november 2003 archives

Friday, November 28, 2003

Cartography reloaded

When I was recently asked what my profession is, I replied that I am a cartographer. “So you design greeting cards then?” Yeah, right! The average age of attendants at the Cartography 2003 conference in Reading was certainly over 40, if not 50. Hardly anyone had ever heard of a “weblog”. In October this year, the Netherlands' Cartographic Society was dissolved. All in all, cartography is not a vibrant field. So what's the cause of all this? I'd say it is self-inflicted brand corruption.

For centuries, cartography used to be cartography. However, as soon as others started to toy with geographic information, cartography swiftly rebranded itself. With the introduction of geographic information systems, cartography became “digital cartography”. In the previous decade, as the web became a new channel to publish maps, cartography rebranded itself to become “web cartography”. Now that location based services are the latest hype, cartography has been baptised as “TeleCartography”.

Is changing labels a form of brand corruption? You bet! It gives the impression, that all the scientific and practical knowledge and skills that cartography has to offer are not valid anymore in the new setting. For sure, I am the first person to acknowledge that creating maps for the web or for mobile phones has to deal with new challenges. But a lot of cartography's skills and knowledge are still very much valid, despite a change in medium.

Naming this website “webmapper”, I can be held accountable for the same offence. Furthermore, I am very much tempted to make the trip to Vienna to attend the conference about TeleCartography. But please, let's stop the brand corruption of cartography here and now!

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

SVG leverages online statistical mapping

Whenever discussing SVG and cartography, it's difficult not to mention Andreas Neumann's work on Vienna: Social Patterns and Structures. It's a prime example of the power of SVG when it comes to visualising data. Whereas a lot of attention goes towards taking topographic objects stored in GML such as MasterMap or the Dutch Top10NL, and converting it to an SVG map using XSLT, it is statistical mapping where SVG really becomes alive.

In February 2003, National Statistics published the Census 2001 Interactive Map, fully created using SVG. Users can select from 18 topics, choose the number of classes and the classification colour scheme. Moving the mouse of any of administrative areas, information pertaining to the area is provided.

As of May this year, the Netherlands' Central Bureau of Statistics provides a mapping interface to its online database: Cartografische Toegang. Rather confusingly, users can select the type of enumeration areas, e.g. municipalities, or provinces, but they can also select the area of interest. It takes quite a few steps to map a specific statistic for all municipalities in the Netherlands. Maybe interesting for a researches, but cumbersome for the general public. Would be great to see this trend spreading across the various online mapping applications available in the Netherlands. Got some things up my sleeve here as well, so stay tuned!

Monday, November 24, 2003

Life is what's happening to you...

That's why I missed web.mapping 2003. Would have been really great to attend this one as there were quite a few interesting speakers. Instead, by invitation of Socialfiction.org, I presented at CIVIC TV in Rotterdam on Saturday. It was a very thought-provoking event in the wonderful Poortgebouw.

There's still W2GIS 2003 to attend. This workshop is held in conjunction with WISE 2003, the 4th international conference on Web Information Systems Engineering. Be sure to go and listen to the paper “Trajectory Representation in Location-Based Services: Problems and Solutions”. Nirvana and I studied together at ITC. If Rome is not exotic enough, you can always look forward to ISPRS 2004 in Instanbul! Come to think of it: I am not too sure with current affairs that's the place to be...

Monday, November 17, 2003

The hundred patent wood

When I left Multimap.com earlier this year, the tradition of giving a GPS receiver as a farewell present was upheld. It's a really cool Garmin Geko 201 and I have been playing with it ever since. However, I was very much taken aback by the long list of patents that Garmin has on the design and operation of the device: 44! Being a user, there's of course nothing to worry about, but in the broader context of open souce collaborative mapping, these patents may well prove to be an impediment for further innovation.

On the 11th of November, Navigation Technologies announced the acquisition of its 100th patent! United States Patent 6,640,187 describes a method for obtaining information for a geographic database

A system and method for collecting address data for a geographic database are disclosed. Data are collected using a plurality of end users' navigation systems. The data indicate a location at which a trip by a vehicle in which a navigation system is located ended and a desired destination entered into the navigation system by an end user prior thereto. These data are received in a data collection facility that statistically analyzes the data and uses the data to update a geographic database.

All right, I don't know much about law, especially not about patent law, but to me it just seems that people are trying to capitalise on what used to be the “Creative Commons”. Just call me paranoid...

Friday, November 14, 2003

Online directories going local

Part four of the SearchEngineWatch.com series on local searching focuses on the getting together of the major print Yellow Pages publishers and the major online search providers. Whereas NTK heralded 2003 as “the year of the geospatial hype”, one of the sessions at the Digital Directories and Interactive Local Media Summit actually attempted to separate hype from reality.

Some 20 to 35 percent of all search queries is seeking geographically relevant results. Yahoo! Get Local estimates that 5 percent of all searches through the main Yahoo! search box included explicitly local terms such as a city, area or neighborhood. Additionally, 15 to 30 percent of all searches wanted a local result, but didn't include a local search term: for example, users searching for “auto repair” probably wanted local auto repair shops instead of the sites on the history of auto repair. On the other hand, the majority of local businesses don't have a web presence. The hybrid approach of integrating directory listings into the main web search results could bridge this current dichotomy.

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

New book about Internet mapping

Cartographers have gone pretty quiet since Kraak and Brown finished their book “Web Cartography”. Although it was an interesting read at the time, the book got very rapidly outdated. Furthermore, the accompanying website did not really provide any updates either: a missed opportunity, for sure!

So I can't wait to get my hands on this new book “Maps and the Internet” by Michael Peterson! The list of contributors contains quite a few usual suspects: Andreas Neumann, Mark Monmonnier, Bill Cartwright, and Menno-Jan Kraak, so be sure this is is going to be a solid read! However, there's always the chance when writing about the Internet that the topics are going to be outdated very quickly. Hopefully there's going to be an accompanying website that's being regularly maintained to keep readers informed on the latest developments.

Monday, November 10, 2003

Mapping for the people, by the people

Launched only last week, MySociety.org has already received quite a lot of mapping-related proposals:

Most of these proposals seem to be open source reiterations of UpMyStreet or Multimap's Local Info service. Biggest bottlenecks still being patents and copyrights (not mentioned the word “patent” for some weeks now....). I should really get my act together and come up with a project to address these issues. Gonna meet Wilfried of SocialFiction on wednesday: looking forward to some more brainstorming on this!

Sunday, November 09, 2003

Webmapping troubles

For some time now, various people outside the GIS industry have asked me about my thoughts on the OGC. I once attended one of their Webmapping meetings in Enschede in 2000. Most of the topics discussed were well over my head at the time and every few minutes the audience rose to applaud someone's achievement: a very funny experience when you are not used to North American enthousiasm! Apart from that, I have always been very impressed how OGC managed to get so many players in the GIS industry together and get them to agree on specifications like GML and WMS.

However, last week David Sonnen expressed his doubts about OGC in a letter to Directions Magazine. He claims that OGC is nearing a tipping point between remaining a successful, consensus-based standards organization, and being seen as ineffective and a poor business investment for its members. There are five issues he is particularly concerned about:

OGC has become a consultant that conflicts with its members
Select members have a disproportionate effect on OGC direction
Members and non-members are confused and frustrated with some OGC decision and conflict resolution processes
The use of OGC Conformance by some members to imply “interoperability” is detrimental to the geospatial market
OGC is perceived to have used its position to impede ESRI

Most of the points raised, I cannot possiby comment on as they seem to be dealing with internal processes. Therefore, you'd better read the various responses from people in the GIS industry that are OGC members:

Because of ESRI being the biggest player in the GIS industry and having a firm stronghold within government agencies, I actually think that it's more or less only OGC that is able to sometimes impede ESRI. When it comes to spending tax money, we shouldn't easily concede to the monopolist.

Also, Mike Liebhold hit on an interesting point a few weeks ago by asking how initiatives of the open source GIS community, particularly OGC, and the many interactive media projects, e.g. the Locative Media Lab, could be more coherently aligned up and down the webby side of the spatial services stack. I reckon, Michael Sanderson's suggestion, that OGC consultants should become open source moderators as part of their activities could be very helpful in accomplishing this alignment.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

Tube, underground, subway, metro

Anymore English synonyms for subterranean public transport? A website about mapping can hardly not mention Beck's tube map once in a while! This time, the London Underground map is in fine company: Metro Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden is a new book that is the first collection of official, current maps of underground transportation systems.

Further information can be found on the website Metro Maps of the World that accompanies the book. Maps, diagrams and plans of Subways, Metro's Undergrounds or U-Bahns have even become a mental substitute for genuine geographic layout or in some cases icons for the city itself.

Monday, November 03, 2003

Regional targeting

Although locating visitors by IP address is not a new idea, this marketing tool is now readily available to subscribers of the Google AdWords programme since last Friday. “Regional targeting” displays advertising to a selective audience within a geographically confined area. The IP address of each visitor is mapped to one of the 210 Designated Marketing Areas (DMARs) in the US. In case the location of specific IP addresses cannot be determined, US-wide advertising is displayed.

Also SearchEngineWatch.com discusses Regional Targeting in the third article in its series on “local searching”. One or even two more articles are to follow. Over two years ago, Wired ran an interesting article on the importance of location in the online world. I was particularly inspired by the following quote:

... while you're checking movie times, an ad pops onscreen for a pizzeria around the corner from the theater. That ad doubles as a coupon, redeemable with a swipe of the barcode at the checkout counter. The map of Manhattan then gains another dimension - speckles of different-colored dots correlate to money spent, as the system tracks coupons that have been cashed in.

How long will it be before this will be added to Regional Targeting: your location is automatically inserted into the ad that you can print off and use the ad to claim your complimentary pizza as described? Did I just spill a business idea here, or what?