Tag Archive for 'Geoinformation'

The geoURI scheme

Published on February 23, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Alex and I have started working on an Internet draft for a geo Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme. Basically a geoURI should identify locations by specifying latitude, longitude and (optional) elevation like geo:48.20833,16.37278,171. By adding query arguments, like geo:48.20833,16.37278,171?type=cathedral, it’s possible to extend the identifier and provide more information or call applications where to visualize the location (e.g. a GIS application, Google Earth, etc.). Words and text fragments within HTML documents can be labeled as place (geotagged) for instance: St. Stephen’s Cathedral (Nothing will happen when you click on the link…).

Our intention is to keep the URI as simple as possible and to make information about locations for internet users as easy accessible as writing an email after clicking a ‘mailto:’-link.

However, today a first draft was submitted by us to the IETF and it will be presented to the geopriv working group at the next IETF meeting held in Prague March 18-23.

We are still in the middle of ongoing discussions and too many ideas around possible geoURI-applications, -neighbors, -examples and -services need to be structured and sorted out. But if you are interested you can track the geoURI development and share your opinions with us at geouri.org (feed).

Everybody has got a map

Published on October 28, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , .

The awareness of geographic information has surely increased recently. Easy accessible mapping APIs made embedding maps on any kind of website a common sport these days. Good, geographic information is essential and should easily be available for everybody.

Though on some sites I can’t help but get the impression that a map is just there because some webmaster may thought “Hey, everybody has a Google Map, we need one too!”.

Besides being a good example of how the result may look like when the screen designer is missing, I wonder why they put the search box above the little Google Map. What would you as user expect of a map within the Austria section of an Austrian newspaper’s web portal? An Austria related map, right? Meaning that I can search there for Austrian addresses, places and maybe routing or some other type of geographic information.

I can’t.

Since Google isn’t offering any of this information for Austria, this map search is, from my point of view, completely useless and misleading. Unless you know the trick of putting “, Austria” at the end of every search term you’ll only be able to find “Wien” or “Vienna” in the map (the Austrian capital, btw).

Basically a map is a fairly good method to support and illustrate articles on a news portal. But please dear webmaster, before doing so, define the aim and purpose of the shown geographic information.

Mapping time

Published on September 14, 2006 in Geotech and Other. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Mikel Maron probably hit an important nail on the head titling his FOSS4G talk “It’s About Time for Time”.

During the last month we were producing a short animation film based on maps for a public exhibition. Working on that project was extremely interesting because for the first time we had a tool to visualize changes over time not as static calculated values (e.g. rates of change) but as dynamically changing images, as animations. Though we deal a lot with temporal aspects in our day-to-day work (spatial and regional development is all about changes over time) we found the new possibilities given by the medium film very exciting.

Rather difficult was that our audience was defined as “normal” people visiting an exhibition about a certain region. Our short film should stress and explain some important aspects of changing regional structures during the past 30 years in this particular region, within a timeframe of 10 minutes. Whereas we expected two thirds of the visitors stopping no longer than 3-5 minutes at our installation. However, developing this animation was an interesting experience and thanks to the amazing work of our graphic artist we are all very happy with the result (I’ll post a trailer here soon…).

Almost at the same time when the idea for our project was born I read that ArcGIS 9.2 comes with a built-in animation feature too (for displaying time lines). Now I’m pretty curious about how ESRI has implemented this new feature.

Google released today a new version of Google Earth supporting KML TimeStamp and TimeLines. Check the nice GPS track example in Mikel’s post to get a picture about how this works in Google Earth.

I hope they make the papers available soon and I can read some more about Mikel’s FOSS4G presentation!

Emperors

Published on August 8, 2006 in Geotech and Other. Closed Tags: , , , , .

…don’t want the public to sneak a peek into their palaces. Otherwise why would the Ministry of Information order the Bahrain Internet Exchange to block all access to the Google Earth servers?

Authorities usually don’t get tired telling us again and again that who has nothing done bad, has nothing to hide and nothing to fear when it comes to privacy critical issues like video observations, biometric security or data mining projects (hello AOL!). So I’m wondering what is it what the Kingdom of Bahrain wants to hide from its people. Have you done something bad Bahrain?
Read some more details in this post.

Information means power, free information is the key to a free world.

(via OE)

Yet another Google Earth security risk

Published on April 7, 2006 in Geotech and Other. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Scud missileThe german IT news site heise is reporting (in german) that a security expert called Klaus Dieter Matschke blames Google Earth to be a potential security risk for the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany. He claims that with the help of Google Earth’s accuracy on certain places in Germany it would be easy for terrorists to point russian Scud missiles onto various public targets.

These missiles are accessible on the international weapon black market for years. Their range is approx. 300 kilometers and, according to the US anti-missile defense authority, they can also be launched from cargo ships. Above all, Iran is suspected to have such missiles in cargo ships installed. (no further comment needed…)

All that are probably correct facts and the coordinates shown in Google Earth could be used as target information for missiles. But, if I have the power to buy Scud missiles and equip cargo ships with them, I won’t have any problem to get accurate target coordinates. This information is not unique in Google Earth. I guess the problem is that Google Earth is publicly available. As you notice even security experts managed to access Google Earth. They now see that there is something called geographic information out there which might result in security issues, meaning business to them.
Somebody has to tell them that GIS and accurate digital geographic information already existed long before Google Earth did!

So if we are confronted with security issues based on public geographic information, what should we do? Forbid and ban every kind of GIS and accurate map except for authorities (and security experts of course)? Oh wait, it reminds me of something: can it be that less censorship, better public information and knowledge within countries and governments is, let’s say, an improvement that came along with democracy and modern society?

Update #1:
Read the full (german) article at Technology Review. Remarkable detail in this article is the paragraph where Prof. Reinhard Zölitz-Möller, University of Greifswald – Dept. of Geography, claims that the German National Mapping agency only provides coordinate information for city centers, but not for buildings. I couldn’t believe that and checked it on their website: just in case they forgot to map buildings in their 1:5.000 vector model than you’ll for sure be able to pinpoint buildings in their orthophotos.

H5N1 distribution maps

Published on March 25, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , .

In contrast to several media scare stories about avain flu you’ll find here a well edited H5N1 distribution map by Declan Butler. A great example of how to use Google Earth for information dissemination.

Ask.com maps

Published on February 28, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , .

Ask.comSince 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.

Google Earth for Mac Beta 2

Published on February 12, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , .

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)

Where’s the value?

Published on January 17, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

O’Reilly announced the date for Where 2.0 Conference 2006: June 13-14, 2006 – San Jose, CA. Since I’m considering California as my desired holiday location this summer it would be great if I can make it.

Deep red Google Earth

Published on January 13, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Google Spatial Planning EarthStefan from Ogle Earth links to a very interesting online article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how Google Earth is changing the way environmentalists work.

I think it’s not only limited to environemtalists, in my opinion Google Earth is changing a lot more work environments though. As employee of a company which deals mainly with spatial planning issues I can see how Google Earth gets more and more used and accepted by my colleagues. The main advantage is the extremely fast and free availability of basic geodata (especially aerial and satellite imagery) which was a few years ago difficult to get and mostly not affordable within our project budgets.

Google Earth helps us to easily validate locations. We can compare given land use plans against actual land use and validate certain input data. It’s not our main task to validate or create data so we don’t have base material for that purposes readily available. But from time to time we need to check certain locations on a larger scale and until now it was only possible if you have good knowledge of that places or you try to get more accurate material from certain sources which usually takes a long time in Austria. The combination of Google Earth and professional GIS tools even more simplifies this process. I can integrate and rudimentary display my own data in Google Earth.

On the other side, because Google Earth is a freely available application, I can publish my data as KML and offer it to our clients. Even if they are not familiar with GIS tools there is a good chance that they know how to use Google Earth. For our workflow the use of Google Earth is a huge step forward.

My favorite point on what Google Earth is changing is that suddenly former data access constraints do not work anylonger:

“Instead, it’s starting to look like a killer app that could change the power balance between grassroots environmentalists and their adversaries.”

Yes, Google Earth means something like communism to geoinformation. Everyone has (visual) access to every place, worldwide. Nothing remains hidden. As long as Google and certain governments limit their urge to censor maps.