may 2004 archives

Friday, May 14, 2004

Awards mark maturity of online mapping

A few days ago, the Germany-based mapping website Map24.com was awarded 2 Webby Awards! While the decision of members of The International Academy of Digital Arts emphasises that the website has accomplished a technical achievement, the People's Voice Award signifies strong web user support.

I reckon these awards show that online mapping certainly has a place on the Web. Let's hope the publicity generated by winning the Webby Awards will put Map24.com on the map once and for all, also outside Germany.

Sunday, May 09, 2004

Multi Point Map

With the introduction of Metrobot at the beginning of this year, I discussed how one business directory website had reservations towards mapping multiple locations as they may all end up at one location. In April, Yell.com launched a new map facility: the “Multi Point Map”. The map displays all results of a search, allowing users to compare the locations of businesses on a single map. It capitalises on the idea that location and directions are easier to visualise when presented in this way, especially where users need to travel to the business they are searching for, e.g. a restaurant where location can be just as important a deciding factor as the restaurant's cuisine (emphasis mine).

According to NOP research commissioned by Yell.com, to mark the launch of its new online mapping service provided by Multimap.com, includes some interesting findings:

Adults spends up to 43 minutes a year struggling to find their way.
One in four women admits getting lost due to holding a map incorrectly, compared to 17 per cent of men.
Four per cent of men and five per cent of women have found themselves mistakenly travelling more than 50 miles out of their way.

Yell.com now offers more ways to search for company information, for example a new “Local Focus” feature to obtain information on community resources, local services and leisure activities by simply entering a city, town or postcode. A cookie stores users' locations, so that with each visit, Yell.com will automatically look for businesses in their chosen area. All in all, this cooperation between the directory listings service and the online mapping service is a great example of the hybrid future of location search.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Storing GPS tracks

Time flies when you are having fun. Colleagues at Multimap.com gave me a GPS unit as a leaving present almost a year ago. But only a few days ago, I finally hooked up my Garmin Geko GPS unit, installed ExpertGPS, and downloaded some GPS tracks to my laptop as a GPX file. Just pragmatism: that's the default file format for ExpertGPS.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="yes"?>
<gpx
 version="1.1"
 creator="ExpertGPS 1.3.5 - http://www.topografix.com"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1 gpx.xsd">
<time>2004-04-20T15:00:40Z</time>
<bounds
 minlat="52.064402"
 minlon="5.081391"
 maxlat="52.120278"
 maxlon="5.193443"/>
<trk>
 <name>Van Arne naar huis</name>
 <desc>Fietsroute vanaf Terschelling, Utrecht naar Herderplein, Utrecht</desc>
 <number>1</number>
<trkseg>
<trkpt lat="52.066504960" lon="5.133361817">
 <ele>-26.298950</ele><time>2004-04-18T19:13:37Z</time>
</trkpt>
<trkpt lat="52.066762452" lon="5.131194592">
 <ele>0.618042</ele><time>2004-04-18T19:14:07Z</time>
</trkpt>
<trkpt lat="52.067921167" lon="5.130486489">
 <ele>0.618042</ele><time>2004-04-18T19:14:37Z</time>
</trkpt>
...

It's not too complicated, is it? There are more formats to store routes, in XML or RDF:

Geography Markup Language (GML).
NaVigation Markup Language (NVML).
Point Of Interest eXchange Language (POIX).
Locative packets.

What route to take? Can't really tell you now, as I haven't quite figured out the ins and outs of each of the specs. So, there's a good reason for you to come back soon and read the results of my investigation! I promise it won't be another year on!