Since when is Ask.com providing maps? Did I miss something? Not only they are catching up to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, ESRI, etc. but also they offer some detailed street maps of Europe. Quite exciting for us here in Europe!
The whole application is very similar to other (familiar) mapping products. Based on image tiles (no Flash so far), with zooming, panning and search options as usual.
Basically the gazetteer seems to work for european places. Well, basically. I wasn’t able to locate Vienna (“Wien”), the austrian capital, instead it suggested me almost every european one-horse-town containing the word “Wien”. But, after all, I achieved to find out the walking distance from “Waidhofen an der Ybbs” to “Sankt Pölten”. Switching between walking and driving gives you different routes, as it should be.
What’s missing, or at least it was hiding from me, is an API or a documentation respectively. I’m not sure if Ask.com is working on an API or if they simply don’t want you to take advanage of their maps and embed them within other websites.
However, good to see a more detailed Europe appearing in those mapping products. Since our INSPIRE will probably end up as NMA-coopartion to avoid publicly available geodata we will partly depend on the goodwill of those companies.
Update #1:
The Cartography weblog and All Points Blog already reported yesterday about it. Check those sites for some more information on Ask.com maps.
Check this video (“the making off”) to find out more about the new iPod Video widescreen!
The german IT news site Heise reported that Google is about to release a Version of their AdSense program that refers ads to coordinates instead of keywords. Thus map featured web sites could place ads related to the location the user is currently viewing.
For anybody interested in streetart (like stencils, stickers, etc.): I made the ongoing streetart exhibition “Streetart – The Readable City” available through Google Earth. Actually only the outdoor part is available in Google Earth (indoor it wouldn’t make sense, lack of GE’s accuracy, once Galileo is operating we can talk about mapping pictures inside of galleries). The outdoor part is a short walk through the 7th district of Vienna, along some streetart works. I did this walk with a turned on GPS, so that I could later at home geocode my photos and load them into Google Earth. That probably sounds pretty geeky, but I ensure you that I’m going for walks without the GPS device as well. Sometimes. However, playing around with Google Earth, GPS and Flickr was fun and I got a nice photo set with clean GPS EXIF entries.
Here you find the Network link for Google Earth.
On Flickr I put a few more pics from the indoor part too. It’s a free exhibition and I guess it was allowed to take pictures, at least nobody complained so far. If somebody feels like his intellectual property is violated by publishing this photos online please let me know.
Streetart
Die lesbare Stadt
11.2 – 20.3.06
Freiraum / quartier21
MuseumsQuartier
Wien Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien
Have a look at the official website of the exhibition.
Some years ago SVG was considered as the next generation of rich media and animation in the internet, as a sort of Flash killer. Nothing happened. Flash technology enhanced and is still widely spread. SVG enhanced too and even went mobile but it’s still a good kept secret.
Now, ESRI & Yahoo! are implementing their webmapping services based on Flash technology. Last week Google silently enabled SVG in their latest API update (API v2.37) for Google Local.
Honestly, it’s quite a time since I did my last Flash development but back then (it was version 5 I guess) I never would have choosen Flash as a tool to be used in a webmapping application. Actually the decision for a vector graphics based webmapping application was then in favour of SVG. Flash’s object handling and ActionScript was too unfunctional for my purpose: I wanted to load geographic objects on demand (e.g. on changing view extents) out of a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database and map them in a web browser, without continuously reloading the whole map of course. SVG was the easiest way to go. As a XML based vector graphic format it allows you to edit, put attributes and styles as you want to every single object within your map. On the other hand vector graphics as SVG required more potential clients compared to raster pictures delievered by mapservers. All objects were handled – requesting & rendering – on the client side (JavaScript was used to access and parse XML, something like “pre AJAX”, to name a buzzword) while the user was interacting with the map. However, after this work I became a big fan of SVG, especially when it comes to webmapping. If there wasn’t this plugin-dependency, which resulted in every single discussion to be the main showstopper for SVG. With native SVG support in a popular browser like Firefox hopefully things start to change.
Back to Google Local: in SVG compatible browsers (such as Firefox 1.5) one can now use SVG rather than PNGs to draw polylines if following parameters are set:
_mSvgEnabled = true/false … to enable/disable SVG in SVG compatible browsers
_mSvgForced = true/false … to force the use of SVG in every browser (even if not capable of displaying SVG correctly) or limit SVG to compatible browsers.
If SVG is not “forced” Internet Explorer 5.5+ will still render polylines with VML (something like a rudimentary SVG…).
This simple comparsion gives an idea what can be done at what perfomance with SVG.
“It draws a random polyline with 100 segments. You can change the
number. There are “Redraw with SVG” and “Redraw without svg” buttons.”
SVG is a well elaborated standard. Maybe Google Local is the push that this technology needs.
Another interesting point on the Flash vs. SVG discussion is the take-over of Macromedia by Adobe. Now we have both technologies under one umbrella. Why not merging them together? Or at least bundle them to one single plugin. Since XML support is already built into Flash, why not extend it to SVG?
The long awaited Tiga debut album is out: Sexor. Don’t expect endless club tracks. Tiga kept them short and catchy. This record is made for your living room!
Actually today we were talking how great it would be to have maps about wine regions, vineyards, etc. to get some information about the origin of the wine. This collection is a pretty good start! (via Google Earth Blog)
A few days ago I discussed with a colleague ways to publish maps, analysis results or to provide analysis tasks within an organisation. We were talking about a quite common corporate geomarketing challenge (I suppose, since we’re no geomarketing experts): a specialised department analyses spatially distributed marketing data and provides other departments with their results. Whereas the presentation of results should be somewhere in between PowerPoint slides and a full functional desktop GIS client. Honestly it was quite hard to seperate various publishing options, identify the optimal tasks and features and combine them to the best individual publishing solution. Along with recent developments on server-side GIS software, powerful new generation geo viewers like the popular Google Earth or the upcoming ArcGIS Explorer offer content providers quite an alternative to well-established map publishing solutions like mapservers do for instance.
So today I tried to sum up a few map publishing solutions I know and figure out their pros and cons, their qualities. Just to clarify: this list is not exhaustive. It’s an overview and the result of a short brainstorming to have a note for further discussions on that topic in my pocket. Comments or suggestions will be highly appreciated!
ArcGIS Publisher & ArcReader
Pros:
- Out of the box viewer
- Local map viewer
- Optional 3D (ArcGlobe)
- “Familiar” GIS application interface
- Advanced map layouts
- Data encryption
- Viewer customisation
Cons:
- Viewer installation
- Local map file
- Limited base maps (e.g. provided by geography network)
- Extension for map authoring needed
- Limited viewer functionality
Google Earth, ArcGIS Explorer (upcoming)
Pros:
- Out of the box viewer
- 3D
- already integrated access to base maps
- OGC Webservice support (upcoming in GE?)
- Local data support (KML, Shp, PGDB)
- Customised tasks (AGX)
- User acceptance (GE)
Cons:
- Viewer installation
- 3D only
- Mainly data viewer
- Limited map layout authoring
- Internet/Intranet access required or recommended
- Ads (upcoming in GE)
Webmapserver e.g. Mapserver, ArcIMS, deegree,…
Pros:
- Out of the box browser interface
- Platform independent
- Customisable user interface and functionality
- OGC Webservice support (embed or provide)
- Access to base maps by third party API (Google local, ArcWeb, Yahoo!, etc.)
Cons:
- Browser interface
- Last & performance
- Development effort
ArcGIS Server, GRASS, GDAL, etc.
Pros:
- Browser interface
- Platform independent
- Customisable user interface and functionality
- Customised advanced tasks
Cons:
- Browser interface
- Last & performance
- Development effort
Once Songbird supports iPods I’ll definitely have a closer look at it. Very promising sounds the extensions concept (like Firefox) which’ll make it highly customisable. But for now iTunes is the one and only useful jukebox.
A new beta version of Google Earth for Mac OS X is available for download. If you’re still running Mac OS 10.3.9 you’ll probably be pleased to hear that GE now supports your system. (via Google Earth Blog)