on open standards have been realized. In near futures these implementations should be available at http://www.freeOpenLS.org.
Since April 8th of this year OpenRoutingService.org is accessible online. The services uses free geodata from OpenStreetMaps (OSM) and provides routing functionality based on the OGC LopenLS Route Service Specification. The plan is to provide routing based on OSM also for other software systems or as web service. Currently the service is enhanced in case of functionality, because until now it is limited to Germany. The area of Germany in OSM covers more than 600.000 streets, which must be transformed into topological graphs for the routing module. During this transformation more then 1.3 million features are generated.
They have tested the performance with different routing-libraries (geotools, pgrouting) and algorithms (Dijkstra, A*).
One further interesting feature of OpenRoutingService.org is the “Avoid Area” function. Here the user can enter an area (e.g, dangerous area), which is excluded in the routing process.
[via: Zur Kopplung von OpenSource, OpenLS und OpenStreetMaps in OpenRouteService.org (Neis, P., Zipf, A.)]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Jun 27
Nokia is planning opening up Nokia Maps for the Desktop and synchronizing information between desktop and mobile phone. Therefore they are working on a browser frontend for their maps and navigation service Nokia Maps, which is optimized for the PC. The user should be able to plan a route on the PC and is shown the information on the mobile after synchronizing. I can be assumed that Nokia Maps will be embedded into the Ovi-platform. Currently the product is under development and will not be available before fall 2008.
In general it can be said that Nokia make a lot of effort providing geospatial solution for the mobile world. Nokia has announced to deliver 35 to 40 million mobiles, which have built-in GPS chips.
[via: golem.de]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Jun 21
Thematic Mapping Engine (TME) enables you to visualise global statistics on Google Earth. The primary data source is UNdata. The engine returns a KMZ file that you can open in Google Earth or download to your computer.
The goal of this project is to investigate and show how geobrowsers can be used for thematic mapping. It is initialised by a master’s thesis in Geographical Information Science at University of Edinburgh.
It is really a helpul tool to ceate a impressive thematic map very fast. The only problem until now is that you have no possibility to use your own statistical data.
Source: http://thematicmapping.org
Written and submitted at CUAS, using their network.
May 28
Google’s 3D data has escaped the client and is now available for your Browser. Today at Google I/O a Google Earth Browser plugin was released. With the plugin it is possible to view Google Earth mashups in the comfort of their own browser instead of having to pull up a separate client.
A small excerpt from the O’Reilly post:
This release does not change Google Maps, the mapping site on Google’s domain; it will not be serving up Google Earth imagery (yet). This release does not change all Google maps mashups into Google Earth Mashups. Instead the plugin enables developers to offer Google Earth imagery to their users very easily. I think it is notable that this is being offered to developers first. Why developers first? For one the plugin is being released at Google I/O, Google’s developer conference. I think that we should expect many developer-only treats today and tomorrow. Second, mashups can really help with distribution and help gain mindshare with those who don’t make it to Google’s sites on their own.
As Paul Rademacher, the creator of the first mashup (Housingmaps.com) and the technical lead on the project, pointed out to me during a call last week “The goal, apart from opening up Google Earth, is to bring Earth to the user. You can’t help but see Google maps when you surf now you’ll also see Google Earth.” The final reason, I am sure, is to keep Google’s main mapping site clean. Google Maps has had a lot of features added lately; they will need to spend some time figuring out a 3D UX.
Here are some sample apps for trying out. You will be prompted to download the plugin:
[via http://radar.oreilly.com/geo]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
May 27
Searching the own home place with Google Earth or Google Maps is definitively one of the most popular activities for many users. “Geoimage-Austria” has provided Google with new imagery for Burgenland, Upper Austria, Tyrol, Vorarlberg and Salzburg. All data is older than one year, but it should be possible to recognize an object with the size of an football.
Until 2009 a new, updated image is planned, which covers whole Austria.
Sample: Villach (this is older data, but also high resolution)
[via derStandard]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
May 21
The Austrian Federal Enviromental Agency (Umweltbundesamt) maps air quality data from gauging stations distributed over the area of Austria. The recorded data from the sensors can be actualised by the user from the map interface. Used technologies are Google Maps and geonames.org for georeferencing.
Values for ozone, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monodixe and some other are recored and mapped. I’m not sure if the application works for any browser, becuase I had some troubles with Safari.
Link: http://luft.umweltbundesamt.at/pub/gmap/start.html
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
