Archive for the 'Internet' Category

Create a 3-dimensional Environment with your Photos

Published
by
joesonic
on August 25, 2008
in GeoWeb, Internet and Software
. 0 Comments

We explore our surroundings, with every technology we have. From text to audio to maps to photos. Now there is a new technology freely available to represent place - Photosynth. Photosynth comes from Microsoft and you can build up your own 3d environment with your digital camera and the Photosynth software.

This is how it works:

  1. You make a lot of photos of your surrounding with as many overlapping as possible. Walk around and change zoom and angle.
  2. Go to http://www.photosynth.net and download and install the software plugin in your web browser.
  3. The software automatically compares all your photos and finds out how they go together and uploads them to the web.
  4. The result is a 3d virtual representation which can be seen by anyone via the Internet.

The optimistic overall goal of the developers is to create a 3d photo-realistic representation of the whole world.

Still there are some limitations and drawbacks:

  • Creating a good Photosync takes patience and practice.
  • Every spot in the environment has to be included in at least three photos.
  • No Mac version until now.
  • You cannot create a private version of your composed photos.
  • Alternative Quicktime VR (available for years).

[via David Pogue, NYT]

Yahoo launches FireEagle - a service to track your locations

Published
by
joesonic
on August 13, 2008
in GeoWeb, Internet and Webservices
. 0 Comments

Yahoo has launched their contibution of “track your location” sites with the release of Fire Eagle. The basic idea behind Fire Eagle is to become the link between your location and the services that you want to give your location to. You can feed your location to Fire Eagle from your GPS unit, cell phone, laptop, etc, then their applications can use it for whatever task you give them permission for. Even though it has just launched, there are a large number of sites already using it (e.g., Dopplr, Facebook, etc.), many of which tie into Google Maps.

In other words, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, what I like to call a meta-app because it manages many location-enabled apps, is now open to all.

Links:

[via Google Earth Blog]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.

ESRI ArcGIS 9.3 JavaScript API and Google Maps

Published
by
joesonic
on August 9, 2008
in GIS, GeoWeb, Internet and Programming
. 0 Comments

Since ArcGIS 9.3 ESRI provides a JavaScript API of ArcGIS Server.

The video shows how to build powerful business applications by dynamically querying information contained in map layers.To query geometry properties you can use the esri.arcgis.gmaps.Query class.

More information for developers can be found at: http://resources.esri.com/arcgisserver/index.cfm?fa=jsapis

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.

4 Years OpenStreetMap - Details & Interviews

Published
by
joesonic
on August 3, 2008
in GeoWeb and Internet
. 0 Comments

Two years ago OpenStreetMap (OSM) was completely unknown in the german-speaking community and central Europe. Today several places in the world have already very detailed and sophisticated maps, produced by volunteers. People uses GPS devices or local knowledge to make existing maps more detailed.

Frustration about the high prices for geospatial data was the motivation for Steve Coast to start the OpenStreetMap project in 2004. Four years later the project developed from an idea to a world-wide map, where thousands of people are participating. Everyone can use the map for free, to embed it on the own web site.

In the past every five months the user doubled, and in the end of 2009 there should be ten times more users than today. And these users will add 200.000 km per day, so the estimations. Indeed, OpenStreetMap is more than a simple streetmap. The map includes information about roads and their environment as well as Points Of Interest (POIs). Questions like, “Where is the next postal office?”, “Where is the next toilette?”, or “Where can I find the next WiFi Access Point?” can be answered. How this can look like shows the POI Control. This web site used OpenStreetMap and analyzes stored POIs.

Of courses some places, especially important towns, are very detailed while other parts are more or less empty. If inhabitants didnt know about OpenStreetMap this can also be seen on the map. For example parts of Spain are not collected. In the USA freely available TIGER data was integrated in OpenStreetMap.

This picture shows a comparison of the city Villach, Austria (pop. 58000) in Google Maps and OSM.

One other important service is routing. An important service which uses OpenStreetMap data is OpenRouteService.org as reported in June.

Following I have summarized important issues form an interview with Frederik Ramm about OSM:

Q: There is Google Maps. Why is there also OpenStreetMaps?

Ramm: Google Maps doesn’t offer their data. You can view their maps, but you can not render maps in your own style. You also cannot put your own routing algorithms on to of the map or calculate the density of letter-boxes for German towns. Google has maps - OpenStreetmap has geodata. That’s an enormous difference. Everyone can participate; a corrected error, a new build road can be found within hours on the map. And finally OpenStreetMap has a free licence, you can use the data for all of your own projects. With Google Maps you cannot do this.

Q: Google has introduced Map Maker and Pedestrian routing recently. Is this a reaction to the OpenStreetMap project, which does not only concentrate on vehicles? Or only a logical improvement?

Ramm: Map Maker a Google services which is based on a technique, that was used for internal data acquisition in India. Google would like to buy map data simply form agencies but for a lot of areas there are simple no useful data available. With Map Maker Google tries to fill these gaps. But we see it relaxed. Google will encourage a lot of people for this project and OpenstreetMap will also benefit. For pedestrian routing it is similar.

Q: Where are the strenghts of the OpenStreetMap project?

Ramm: Free accessibility of data is an enormous potential for creativity. Every few weeks there is somebody who has worked on a software fir OSM. One further strength is that everyone can participate and provide her/his expert knowledge about a local region. The community is the core of the project. Competitors are driving their surveying vehicles. With this technique you cannot get the secret paths between two house blocks.

Q: And where are the weaknesses?

Ramm: There is no complete worldwide coverage. Yet. Further, the community is fixed on map visualisation. This leads to missing Information. There is also no mechanism which can evaluate the completeness and correctness of the data.

Q: What’s about mobile devices?

Ramm: At this years ‘State of the Map’-Konferenz Nick Whitelegg has introduced Freemap Mobile, a J2ME-application for hikers. A complete editor for a mobile platform is not available but moving map and routing works for a lot of applications. Navit is one example which works with the Nokia N810, but also with other Windows mobile devices. Definitively, there is potential.

[via Golem.de]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.

Semantic Search with Cuil

Published
by
joesonic
on July 28, 2008
in Internet
. 0 Comments

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is a search engine unveiled on July 28, 2008. Recently several start-ups wanted to establish on the hard search engines market, but also big companies like Microsoft and Yahoo managed it to attack Google. But the semantic search of Cuil tries to make it different. Uniquely, it organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries and pictures for each result. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google.

Today it started their service and provided relatively good results in my opinion. The search results are not in form of a list, it is more like the layout of an online magazine. Cuil can use 33 million $ Venture-capital. Also Tom Costello is on board, who has worked in the field of search technologies for IBM and made research at the Stanford University.

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.