Just a day after introducing the new geotagging feature, the Flickr team has released the Flickr Geo API.
It’s simple but powerfull: just add parameters like bbox or accuracy to the flickr.photos.search method and filter any search by location. See the Flickr API documentation for a detailed description of this and other new additions.
Btw, Steward Butterfield has a few quite impressing numbers in his last post about the successful launch of the new Flickr feature…
Update
Flickr can read automatically the EXIF location information of your photos, but you have to enable this feature first. Do it here!
Google Earth is recently being discovered as tool for public data dissemination by our Federal States too.
Additional to the print publication Almanach the Federal State of Upper Austria operates a website about alpine pastures. It’s all about alpine pastures history and their importance for the Austrian alpine space.
The online version of the publication features a search which gives you plenty of information for each alpine pasture. Besides relevant hiking information you’ll get for each site a KMZ-file to view it in Google Earth too.
The KMZ shows you in Google Earth a more detailed aerial image of the site surroundings (the satellite imagery of the alpine space is still very rough), of course the site itself containing a link to more information about it and the hiking trail to the site.
Fly to Gowilmalm!
If you like hiking in the area of Upper Austria you should definitely have a closer look at the Almanach and maybe discover a few new potential hiking destinations in Google Earth.
If you call a GPS device your own, live in the area of Vienna and enjoy discovering your neighborhood from a new perspective then you should have a look at 4816:
the intersection of the minutes
4816 is about finding the minute points on the GPS grid in the urban area of Vienna. The point N48° 11,000´ E16° 19,000 is an example of these 185 intersections of latitudinal and longitudinal minutes within Vienna. … At each intercept point a photo is taken in each compass direction.
By traversing the GPS intercept points you take a journey through Vienna. The goal is known. But what will be the nature of its environment? Will it be approachable? What will be the special thing about it?
Kick-off is this thursday night (8/31/2006) at the FLUC in Vienna.
To get a picture of how far this project can get, I marked the minute intersections in and around Vienna in a Google Map.
Looking at certain markers on the satellite image I started thinking about methods to stabilize a little boat in the middle of the danube, precisely at N48°16′ E16°22′, for the time necessary to take a picture in each compass direction. Any ideas?
At locations like N48°15′ E16°22′ you should be quick and better have a copy of the railway schedule in your pocket if you don’t want to be run over by a train.
Well, before trying this two points I should check if all my insurance fees are paid.
Still fun and less dangerous will be explaining to people why I it is so important to enter their garden and make 4 pictures at this magic location.
I think Don Cooke would love this project.
Update
I have now a GPX-file and a KML-file for Google Earth available which show only the minute intersections within the boundaries of Vienna. Since my Google Map parses the same GPX-file, it got updated too.
Episode 57 of A VerySpatial podcast covers a very interesting interview with Craig Gillgrass from ESRI talking about the geodatabase in the upcoming ArcGIS 9.2 release.
It gives a good overview about the new geodatabase concept, starting with file-based geodatabases, mentioning new packages like Personal ArcSDE – bundled with ArcGIS Desktop, runs on top of Microsoft SQL Server Express (!!), should allow up to 2 users and is targeted to small companies – and finishing with ArcGIS Server / ArcSDE Enterprise.
All in all it’s extremely interesting and clarifying information for somebody like me who wasn’t attending ESRI’s UC 2006 and just got confused about the new geodatabases. I guess it’s time to get one of the updated product schemas to finally understand all connections and relations between the ArcGIS product lines.
Never ever try accessing Flugfeld Aspern from the southern side.
Today I wanted to get to the old runways, I’ve never been there before and I know this area only from above, from maps, development plans and Google Earth. From above things appear easier than they actually are. A rectangular settlement and street structure is supposed to be easy for orientation and mind maps. Very misleading and probably the reason why I left the map at home because it’s seems so easy to go there.
No way! I simply couldn’t find a way to the old rollways. All the fences and hedges in this area destroy any sense for direction. At a certain point I even found myself going in circles!
Maybe I should’ve placed a waypoint on my GPS before I left for Flugfeld Aspern.
However, next time I’ll try from the northern side, put the map in my bag and mark some spots on the GPS before leaving.
See the track, including some photos, here.
Once I got the Flickr photo search boxed over my map, I thought why not include the public transport timetable and route search the same way. So now I open the search box, enter origin and destination information and the public transport routing shows me the best way to go by foot, bus, tram and subway. All done with a little help of the “involuntary” API of our public transport company, the Wiener Linien.
Accessing the route search directly out of the map would be more convenient. E.g. mark origin and destination directly on the map and the route search shows you the quickest way between the two points by public transport.
I guess it’s time to register at the deCarta Developer Zone to get access to a geocoder API for Vienna which does reverse geocoding too…
Thanks to planet geospatial I almost was able to attend ESRI’s International User Conference 2006 without even going to San Diego (and experience those nice travel adventures as others did).
Beside all improvements and new features (btw, can’t wait to see this animation thing demoing somewhere) and bug fixes of ArcGIS, one point called my attention: the File-Based Geodatabase.
Since they can be compressed and are cross platform (Linux, Solaris, and Windows), file-based geodatabases are a good choice for data publishing. Like it did with shapefiles, ESRI is providing an open API that will allow anyone to create and use file-based geodatabases.
Is the File-Based Geodatabase going to be the next Shapefile?
Quite an ambitious project considering that, as far as I know, every piece of software dealing with geographic data is able to read (most of them even to write) a Shapefile. I’m not that long in the GIS business world, but I know the Shapefile as de-facto standard for quick geographic data exchange.
A major advantage of Shapefiles (and the Personal Geodatabase) is that you can access and edit attribute data without the need of a GIS client. In case of Shapefiles just fire up Excel (or any other DBF editor), access, read or change the attributes you want and save them back to the file (if you used Excel, be careful).
Will it be possible with File-Based Geodatabases too?
E.g. while working with ArcReader the non-ArcMap user can open Access and update the whole attribute set without any difficulty. A common and highly appreciated workflow in my environment.
However, in times of increasing importance of easily accessible geographic data the Open Geodatabases concept looks promising:
It is no longer necessary to access geodatabases via ESRI software products; the technology and documentation easily support direct access from other products and systems.
What I really do appreciate about Mashups is the speed of development. Very quickly you get from the first thought of an idea or feature to a point, where you can see your first results.
From time to time, mostly motivated while reading a technology post, I can’t avoid to start playing around with this kind of “quick and dirty” development tools by myself.
So, a few months ago I wanted to try the AJAX capabilities of the Google Maps API and started making this little map of the underground stations in Vienna. Basically I just let JavaScript and the API parse an XML file and overlay the result in a Google Map. To decorate the points in the map, I added a photo from Flickr for each station and linked to a Flickr photo search to see more pictures about this station and the area around.
Two days ago I read a post about FlickrStorm, a new Flickr photo search with some “magic” (whatever that means) from a future Google employee. However, reading the post it came to my mind to link my map to FlickrStorm instead of the Flickr search. Unfortunately FlickrStorm doesn’t allow access from outside, meaning that you can’t simply access FlickrStorm by calling the search with an expression like “/?q=searchterm”.
Once the idea of improving my photo search of the underground map in my head, I started trying a few alternative ways – loaded some AJAX libraries, did some testing and finally got a photo search running I’m satisfied with.
Go figure! I really think it’s a nice map add-on.
At least I had my fun hoping from station to station in the map and browsing thru the photos that showed up in the search box. It’s kind of exploring the city by subway on the internet. Flickr has in the meantime become such an amazing photo archive. I even discovered some corners I’ve never seen before around some subway stations, have to open my eyes better next time I pass by…
Browsing thru my Flickr contacts today I came across this blog post:
Zooomr is up again…
… What they did do was expand on the stuff I’m completely uninterested in, like GeoTagging. …
Shocking! Somebody who isn’t excited about geotechnology!
Seriously, this post made me think about the ongoing hype around recent geotechnology. I’m referring to the “mashup industry” as synonym for geotechnology intruding entertainment. Let’s stick with geotagging: the only people I can see who are geotagging their photos right now are geeks, early adopting geo geeks. Of course everyone is stunned by tools like Google Earth, but no one of my “normal” friends is even asking for loading photos into Google Earth and view them on the globe. They just want to watch the pictures like my parents already did with their old photo albums,.
Geotechnology as part of the entertainment industry is unlikely going to be the “next big thing”.
I think there are good chances that technologies like geotagging will sneak silently into our day-to-day life. It definitely will be a handy feature, even for non geo geeks like my aunt, if you have a button next to the picture in your photo organizer which tells you the place or shows a map where the picture was taken. But first the demand for this button must be created. Why would I need a digital map in addition to the photo when I have my mental map know exactly where the picture was taken?
I don’t own a mobile phone because I needed one. I wanted a mobile phone because somebody told me that I want it. And now I can’t imagine how my life worked without mobile phone.
An updated Skype for Mac video preview is available. It’s worth downloading only for this single change log entry:
improvement: CPU Usage in Video calls is reduced.
In the prior version I disabled video after the first few video chats. The system started to behave sluggish and slow once Skype video was started. Skype was taking almost everything the CPU had to offer. In this version it seems to be pretty much better. Well, at least I can continue working while Skype video is running (or I don’t have the excuse any longer that Skype is blocking my system and I have to take a break…).
Get the new version here.