Simple, yet interesting: search Twitter for a place name, bundle returned tweets in a new stream and watch what’s going on there.
Compared to a pure geographic search, the semantic search returns tweets about that place, instead of tweets located nearby. The content of geotagged tweets isn’t necessarily directly related to the place, as the geographic search results show. A combination of both methods might be useful though.
Rainer links to an interesting NYT article about the recently introduced My Location feature in Google Maps mobile. Actually the first thought coming to my mind when I heard about My Location two weeks ago was: “How come that Google knows cell tower positions, almost worldwide?”.
As far as I know it’s one of the best kept secrets among mobile carriers. Christopher Schmidt gave a talk about that issue at the Where 2006 conference, explaining the ignorance of most mobile carriers and showed us his GSM location hack.
According to the NYT article, Google gathers cell location information the same way as Christopher did: users equipped with mobile phones and GPS devices send cell and location information back to a central unit, where it’ll be provided for other users without GPS devices.
Or in other words, Google uses GPS enabled mobile phones, like your 800,- EUR Nokia N95 for instance, to enhance their service. Strangely not every Google employee supports this strategy and dare to sell a N95 on eBay.
However, Rainer points out, and I totally agree, that an API for LBS is needed. We have seen what happened when developers gained access to geographic information through APIs. LBS has been the next big mobile thing for a couple of years now. I think an LBS API could finally make it happen and bring thousands of ideas and map mashups to mobile devices.
Today the EU and US announced their agreement on the GPS-Galileo common civil signal. So future (civil) devices will be able to communicate with GPS and/or Galileo satellites.
Interoperability usually is a good thing and especially in that case it’ll help Galileo to literally take off because GPS is widely adopted.
However, a few questions remain…
A strong driving force behind Galileo was to become independent from US-operated GPS. In an earlier agreement the US already ensured that Galileo can be regionally turned off for security reasons. Does the current new interoperability agreement have any effect on the earlier “US veto” agreement? What happened to the independence argument in this new agreement?
One of the main advantages of Galileo over GPS was its higher accuracy (it was said to be to function even indoor quite well). As far as I know positioning accuracy depends on frequency and signal interference (I’m no engineer, so correct me if I’m wrong). If GPS and Galileo use the same signal, what happened to that advantage? I would assume that GPS and Galileo achieve the same accuracy then.
To say future devices will, based on the agreed interoperability, support both systems is kind of a weak argument. I guess they would’ve done so anyways. Putting two chips in one device shouldn’t be a problem until 2012 (when Galileo is supposed to start).
Since private companies left and the financing of Galileo is very likely done by public funding, which somehow shows that the private sector doesn’t really trust in future Galileo business opportunities, the “supporting European LBS business” argument is slightly disappearing too.
So where is the point for Galileo? Or why should the EU not drop Galileo, license, build and operate it’s own GPS satellites instead and probably save a lot of tax money?
Today I’ve found a solution how to stay up to date where all the young hip people are going out in Vienna: it’s easy, just follow the “bobo” tag on Tupalo!
Tupalo is a Vienna based mapping-”Stuff in your Neighborhood”-start-up, a social networking site where people can easily pin-point their favorite spots on a map, rate and review them and share experiences. I started liking it mainly because it reminded me of a couple of nice places I went once, but for some reasons forgot about them and never came back again. So Tupalo is responsible for my quite long wanna-go-again list.
Among other features users can subscribe to all kinds of feeds on Tupalo. What I did to catch up with the local hip crowd is to subscribe to the bobo-RSS-feed. Since Tupalo is a mapping application, the RSS feed is of course GeoRSS flavored and can be placed immediately on a map. Each time a new hot bobo venue pops up in Vienna, I’ll get informed what and where it is right away! Great!
The German news magazine Focus reports (in the meantime TechCrunch too) that Apple is working on an in-car navigation/entertainment device. According to Focus it’ll be released in 2009, whereas the first 6 months Mercedes Benz apparently has exclusive rights on the device.
Once Apple is working with navigation technology, can we expect some LBS features on the iPhone too?
At yesterday’s Web Monday, hosted by Metalab, I attended an interesting presentation about microformats (given by Eric). Among other things the open microformat standard includes a “geo” element to define geographic locations.
As Alex yesterday mentioned, the documents, as well as the documents referred to, lack of declaring a reference system. It’s quite obvious, and has been already discussed in the geo microformat BOF, that the coordinates enclosed by the “geo” tag are based on WGS84.
How come that WGS84 didn’t make it into the document then? I think an “open standard specification” must not allow any room for misinterpretations and therefore should include the declaration of the applied geographic reference system in some section.
…it works in Google Maps, so it seems to be right…
Ouch.
Why is defining a reference system important?
Once you leave Google Maps behind and try to visualize your geographic information in other mapping applications, such as national mapping services based on national reference systems others than WGS84 for instance, you should tell those applications about the framework you used to identify your locations. Otherwise you’ll run into troubles regarding the accuracy of your locations.
Austria is a small country but the national reference system includes 3 different prime meridians. In order to achieve satisfying mapping results you’ll always choose the closest meridian to your mapping area. Without the information which meridian was used for data collection for instance, you’ll end up having at least 3 options where your locations could be.
No serious web developer would ever write an HTML-document without a valid Document Type Declaration. It’s quite similar in geodesy with geographic data and reference systems. Would be great to see neogeographers fulfill minimum geodesy requirements. Geography is for some time around now and things like reference systems have turned out to be very useful.