june 2002 archives

Friday, June 21, 2002

After about 7 (?) years, the Netherlands' National Mapping Agency, the “Topografische Dienst Nederland” have changed the look and feel of their website. Well, I am not quite sure about the 7 years, but I cannot remember another interface since I first logged onto the Web in 1995. Although the look and feel have changed, there is still little information available. It is still targetted towards a semi-professional audience. There is no “fun” at all. Still like the Ordnance Survey website a lot better.

There is one new link though: the “TOP10NL Demonstratie Website”, designed and produced by the Department of Geoinformatics, Cartography and Visualization, ITC. This is really the only attempt to position TDN in the 21st century. There are even some SVG examples that you can view. These have been created using “SVG Maker” by Software Mechanics Pty Ltd.

Thursday, June 13, 2002

Zürich, here I come! I just registered for the SVG Open Developers Conference. Really looking forward to attending this exciting conference. SVG is the next big thing in cartography I think, so all the more reason to be there.

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Day after the night before? There is an interesting article about the internet economy in general and Multimap.com in particular in the Guardian.

Monday, June 10, 2002

People often arrive at my website when searching for “SVG MapInfo”. Until now, there was not much information to provide. I am going to add a section to this website soon that will discuss several ways to generate SVG from geographic data. An interesting software tool for MapInfo and also for ESRI is SVG MapGen by GeoGraphs Corporation. It is a stand-alone programme to export maps from ESRI Shape and MapInfo MID/MIF to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

Another tool is SVGMapMaker, by DBx Geomatics, the “home” of GML and SVG. SVGMapMaker is not a stand-alone programme, but a plug-in for MapInfo Professional. It exports maps and layout windows to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. It is possible to specify options such as filter effects, color gradients, tooltips, hyperlinks, opacity and info tool when exporting.

Google goes geographic! The winning project of Google's 2002 Programming Contest competition is “Geographic Search”. The project adds the ability to search for web pages within a particular geographic locale to traditional keyword searching. To accomplish this, a gazetteer was created from the freely available TIGER and FIPS data sources. The system provides an interface that allows the user to augment a keyword search with the ability to restrict matches to within a certain radius of a specified address. The “location” of a web page is determined by scanning it for street addresses. The parser can recognise a lot of different ways people format addresses in text, and uses the same gzatteer to turn those into geographical coordinates.

Very interesting idea, as it is very simple. The GeoTag effort tries to achieve the same thing, but it requires web masters to add the tags explicitly to every web page for it to be indexed. The approach in the “Geographic Search” project on the other hand uses addresses that people tend to add to their general information column anyway.

There is one problem however. If I write in my blog about the restaurant I visited the other day in Paris on the Rue de Rivoli, wouldn't my website be wrongly geocoded and appear to be located in France? So maybe there is a lot to be said for the GeoTag approach after all...

Friday, June 07, 2002

Providing aerial photos for free on the Web is quite an issue these days! Most of the time, it is in a positive way. A few weeks ago, Channel 4 broadcasted the programme “The Secret Map of Britain”, presented by Mark Thomas. In the background of one of the shots, a computer screen with aerial photos on the Multimap.com website clearly visible. They even made NTK!

Unfortunately, since the Current Situation, aerial photos are all of a sudden hot material! Apparently, terrorists might download photos of strategic locations from various websites, or even order high-quality copies online. But, as usual, opinions differ...

Thursday, June 06, 2002

OK, I gave in. I just added some extra notes to the SVG section regarding configuring Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) on Windows 2000 Server for the appropriate MIME types for SVG. Furthermore, the latest developments with regard to referencing SVG in your documents have been updated with a short explanation of the XHTML+MathML+SVG profile.

In the US, wireless carriers have been struggling to becoming E911 compliant. However, according to an article in WDN Daily, they have seen the strength of postitioning technology and have started to actually turn E911 compliance into a profit center by deploying revenue-generating location-based services. This quite an interesting development. LBS is drifting away more and more from the geomatics industry and becoming more and more dominated by the wireless carriers? Or, are geomatics companies finally targetting a very rich market? For example, whereonearth, a software vendor that provides a Location Based Service (LBS) technology platform, has teamed up with Hutchinson 3G here in the UK.