january 2003 archives

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Nothing here. Blogger had a hick-up it seems...

Trying to access Streetmap.pm this morning through CPAN, but it was no longer available... Apparently Streetmap wasn't very pleased with this Open Source endeavour! (Funny how “OS” stands for both “Open Source” and “Ordnance Survey”...).

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

If it's on NTK, then it's usually the next big thing. On of the latest issues of this newsletter proclaims: Yes, 2003 will be the year of geospatial hype. Then it goes on listing websites such as GeoURL ICBM Address Server recently mentioned on webmapper.net. One of the links took me to this gem: Streetmap.pm on CPAN. You send it a postcode and it returns its coordinates. Is that cool, or is that cool? Well, to be honest: scraping text using regular expression is not very elegant to start with. Second, I am not sure whether Streetmap are so happy with this themselves, let alone Consignia or the almighty OS!

Saturday, January 25, 2003

Lord Hereford's Knob or Twatt? Yes, these are names of places (toponyms) in the UK. More than hundred of these can be found on Amusing UK place names. The only place in the Netherlands I can think of is Sexbierum.

On the website “BITE: beerintheevening.com”, you can have your pub crawl dynamically generated! You can specify an area in London and the distance you are willing to walk from one pub to the next. Now that's a useful Location-Based Service!

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Just like the Wall Street Journal before, it's this time the New York Times taking a closer look at travel directions from online mapping services, with particular reference to MapQuest.com. It is a good read with the usual stories of people going astray, to put it subtly. (BTW, you have to register with the New York Times to read the full article)

Interestingly, Jennifer Mack, a spokeswoman for the AAA, assures us that the traditional map business is not dying: Likening Internet-based maps to digital news, she added, “It's still not going to replace newspapers”. Joel Minster, a senior vice president at Rand McNally, said online maps have not hurt the company's business. ”As a matter of fact,” Mr. Minster said, “what we're seeing is that people are more comfortable with maps and come to expect them more. And what does frustration with online maps drive people to do? They go buy a real map!”

Did I mention the word “patent” recently? Well, this time it's Vindigo. They've been awarded U.S. Patent No. 6,480,785, titled, “System For Determining a Route and Presenting Navigational Instructions Therefor”. Apparently, they have been able to come up with an routing computation algorithm that does not require major computational power of large servers to process arbitrary direction requests in a timely manner. The newly patented technology embeds a complex navigational system into handheld devices without crippling the device memory or functionality! More about this can be found in atnewyork.com.

Sunday, January 19, 2003

Route planners are hitting the larger mobile networks here in the UK! O2 has launched the AA Roadwatch and Route Planner services as part of its my02 services on the XDA Pocket PC Phone. Users can search for city-to-city driving directions, interactive maps, or real time traffic delays on a major highway. The user then has options to view the directions in a step-by-step view, request a map, email the directions to anyone in their Contacts database on the XDA, and save the information for offline viewing at anytime. Of course, I am not aware of the inner working, but it would be interesting to compare the system architecture with Webraska's patent regarding Internet-based Distributed Navigation (IbDN®).

Talking of which: the other day, the CEO of OpenGIS consortium filled a small column in the newsletter about patents more or less killing the GIS and LBS industry. It even specifically mentioned Multimap's patents!

Web mapping is becoming a mainstream grassroots initiative. A few days ago, the GeoURL ICBM Address Server was brought to my attention by one of my colleagues. This location-to-URL reverse directory allows you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. It works more or less like the Geotags initiative, mentioned before. First of all you add specific meta tags to the <head> section of your web pages. Then, you register your website with the directory to inform the directory to index your website to obtain the coordinates from the meta tags you inserted.

I'd say “grassroots”, because people all over the world initiate and take up these Web mapping projects: it's not a large global organisation such as the OpenGIS Consortium. Why mainstream? Well, the GeoURL ICBM Address Server has its precedent in the Usenet mapping project. The form to register with this project included an entry for longitude and latitude information:

#N      UUCP name of site
#S      manufacturer machine model; operating system & version
#O      organization name
#C      contact person's name
#E      contact person's electronic mail address
#T      contact person's telephone number
#P      organization's address
#L      latitude / longitude
#R      remarks
#U      netnews neighbors
#W      who last edited the entry ; date edited

This information was then used for generating geographically-correct maps of Usenet links on a plotter. Later, it became traditional to refer to this as one's “ICBM address”, hence the name “GeoURL ICBM Address Server”. First of all, the Internet is of course more pervasive than Usenet. Furthermore, it's not only the sysadmin of a UUCP host who can register with the directory, it's you and me: everyone who has a website without being necessarily its sysadmin.

OK, Web mapping is not anymore restricted to the “happy few”, but there still remains the hurdle of adding the correct longitude/latitude information. Would you know the coordinates of where you are? Fortunately, GeoURL ICBM Address Server website provides links to many resources to look up the coordinates of your location: it even lists Multimap.com! Websites such as The New York City Blogger Map and London Bloggers Tube Map make it easier for their registrants to enter: instead of real-world coordinates, the blogs are located by their nearest tube stop in New York and London respectively. Another advantage is that the directory immediately knows the location when people register: it doesn't have to crawl the website for meta tags at a later stage.

So there is the trade-off: use coordinates to get a world-wide coverage or use familiar land marks and do away with geographically-correct maps. UKbloggers does not compromise. Users register with UKbloggers using their postcode. Then, UKblogger uses the extensive gazetteers from Multimap.com to geocode each entry.

More articles about Web mapping can be found in the archives of Mappa.Mundi Magazine. This magazine explored how we see and use the Internet and provided a forum for the discussion of visualisation, mapping, and other broad concepts that were of interest to the web development community...

Thursday, January 16, 2003

Cewl stuff: the other day a new SVG recommendation was released: v.1.1. Like XHTML 1.1., modularisation was introduced, together with profiles for mobile and hand-held devices. Hopefuly this will make SVG even more leaner and meaner than it already is. Well, it has to be said that it's still the plug-in and browser support that limited re-using SVG code snippets across files so it's not the recommendation that was limited, but I hope that plug-ins and browsers have more incentive now to upgrade their support for the features in SVG.

Details about the next SVG Open conference are now available as well. Imagine: Vancouver! Also, there is a new GIS to SVG conversion tool available: MapViewSVG from uismedia. This is an extension for ArcGIS 8.x or ArcView 3.x to convert maps from ArcView/ArcGIS into the SVG format.

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

Snow's everywhere! Yesterday morning there was just a very thin layer of snow, but when I woke up this morning there was this thick pack! And yes, it's still snowing: very beautiful.

Monday, January 06, 2003

When I woke up on Sunday, it was snowing in Amsterdam! Later on we went for a nice wintery stroll along the Amsterdam canals. Made it to the airport early to learn that my flight was cancelled! Got home 5 hours later than planned. Back at work again...

Saturday, January 04, 2003

Haven't logged on for quite a while: been busy meeting up with people from the past and present the last two weeks. This overview will get you up to speed:

Saturday 4-1: Amsterdam with Harold and Anne.

Friday 3-1: Visited the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden with my dad.

Thursday 2-1: Enschede! Need I say more? Went to see the “Two Towers” with my flatmates. Well worth it...

Tuesday 31-12: New Year's Eve in Utrecht with Arne and friends. Even Miriam was there: a former flatmate when I was living in Utrecht. Very funny to see her again after all these years.

Sunday 29-12: Caught up with sleep and spent most of the day chatting with Peter in Utrecht.

Saturday 28-12: Hiking from Arnhem to Eerbeek. Was a very nice opportunity to meet up with many people I hadn't seen for years. Went back to Utrecht in the evening.

Friday 27-12: Henriette and I had a good time in good, old Utrecht. Even after Christmas we mangaged to go for a nice lunch and had quite a few drinks along the way. In the evening, Peter and I were picked up by Richard to go to Arnhem.

Thursday 26-12: Harold and Anne came to Waddinxveen on Boxing Day for a belated Christmas dinner.

Sunday 21-12: Herman and I went to see the exhibition “Mario Testino: Portraits”, organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London (!!!) at FOAM. Afterwards we went for a nice meal in a tapas bar: viva Espana!

Saturday 20-12: met up with Bastiaan and Patricia in The Hague.