december 2005 archives

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Geoblogging revisited

Explaining the increasing relevance of location for the web back in 2003, one of the points I discussed was the location of the author. Authors have always been adding contact information to web pages using the address tag. More recently, geographic coordinates were added within meta tags to register the location of the page with GeoURL (see the green button on the homepage). In a next step, the contact information on webmapper is now marked up according to the hCard microformat. From the Microformats website:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Actually, if it weren't for the button I put up below the contact information, you wouldn't notice it at all! While at the Where 2.0 conference in San Fransisco, I attended the geo microformat BOF session where we discussed various formats to markup descriptions of geographic locations that appear on websites. Discussion settled on the hCard microformat that contains both address details and a section to define geographic coordinates. Thus, there is format to mark up the information in such a way that visitors can read and crawlers can scrape!

With recent changes to the web traffic statistics service, I can now see on a nice world map where visitors to this website are coming from. Furthermore, another chart shows the distance between the location of the website and the location of the visitors to the website! It's just using a simple IP address look up table, so none of the privacy issues Mike Liebhold raised over Windows Live Local...

Sunday, December 11, 2005

A different point of view

First there were online maps, than aerial and satellite imagery, followed by a hybrid view (labelled imagery). All vertical views of the world as we know it. Then there was BlockView: horizontal photos taken at street level. As of last week, a new point of view was introduced by Windows Live Local, the successor to Virtual Earth: not vertical, not horizontal, but oblique! At Where 2.0 we got a glimpse of what was coming, but playing around with the oblique imagery myself, I was still surprised of the effect. Windows Live Local sourced the imagery from Pictometry.

It's a bit like Google Earth, but instead of starting up an application, you can just point your web browser to http://local.live.com/ and see the world at an angle. You can pan around by simply dragging your mouse across one image at a time. The thumbnail images in the upperleft corner help you to navigate between adjacent images. Although the images are next to each other, they may be taken from a different view point. This is sometimes rather confusing. The compass located above the thumbnails remind me a bit of the 3D-view plane in the Map24 map interface. Similarly, you can change which cardinal direction is at the top, thus changing the orientation of your view. Double-clicking in the image you can zoom in. Not being able to drag the navigation widgets themselves to another corner of the map view is a bit annoying. The widgets often obscure some part of the image, especially at the left border, that may not be covered on an adjacent image. Furthermore, rotating the direction of view may sometimes get you lost. Maybe it's because I am unfamiliar with the area, or it is because the vantage point does change indeed? Finally, accessing Live Local with Firefox, the mousehand remains glued to the current map view when you pan around by dragging the map. This is really frustrating. With Internet Explorer, this works all right.

Will Windows Live Local soon launch YAMA? For example, these oblique views may be a great way to enhance store locators. According to the Nielsen report Making it Easy for Users to Find Physical Locations, once you have identified the location of the nearest store on a map and driving directions on how to get there, an [oblique] image is really useful in actually getting to the store entrance. Via Virtual Earth is probably the first place to check if you are interested.

Friday, December 09, 2005

Rent-a-map

Some time ago, Ed Parsons suggested in his article the Napsterisation of geographic information that customers should be able to buy map views a piece at a time, not the whole map sheet just as you would download only a particular track from a music album on iTunes Music Store, instead of the whole album. If it's a map you use on a regular basis, it's useful to be able to buy and download just the map view you are interested in. However, if you're on a weekend city trip abroad, why download the town plan you'll use only for that weekend for the same fee as you would for a map that you use all the time? When renting a DVD from your local video shop (it's never a local DVD shop, is it?), you would not want to have to pay the same price as when you would buy the DVD, would you? So that's when a rent-a-map service would be useful!

Siemens VDO Dayton indeed have a rent-a-map service for their range of navigation systems: C-IQ. While you can buy the latest road maps for your navigation system from the TeleAtlas NavShop or NavTeq website, at the C-IQ website you can obtain access to the road maps just for the length of time that you require! So if you are going on a business trip to France, you don't have to buy the full road map of France, because you can just buy a temporary licence for even as short as one day! There's no need to download the data, as you can just unlock a specific road map that you already have received on DVD or CD-ROM using the access key that comes with your temporary licence. Furthermore, you can compliment your navigation system with additional products such as speed camera locations or traffic information. Going back to our weekend city trip scenario, C-IQ also provides travel guides on demand. Of course, you need to have a navigation system from VDO Dayton to use these services.

If there were such a structure not just for in-car navigation systems, but for mobile devices as well, I'm sure people would start downloading all sorts of maps (e.g. road maps, town plans, hiking maps, underground maps) all the time, wouldn't they? I leave it up to someone else to discuss all the DRM implications... Okay, how about binding a licence key to the MAC address of your device?

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Multimap implements Ajax for Yell.com

Okay, it's been a while since we saw the first implementations of mapping interfaces done in Ajax by search engines throwing in their weight, but established mapping websites are regaining ground in the online mapping arena again. Only a few days ago, I commented on Map24.com adding new features to the map view. Today, Nika told the world, that Multimap has released its first Ajax-based mapping interface on a client website: Yell.com. Can't wait to see it on the Multimap public website, though. It would make Multimap the first established mapping website to take the plunge and revamp their map interface technology! But I bet it's their map serving capacity holding back a major launch like this at the moment. Come on, guys!

Apparently, Yell has recognised the increasing importance and benefit of combining map and location services with a search facility. Today's enhancements are a key driver of the usage of the Yell map service. The draggable maps make using the service a much smoother experience. Also, the traditional navigation compass has been extended to enable diagonal panning. Another improvement is the option to switch between the map view and the aerial photo. So when can we expect the hybrid map/aerial photo option? Anyway, congratulations to the Multimap crew! So, let's play around some more...

Comparing mapping data and APIs

Has its new mapping API really put Yahoo! on a par with Google Maps as I put it the other day? Go check it out yourself! Jonathan Aquino has put Google Maps and Yahoo Maps side-by-side. The map views on the page are linked together, so when navigating around one map, the other map views will pan and zoom at the same time. The subtle differences in cartographic representation between Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps become apparent as you move around the maps. Both mapping APIs use TeleAtlas roadmaps (Yahoo! also incorporates Navteq data). You won't notice too many differences between the two major roadmap providers in the Palo Alto area to which the map view defaults.

However, if that's really what you are looking for, check out Ryan Jonasson's website. He has put Virtual Earth and Google Maps side-by-side. While the former mapping API uses Navteq data, the latter takes its roadmap data from TeleAtlas. This is most apparent when sometimes the same road is represented in a different line style. Be careful comparing the two roadmap data sets, because they are from different years. Changes may have already been incorporated into the database by the roadmap provider but have not been pushed through to the user yet. Furthermore, roadmap providers tend to add Easter eggs to the data, usually dead-end streets that are not actually there. This practise is called fingerprinting. When such an Easter egg appears in a competitor data set, they can prove that the roadmap was copied.

If it's not so much the cartographic quality of the mapping API or the roadmap provider they are using that you would like to compare, but its ease of implementation, check out the mapping API comparison chart compiled by the people at StrataVarious as they developed the Boston HyperMap Atlas. The charts compare topics such as how to install the APIs, how their GUI systems work, and how each API was adapted to the HyperMap software.

I really can't wait before these mapping APIs cover continental Europe. It's just not fair! Mapping data in the US has always been free of charge anyway. And now they get free mapping APIs as well. Grrrr...

Monday, December 05, 2005

Pixel maps

Quite a while ago, Dan Cederholm linked in one of his QuickBits to Minifonts Pixel Maps. Combined with the work I did for the National Atlas of Public Health — plotting hospital locations on a grid — I thought I can do that too! So at last: here it is...

The term pixel maps does not necessarily refer to the file format i.e. raster as opposed to vector. Actually, I created the map in SVG and used Batik SVG Rasterizer to create the raster map! Pixel maps are built up of small rectangles thus creating a highly-stylised representation of the outlines of the continents. Each rectangle is typically separated from surrounding rectangles by a small gap to allow the background colour to come through.

These maps seem to appear just about everywhere these days. Check out this nice example on the Navteq website or the splash page of Becker. A pixel map of the world even appears on the background of the Dutch TV show De wereld draait door. Can you think of another website that features a pixel map? Let me know.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Looking beyond the horizon

With search engines making inroads into the online mapping arena, established mapping websites such as MapQuest, Maporama, and Map24 are struggling to keep their audience. For example, Maporama recently launched a new travel directions service. Going from town to town, the engine only takes into account the major roads, while going from address to address it takes into account both the minor and the major roads. Since most people request directions from town to town, the engine only has to calculate travel directions across the major roads most of the times, thus response times are greatly reduced overall.

In their struggle to grasp the online audience, Map24 have added a new navigation widget to their Java-based map interface. Moving your mouse across the 3D-view plane at the bottom of the map view, you can tilt and rotate the map to look beyond the horizon. A quadrangle in the adjacent zoom widget gives you the context of the map view. As more and more people are becoming familiar with the tilted map view — featured both in the TomTom in-car navigation system (now even available from Argos!) and in Google Earth — Map24 made a sensible move providing a similar map view in web browsers. However, it's a shame that the street name labels sometimes obscure other map features too much. So what's coming next?