june 2003 archives

Friday, June 27, 2003

Creating dot maps

The trend of mapping locations, e.g. blogs, started earlier this year. Blogosphere and GPSter are some of the more interesting initiatives. Another exciting tool I found out about recently is Indy Junior. It's a fully customisable map, implemented with Flash technology, to display geographic locations encoded in XML. when installing the map on your server, you're asked to fill out a form to customise the appearance of the map to your liking. Pretty neat! Can't wait to show it on webmapper.net...

Vice versa, bloggers frequently write about locations they are visiting. A Movable Type plugin, based on Geo::Sketch, automatically detects town names in each blog entry and creates a map of that location!

Search engines unite!

Thanks to starhill index, I learned that Google and MapQuest have joined forces to provide a local information service as featured on websites like Multimap.com and MapMinder.

Visitors to MapQuest are now presented with offers for further information in various categories, such as hotels, resorts and real estate. Each category links to a page of eight paid listings from Google's AdWords program. The paid listings is generated for MapQuest by taking a category and combining it with the city the user enters. For example, a map of EC1N 2NS in London will return links to paid listings from Google advertisers who bid on “London and hotel” or “London and restaurant”. All in all, it's a rather crude implementation. Would have thought that MapQuest could come up with something better...

Thursday, June 26, 2003

webmapper.net runs off new Blogger

Logging on to Blogger today, I was kindly informed that my blog had been migrated to the new Blogger system. One of its many new features is the title field! I have been waiting for this quite a while. I could have used some kludge, but I thought it just wouldn't be worth the hassle. There are many more features in Blogger, so keep stopping by to see the latest improvements on webmapper.net!

Monday, June 23, 2003

Previously, it was highlighted that national mapping agencies (NMAs) sometimes deliver product that compete head-to-head with commercial products. Last week, Getmapping and Ordnance Survey resolved their outstanding legal dispute concerning the development of the imagery layer of OS MasterMap: Getmapping has withdrawn all of its claims and paid a six-figure (!!!) sum to Ordnance Survey. Would this cause Getmapping to withdraw from the Geographical Industry Forum?

Sunday, June 22, 2003

For once, the online GIS community does not lag too much behind the general Web community. Furthermore, it is addressing one of the issues that I feel rather strongly about: patents. Only two weeks after the W3C, released their Patent Policy assuring that its Recommendations can be implemented on a royalty-free basis, the OGC reaffirmed its IPR policy. It's designed to protect the Consortium's standards framework from patents that would impede development of open infrastructure for interoperable geoprocessing. David Schell, OGC President, stated: “Without royalty free, publicly available standards, competition is dangerously inhibited. Further, if a standard is not royalty free, then any one party can effectively impose a tax on fundamental components of the of critical public infrastructure. It is our belief that the greatest benefit of technological innovation is achieved through open, unencumbered competition”.

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

Behind the scenes of webmapper.net, there are quite a few changes going on. First of all, I have recently left the online mapping company I used to work for. From mid-June I'll start working in the public sector. For years I have kept an eye on the great work they are doing at www.zorgatlas.nl. The Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) develops and maintains this Web atlas that provides a geographic view on care and health in the Netherlands. So, once they offered me a job, I was easily convinced to join them. So that's the next big thing: I'm moving abroad again: re-migrating (is there really such a word?) to the Netherlands. I have got three weeks off now, so enough time to chill out, go on holiday, and get across the North Sea!

Hopefully I can keep tabs on the trends and developments in online mapping, albeit from some distance. If you're coming here for your weekly shot of online mapping news, there's no need to go somewhere else now. However, be prepared to read also some of the other stuff I am working on such as collaborative mapping (really hope to find some more time to get this properly off the ground) and Scalable Vector Graphics.