december 2001 archives

Friday, December 28, 2001

Online mapping: one of the Seven Wonders of the Web. Multimap.com (4) is mentioned among a list of Web sites I admire, such as Google (1) and yes, of course, Blogger (7).

Had a great weekend and Xmas in the Netherlands. It was very good to see friends and family again in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Waddinxveen. Came back yesterday afternoon and started drinking from 5pm until I could not take it anymore: had to go into work this morning.

Just bought the “Rough Guide to Venice” on my way home from work. Not enough time to learn everything there is to know about this beautiful city. I am very much looking forward to spending some time there. The furthest I have ever been for New Year's Eve! Buona sera, signorina!

Wednesday, December 19, 2001

Got tickets for “Lord of the Rings” on Friday night. I am very much looking forward to seeing the film. Alright, one confession then: I actually have not read the book (yet)... Just got “No Logo” to read. Haven't read a good book for a while. Have a look at “Filmfreaks” soon to find out what LOTR was like. Will maybe be a while, because I will be in the Netherlands over Xmas.

Thursday, December 13, 2001

SVG really seems to be taking off: MacCentral runs an article on Locus Technologies' Web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) that is entirely based on Scalable Vector Graphics SVG) . Using Adobe's SVG Viewer, one can view a map of a site, click on a well on the map, and obtain chemical and water level information for that well, including a log, if one exists. Data can be displayed in tables or graphs, posted on the map or downloaded. Though navigation is a bit akward to start, once you get used to it, a realm of information is readily available as if it were a desktop GIS! Hurray for Locus Technologies.

Sunday, December 09, 2001

In the Wireless section of Wired, I found the article “This Ping Thing Didn't Take Wing” on the German company Gate5. The company develops location-based services, and placed on its Web site an application that deciphered whether mobile phones were switched on or off. This “pinging” made use of a security leak in the SMS protocol. The main problem was, that Gate5 did not inform the subscribers who were being monitored.

Swisscom in Switzerland, offers a similar SMS and wireless application protocol service that allows users to locate other mobile phone subscribers within a 100-meter radius. However, the service -- called “FriendZone” -- doesn't work unless the mobile phone subscriber grants permission to be located. Very cool!

This item reminds of an article I read a few weeks ago in Wired. It talked about BotFighters. Players use their cell phone to locate and kill opponents. This game is provided by a Swedish telecom company, Telia. Location and gaming...: “Miscere utile dulce”!

Thursday, December 06, 2001

After so much cartography news, I thought of writing something completely different. I was just reading an article in the Dutch newspaper “Volksrant” that had the word “loftuitingen” in it: Ondanks zijn loftuitingen veroorzaakte Sobel bij zijn aantreden meteen ophef met zijn ontboezeming over de F-16's. Just like the lovely word “wapenrusting”. The two words in one sentence: De schoonheid van zijn wapenrusting ontlokte loftuitingen aan zijn toeschouwers. Can't get any better for today? Well, what do you think of $fields[3] =~ /^\"([ABM][1-9].*)\"/? That's quite something I'd say.

Wednesday, December 05, 2001

This link has been around in my browser “Favorites” for quite a while, but it is really something to read once. So to keep it for posterity here it is: “Atlas Shrugged: When it comes to online road maps, why you can't (always) get there from here”. This is quite an interesting article to read if you really would like to know what my day-to-day work encompasses: solving all the problems mentioned in this article.

Yesterday, the “Ordnance Survey”, Britain's National Mapping Agency, released it's; latest product: “OS MasterMap”. The interesting thing about it is that the data is stored in GML version 2.0 format! The other day, I also came across an announcement of the “SVG Open / Carto.net Developers Conference: Conference on interactive vector-based webgraphics, Online GIS and Webmapping”. Would GML and SVG really take off at last?

Tuesday, December 04, 2001

A few weeks ago there was a thread on the Map-Mac e-mail list on Street naming conventions. The posts have been in my mailbox too long. I'll give them a place here for me to keep them for later reference.

There does not seem to be any systematic listing of street names (in the US), except what you might be able to mine from TIGER, a ZIP code database, or NavTech data. However, here are some rules for most large US cities:

These rules are rather unreliable. Even within cities you'll often find that the official street map says one thing, the street signs say another, and the exit ramps off the interstate can't make up their minds...

Post-name position is much less common, seen systematically mostly in Washington, DC, Atlanta, South Florida, Minnesota, and the Pacific Northwest. Exceptions in older Eastern cities are often single examples, as where an old downtown street later gained a lengthy extension. (The same impulse produces “Poplar Street Extended” and “Main Street Road”.)

An additional complication is that some cities--Tulsa and Minneapolis come to mind--use both a pre- and postname direction (“East 61st Street South”) but may commonly omit the postname direction because it's assumed for the most developed quadrant of the city.

Actually, Minneapolis streets have only one directional word, officially applied to the end of the street name (not that these are applied with consistent logic... N, NE and SE apply to all streets in specific sections of the city, whereas S, E and W apply to streets in the southern half of the city; S is for north-south streets, and E and W are based on relationship to central Nicollet Ave...). Duluth however is a mess.

Signing is pretty consistently “Whatever Street N”, people routinely use mailing addresses saying “N Whatever St”, or if a street only appears in one part of the city, just omitting it altogether.

In cities that use the Lyman system--almost all in Utah--what appears to be a postname direction is actually the streetname. A typical address there takes the form of 215 E 700 S. “700 S” is the streetname, and may sometimes be posted as “7th South”.

Similar things happen in many western counties that have recently had to develop addressing systems for automating emergency services (911) in rural areas, i.e. addresses like “73567 700 Rd”. In general though, these counties don't use directionals; they start at on edge of the county and sweep across.

When street names include a direction element, such as Main Street South, sometimes the direction comes after the road type (Bloor Street East) and sometimes it comes before the street name (East 42nd Street).

Anyone interested in setting up a gazetteer searching module for the US?

Sunday, December 02, 2001

Thanks to Jason Kottke's proclaimed fascination with the London Tube Map, I stumbled upon the Web site “Underground History: Disused Stations on London's Undergound”. Does not need any particular description, I'd guess. Will definitely look out for station “British Museum” next time I travel between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road!

Saturday, December 01, 2001

Yesterday, I received tons of mails in my hotmail mailbox. No, I am not popular at all, so I just subsribed to some e-mail lists as to receive at least some e-mail in my mailbox. Yesterday's activity was on the carto-soc e-mail list of the Society for Cartographers. So what was all the fuss about?

It all started with a question about where the most remote place in Britain would be. However, cartographers are cartographers thus... the conversation soon turned to the most boring map grid in the UK, furthering on BBC Radio 4's item “Britain's Dullest Place?”: where to find one square kilometre on an Ordnance Survey map which had nothing in it at all - not even a contour line - just white and empty and, presumably, extremely dull. Where it is? Have a look at Longbridge Muir and Ousefleet.

Oh, my god. If you are a really desparate cartographer and would like to share your passion/obsession you can become member of the “Cartographers Anonymous” a.k.a. “The Charles Close Society for the study of Ordnance Survey Maps”. This can only be in good olde Britain, not? Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!

“Link and Think”, f.k.a. “A Day With(out) Weblogs” is an observance of World AIDS Day in the personal web publishing communities. The project involves hundreds of webloggers, journalers, diarists and other personal website publishers, each linking to resources about HIV/AIDS or publishing personal stories about how the AIDS pandemic has affected them. This was my contribution then!