january 2004 archives

Thursday, January 29, 2004

TeleCartography, part deuX

Having mentioned locational privacy in the previous post, Directions Magazine's running an article on this very topic! Anyway, back to TeleCartography now. Today there was lots of cool stuff being discussed, especially regarding positioning technologies for LBS services. With Galileo becoming available in the near future, positioning by satellite navigation systems will be much easier when receiver accept input from both GPS and Galileo. Another way of positioning oneself is to draw a sketch map on a PDA. The sketch is then matched up with a digital street network to attach a geographic coordinate to the sketch!

Siemens provided an indepth, technical view on how LBS applications are implemented using standard APIs. Nokia presented a business-analyst view, claiming operators are not willing to spend more than 2 Euro per subscriber on LBS. Nokia also highlighted that there's no clear rules about the ownership of location data. When the Swiss telecom network did not want to provide location information to mobile phone companies, they put up large posters with a phone number and a picture of a rabbit and a butcher's knife. The poster asked people to send their votes whether or not the rabbit should be killed. As each poster had a different number, the mobile phone companies were able to determine the location and time a person was, hence bypassing the network operator!

Various presentations gave their views on the GiMoDig system. Using OGC specifications, a framework is created to access data from four different National Mapping Agencies and to portray the data in a uniform manner on mobile devices. It's really impressive what can be achieved with this!

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Professional geowanking: TeleCartography in Vienna

Currently I am attending the LBS and TeleCartography conference in Vienna, Austria. Last night at the Ice Breaker Party, I was introduced to Bill Cartwright. When I told him about the Locative Media Lab initiative and the gathering at Transmediale, he got rather excited and is considering to go to Berlin. As he is Associate Professor of Multimedia Cartography it would be very interesting if he'd make it to Transmediale. I'll keep you updated.

This morning, most presentations were on cartographic adaption. For me it's a synonym for generalisation, but it seems generalisation only applies to the geometric properties. All in all, cartographic adaptation tries to change the appearance of the map as is suitable for users and the activities in which they engage. Someone noticed that LBS are not egocentric enough: in other words, there's a stronger demand for personalisation current services provide. Another observation was that LBS currently still means Location Based Selling.

The afternoon covered topics in Augmented Reality and later on user-centric design, and privacy. Some presentors argued that schematic representatons had a higher cognitive quality, whereas others argued for the use of all round panoramic views with notes overlaid. Having worked on route planning applications for three years, my attention was caught by the presentation on chorematic focus maps. The theory of choremes was developed in France and visually represents the highly generalised typification of a geographic situation rather than the reality. Made me think of the LineDrive maps. The papers on user-centric design and privacy came from RMIT. The research project seemed to be heavily sponsored by Webraska, but the usability guidelines for LBS should be interesting. The presentation the infringement on privacy was rather US-centered. It was raised that so much information is collected, there's no computer in the world able to wade through it, nor are mobile phone companies willing to invest in storing this information long time. Privacy is as far as the social side of LBS is being discussed today. Hope there's going to more on this.

Many synonyms are being used for mobile phones. The Americans seem to prefer cell phones, whereas the Austrians, Swiss, and Germans refer to a mobile phone as a handy. Also, PDAs have been referred to today as Wireless Handheld Information Appliances! Now off to the Heuriger for some socialising!

Thursday, January 22, 2004

The end of the browser: new ways to use maps

When Macromedia presented Central last year at the Flashtival in Amsterdam, it was for me a hint that there won't be much of a future for web browsers as we know them today. As this morning I came across Avalon, the presentation subsystem in Longhorn, their doom is nigh more than ever!

A sample real estate application takes you on a journey of things to come. It's not only the end of the browser that can be seen here, there's more to it:

Flash and SVG will have a new competitor: XAML, an XML sibling from Microsoft that can be used to draw vector graphics
Avalon provides an easy to use interface to web services such as MapPoint.net, thus taking away the typical GIS-savvy interfaces one encounters when currently accessing complex web mapping applications.

Sure, Longhorn is still some way off. Still, it heralds a new approach in dealing with interfaces that can have interesting repercussions for online mapping...

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

My cup of tea

After a recent announcement at the webmapper and socialfiction websites, posts to various related mailing lists, tonight was the first modest gathering of the Map Mongers in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It's not only the States, the UK, or Finland where psychogeography, locative media, and collaborative mapping are becoming the latest fashion statements (that is if you include wearable computing, of course...).

Topics of conversations rapidly succeeded one another, and social interactions emerged among new participants. Highlights were projects that collaboratively geocode telco network cells in the Netherlands, and creating location-aware games using mobile phones and bluetooth. Biased I am, for I am only human. Surely, socialfiction will publish its comments on the Map Monger gathering at some point?

Redrawing the map

In a previous reincarnation, I was involved in a project to add mapping and routing functionality to a major UK business directory website. In one of the discussions the issue of putting multiple businesses on the map while maintaining legibility came up. Businesses are typically geocoded by their postcode. If businesses have the same postcode, their locations end up one on top of the other. Since this behaviour is not acceptable nor were there any straightforward solutions, the option was dismissed.

Locked into a geographic mindset, it was easy to overlook one particular solution: abandoning a geographic map and use a network diagram. This is exactly how Metrobot elegantly lays out its search results. It's a very admirable adaptation of the LineDrive maps featured on the MSN Maps and Directions website (formerly MapBlast.com) and the mobile maps developed by Hitachi and KDDI.

Of course, US street maps with the regular patterns of streets and avenues and Japanese street maps have generally less geographic complexity than European street maps. Nevertheless, focusing on network topology rather geography is an interesting approach that may become very useful, especially when location-based services and location-aware mobile devices get their act together.

Sunday, January 11, 2004

Map Mongers

A group of people dedicated to the encouragement of all things map-like in the Netherlands, organising informal gatherings of those interested in maps and mapping, urban space, GPS, locative media, (social) networks, psychogeography, and what have you.

Inspired by an international scene, webmapper.net and socialfiction.org started the Map Mongers. Driven by the as yet unexplored possibilities of these new mapping technologies and the gut feeling that in the Netherlands countless people are interested in these subjects, but are not yet connected.

The Map Mongers are not a group, but a high tech tea party.

We will meet for the first time on:
Tuesday 20 January
19.00 hour
Cafe De Zaak, Minrebroedersstraat 9 (behind Stadhuis)
Utrecht

Get in touch if you are interested in attending: webmapper.net or info@socialfiction.org

Map Mongers RSS feed

Friday, January 09, 2004

Seek and thou shall find

Having skipped part five of the SearchEngineWatch.com series on local search, part six is well worth getting a mention here. A hybrid future is envisioned in which online directory services will look and operate lot more like local search engines than they do now. Scoot used to be a good example before it was bought by BT. Similarly, there will be a lot more directory-like structured data behind search engines' localisation efforts. However, the article states that as of yet, local search has provided a relatively poor user experience. Hopefully the webmapper.net article on store locators may contribute to improving this.

The so-called “hybrid future” actually ignores another important trend: online mapping companies teaming up with directory services or various other information brokers. Multimap.com is an interesting example. Using their local search facility to search for hotels in the area, the information is pulled from Active Hotels, one of Europe's leading online reservation providers to the hotel industry. Another example is Mapquest teaming up with Yellow Pages.

The ISEDB argues, that businesses must not rely upon their listings with directories or search engines only for customers to find them. With the wider uptake of portable and particularly location-aware devices looming, providing locational information on your website is going to be the next step. Although websites don't move around too much, this locational information may relate to the physical locations where the actual businesses represented by the websites are physically located. Industry standards and the methods of serving out this data are still in the development phases but it's a safe bet to assume there are plenty of people working on the solutions right now and given the speed of technology, implementation will probably be much sooner than later. Seems they missed GeoURL and Geo Tags.

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Privacy concerns main obstacle for introducing LBS?

Many address details can be obtained through various public records and phone listings. Reverse directories that let someone look up an address by phone number have been available at libraries or for sale commercially for years. Now websites that gather that data make it possible for fast, do-it-yourself stalking. Online mapping services are powerful and simple: just type a post code for a map with door-to-door directions. Finding someone has never been easier, whether to look up a long-lost friend or relative, or with malicious intent...

If you are in the US, Google's the website to turn to. The search engine added a phone number-map lookup feature more than two years ago. Whereas the UK online mapping service Streetmap gives you a small scale map when typing in the full phone number, Multimap pulled this feature off its website a few years ago, as phone numbers can change location when people move house. To tackle privacy concerns, Google provides a form for people to get delisted . Not seen this feature on any other website, but it's a great idea: it would make the uptake of LBS less of a privacy threat.