august 2003 archives

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Abandon ship! Abandon the IMS Technology!

Over the last few weeks, the agile motor cruisers “MapServer” and “Flash” have started a boat race to challenge the ocean liner IMS “Technology”. Since the IMS “Technology” set sail in June 1993 from PARC Map Viewer, many Internet GIS developers have crossed unchartered waters to terra incognita: “web mapping”. Indeed, the engine below deck was state-of-the-art: the IMS “Technology” converted map tiles to raster images, stripped them from intelligence, and sent these to the client computer allowing for limited interactivity. No longer is “web mapping” terra incognita, but the IMS “Technology” is still the preferred mode of transport for most ocean-crossing online mapping providers. However, will this era soon be over?

On August 11, GeoGraphs released GeoFlash ASE. It creates interactive SWF documents from common GIS data formats. Using the Flash player, users then zoom and pan around the map, query objects, obtain information about the objects through tool tips, and perform thematic analyses.

Only one day later, DM Solutions Group announced significant enhancements to the open source web mapping platform, “MapServer”. Version 4.0 includes implementations of the Open GIS Consortium Web Map Context and Web Feature Service specifications. Another key addition is the capacity to output maps in vector-based file formats such as SWF, PDF, and GML. Furthermore, DM Solutions Group is also continuing its support for the PHP scripting environment, the most widely adopted MapServer development environment.

Interestingly, both companies are committed to SVG as well. I am looking forward to seeing some more activity in that area. However, as long as map data is heavily copyrighted, it's tricky to expose all those coordinates for everyone to read in an SVG document. I reckon National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) are a lot more comfortable with binary SWF file...

Monday, August 11, 2003

Where on Earth?

These days, “location” is key on the Web! For long, store locators gave us an online tool to find our way in the physical world. Recently, the physical location is starting to become important in the online world:

What is the location of the author?: Websites such as GeoURL and London Bloggers show the (permanent) locations of websites, on the former organised by geographic coordinates and on the latter organised by their nearest London Underground tube stop.
At what location was the content published?: With the rise of mobile blogging (“moblogging”), authors are publishing content on their websites from any location with online access, for example from the coffee bar around the corner.
What is the location of the visitor?: When you visit Mario Klingemann's Flash Blog, a map indicates the location of the last 20 visitors and the shade of each country tells you how many visitors arrived at his website from that country.
Where did the visitor arrive from?: Some websites show a listing of the latest referers. It is interesting to establish the locations of the websites that visitors are referred from. This information tells you something about the scope of the topics addressed on the website.
What location does the content refer to?: This information allows visitors to search for information by geography instead of by time or topic.

It is not so much the location in itself that matters, but the (geographic) attributes that can be derived from the location, e.g. social economic characteristics of an area:

Distance between the author's location and where the content was published.: This information is interesting when the author is travelling around.
Distance between the author's location and the location that the content refers to.: This is visualised by the former UpMyStreet people. It's interesting to read what someone local has to say about the corner shop, or what someone from your area or a similar area (e.g. based on social-economic characteristics) suggests about your holiday destination.
Distance between the author's location and the location of the visitor.: The proximity of the author could contribute to the trust the vistor has in the contents of the website.
Distance between the visitor's location and the location that the content refers to.: When the distance between the visitor and the location that the content refers to is known, only the content close to the visitor can be presented as to prevent information overload.

Location and distance can now be used to determine someone's credibility, to establish relationships of trust. I value the comments someone local has about the corner shop much more than someone from further away. However, the person living away may have friends living in your area. Physical proximity can now be augmented by social proximity. “Location, location, location” or the “Web of Trust”? Location as a building block of the “Web of Trust”!

Friday, August 08, 2003

Feeling lucky

Only noticed today: typing “webmapper” into Google and hitting the “I'm feeling lucky” button, your are directed to this very website! No more applications to make image maps, no more online magazines for the Canadian geomatics industry, no more paleoclimatology...

Wednesday, August 06, 2003

All quiet on the western front?

As you may have noticed, it's all been rather quiet lately on webmapper.net. Behind the scenes I am working on some stuff. Firstly, I'm working on my presentation on collaborative mapping at Cartography 2003, the annual conference of the British Cartographic Society and Society of Cartographers. Secondly, I wrote an article based on a benchmark study of online store locators of some global retailers that have outlets in the Netherlands. Hopefully this addresses one of the comments I recently received (I learned a bit about British ice skating history along the way...). Both will be published on webmapper.net, but you'll have to be patient in the meantime. I'll be back...