Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

Here's your weekly dose of geonews in batch mode.

On the FOSS4G and open data front, there's a followup entry reviewing more open source geocoders (initial story). via the OGD blog I found an interesting entry on the failures of Edmonton and Vancouver open data efforts: "[...] two minor mistakes that are preventing the Edmontorcouver opendata initiative from being a tremendous success [...] 1. They expected a new community to build itself. 2. They wrote their own license." GeoServer new supports ImagePyramid imports. There's also a long article about creating interactive charts with Geopublisher 1.4. There's also a short entry on displaying two different graticules in QGIS. Here's a site that let's you overlay OpenStreetMap data transparently On Google/Yahoo Maps.

In the everything-else category, Slashdot discussed a story named about a new phone to track employees movements and a discussion on augmented reality. Here's an entry named Geotag Photos with an Android Phone and Any Digital Camera. Via O'Reilly, here's an entry on Twitter's location policy. You can also embed Bing Maps Twitter Maps on your website. Geolocation is also coming to Facebook next month. In fact, MapQuest has a new feature to share MapQuest maps woth Facebook friends. The Canadian RADARSAT Constellation got confirmed funding in the recently announced federal budget. Using GPS sensors, it seems the Chilean earthquake moved the City of Conception 10 feet to the west. In addition to the Google geonews shared this morning, here's Fredericton, Canada in 3D and Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria in South Africa and Mulhouse in France also in 3D.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

From the ERDAS website : "ERDAS has created a Chile Relief Website and web service enabled geospatial datasets free of charge for all organizations participating in the relief efforts to the Chile earthquake and tsunami disasters. 
The following website has been updated to contain a Chile Relief Map context to provide a web map interface to the Chile Web Services:
http://apollopro.erdas.com/apollo-client/index.jsp?fullscreen=true"
Visit the site to see a list of all the data.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

We've just released an update to the Twitter Maps application in the Bing Maps Application Gallery. NOW, you can embed our Twitter Maps functionality into your own web site. This means you can be cool by having a Bing Map on your web site, blog, favorite social networking site with the Tweets you care about. And, WOW, it’s super easy. 

 

 

You can do this in four easy steps:

1. Select the map location either fixed (centered on a specific point) or anywhere (moves the map as the Tweets come in).
2. Specify the dimensions of your map (height and width).
3. Add search filters. These will be carried into the embed form if you’ve specified them to filter only tweets that meet your search criteria.
4. Copy/paste HTML into your web page.

 

  

 

CP – Follow me on Twitter @ChrisPendleton

A lot of recent major Google geonews lately. Google made the announcement of the addition of biking directions in Google Maps: "This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city's busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. [...] When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.". On the Google Lat Long blog, you'll get more information regarding those biking directions: "[...] I can lift the curtain and explain the many factors and variables that we've had to take into account to put this whole feature together [...]". Obviously, offered bike routes are not perfect and will improve over time.

There's an official entry on the major StreetView imagery update. Mapperz shows a map where we learn almost all of U.K. is now available in StreetView. You can now also edit places directly in StreetView. Also adding to integration, there's a new 'Edit this place' capability in Google Maps. There's also Barcelona now in 3D in Google Earth. The GEB offers a nice wrap-up entry named playing games in Google Earth.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Found on Engadget. It demonstrates just how deadly Google can be to the core business of other companies. From their article : "Back in January 2009, as Vodafone was preparing to close a £20 million ($30 million) deal to buy Swedish mapmaker Wayfinder, it was seen as a bold move from a carrier intent on entering the apparently lucrative market for location based services. Fast forward to the present day -- past the bit where free Google Maps Navigation destroyed TomTom and Garmin share prices, and past the introduction of free turn-by-turn navigation to Nokia's Ovi Maps -- and you'll find Wayfinder gently sobbing into a handkerchief as it permanently closes up its doors. Vodafone's Anna Cloke gives us the reason for it with devastating concision:"We could not charge for something that others gave away for free.""

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

It's been almost a year since we last mentioned Maestro, and yesterday was announced the release of MapGuide Maestro 2.0. Reminder: " MapGuide Maestro is an Open Source (LGPL) map authoring tool for MapGuide Open Source." The first link above offers a list and screenshots of the top 10 features of MapGuide Maestro 2.0: 1. Theming, with ColorBrewer Suport 2. Expression Editor 3. Resource Validation 4. Improved XML Editor 5. Profiling 6. Package Management 7. Custom Resource Templates 8. Duplicate Resource 9. Colour-Coded Resource Tree 10. General Usability. See also related stories below.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

phyr writes "The latest release of NEST (Next ESA SAR Toolbox) 3C-1.01 is now available for free at http://earth.esa.int/nest. NEST is an ESA toolbox with an integrated viewer for reading, post-processing and analysing ESA and 3rd party SAR data starting from Level 1. NEST is developed by Array Systems Computing Inc. under contract to ESA. NEST 3C adds the following features:

• Improved ROIs and Bitmasks
• Geometry Import and Export
• Radarsat 1 Reader
• TerraSARX SSC Reader
• Cosmo-Skymed Reader
• ASAR WSS Debursting and Mosaicing
• Layover and Shadow Bitmasks
• Filling Holes in DEM
• Basic C-Band Wind Field Estimation
• New Geotools Reprojection
• Multi-core Support
• Bug fixes and performance enhancements

" We mentioned the open source NEST project before, see related stories below.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

From the OSGeo-Discuss list, I learned about the announcement of the WMS Inspector project. From the announcement: "This is a post to announce the first public release of WMS Inspector, an open source Firefox add-on with tools for working with Web Map Services (WMS). It can be specially useful when working with Javascript mapping libraries like OpenLayers or MapBender or setting up WMS services. Main features include: * Load all WMS requests in the current page and their parameters * Requests sorting by service or type * Individual WMS requests (images or errors) visualization * Copy services, requests or parameters to the clipboard * Direct edition of request parameters values * Output GetCapabilities response as an HTML report or original file The WMS Inspector can be downloaded from the official Mozilla repository. For more information, please visit http://wiki.github.com/amercader/WMS-Inspector/ "

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Found via Ajaxian : "I give you the YQL Geo library (and its source on GitHub). Using this library you can do the following:"

• Detecting the visitor's location with the W3C geo API and with IP as a fallback
• Find geo location from text
• Find location from lat/lon pair
• Find locations in a certain web document (by URL)
• Get the location for a certain IP number

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Slashdot discusses a story named Digitizing and Geocoding Old Maps? Their summary: "I have quite a few old maps (several hundreds; 100+ years old, some are already damaged – so time is not on my side). What I want to do is to digitize them and to apply geo-coordinates to them so I can use them as overlays for openstreetmap data or such. Obviously I cannot put those maps onto my €80 scanner and go. Some of them are really large (1.5m x 1.5m roughly, I believe) and they need to be treated with great care because the paper is partly damaged. So firstly I need a method or service provider that can do the digitizing without damaging them. Secondly I need a hint what the best method is to apply geo coordinates to those maps then. The maps are old and landscape and places have changed, it maybe difficult to identify exact spots. So: are there any experiences or tips I could use?" See also the replies on the site.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Just saw over on the GeoGeek New Zealand blog that a new version of ArcGIS Explorer is available. It comes packed with a lot of features and updates including updated basemap gallery, new analysis tools, enhanced symbol management navigation methods, and may more. Visit the blog for the full details and screenshots.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

After yesterday's review of open source geocoders, Google just announced the introduction of the new Google Geocoding Web Service. Improvements, from the announcement: "* A flatter response format for address components that is easier to parse. * The ability to tag an address component with multiple types. * Both full names and abbreviations for countries and states. * Differentiation between rooftop and interpolated geocoder results. * Both the bounding box and recommended viewport for each result. [...] The Geocoding Web Service is intended to enable precaching of geocoder results that you know your application will need in future. For example, if your application displays property listings, you can geocode the address of each property, cache the results on your server, and serve these locations to your API application. This ensures that your application does not need to geocode the address of a property every time it is viewed by a user." See also related stories below.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

GeoTools 2.6.2 has been released. From the announcement: "This release is mostly intended to provide a number of important bug-fixes, but there are also some new features and improvements for your programming pleasure including: * The rendering system now has the ability to draw polygon fills and SVGs as vectors and draw marks with arbitrary sizes. * GeoTools applications can now use the H2 database with a spatial index provided by Hatbox. * Support added for polyconic projections." See also previous stories below.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

The linear thiking blog offers a short review of open source geocoders. From the entry: "All of the engines implement parsing and matching logic purely in code. None of them provide a declarative description language to allow easy modification of parsing, standardization, and matching rules. [...] In all the projects the parser design appears to be fairly ad-hoc and poorly documented. This situation doesn't inspire confidence that it would be possible to modify the parser to support a different address model, or to handle particular kinds of input errors." See also previous stories below.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

About 6 weeks ago I asked the Bing Maps Product Management team about our presence at SXSW. A couple weeks later they gave me a panel. Then, they asked me to proctor it. Oh, and populate it. Hmm, this was a bit more than I was expecting to take on, but always up for a challenge I ran with it and now I’m proud to announce my panel for SXSW jam-packed with location all-stars. My panel is on Sunday, March 14 @ 9:30 AM. Here’s the scoop:

 

Augmenting Maps with Reality

Remember when the utility of an online map consisted of directions and gawking at satellite imagery?  With the recent tide of location-based apps, maps is rapidly emerging as the gateway to socially exploring the world around us.  But that’s not all.   In this future focused discussion, we’ll explore the rise of maps as a social platform and it’s potential beyond.    

Check out this lineup:

Dennis Crowley – foursquare - CEO & Co-Founder

 

 

Laura Diaz – NAVTEQ - Senior Manager, Partner & Developer Program

 

 

Kellan Elliott-McCrea – Flickr - Architect

 

 

Ryan Sarver – Twitter – Director, Twitter Platform

 

 

Proctor: Chris Pendleton – Microsoft – Bing Maps Technical Evangelist

 

I tend to think of myself as a one-man wolf pack. But when I met Ryan, I knew he was one of my own. And my wolf pack... it grew by one. So there... there were two of us in the wolf pack... I was alone first in the pack, and then Ryan joined in later. And six months ago, when I met Dennis and Laura, I thought, "Wait a second, could it be?" And now I know for sure, I just added two more wolves to my wolf pack. And now, finally, Kellan joined the wolf pack. Five of us wolves, running around the desert together, in Austin, looking for music with maps. So tonight, I make a toast!

I hope to see you at my panel…or, somewhere in the streets of Austin.

CP – Follow me on Twitter @ChrisPendleton

Here's your weekly dose of geonews in batch mode.

On the Google front, you can now refine Google searches by location, with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. Google also announced the winners of their StreetView trike contest. There's also Athens in 3D. If you wonder how crazy it can get, here's an entry named solving a murder with Google Earth. There's also new imagery in Google Earth, including Chile. Here's an entry on heat maps with Google Fusion Tables.

On the Microsoft's front, here's a two-parts article on Integrating OpenStreetMap in Bing Maps. Bing Maps also just released their biggest imagery update ever, 6.7 million square kilometers.

On the ESRI front, we mentioned last week the podcast about ESRI's position on open source, via GGNB I learned about the new ESRI page about their position on open source software. The ArcGIS API For JavaScript 1.6 Now Available. And ESRI also announced their new World Topographic base map (screenshots included).

On the FOSS4G front, here's how to create contour lines in QGIS. There's also a new Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) mailing list.

In other news, several geoblogs mentioned that Platial is turning off their services. APB offers an entry named GIS Used to Help Decrease Stroke, Heart Disease, and Cardiovascular Risk 25%. There's also an entry about large shapefiles on small screens using a drawable spatial index. Engadget does a head-to-head comparison of three GPS smartphone navigation systems: Google Navigation, Ovi Maps, and VZ Navigator. TMR also points to the testing of the SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger.

In the maps category, via Mapperz, I learned about ProtectedPlanet, the latest initiative of the World Database on Protected Areas. Here's a named Which Burger Chains Dominate the U.S. Landscape? Here's another map, linking the affordability of housing and transportation in the U.S.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

kstreith writes "Opticks 4.3.3 is now released along with a new Spectral processing capability and Python scripting capability. Also includes updates to the existing IDL scripting. The release highlights include better support for scripting and support for loading FITS data. The new Spectral Processing extension provides algorithms to work with hyper-spectral and multi-spectral data and visualize and perform signature matching. The new Python scripting extension allows a user to combine the power of Python with the visualization power of Opticks. The IDL scripting extension now supports IDL 7.0 and IDL 7.1." We mentioned the open source project Opticks before, see previous stories below.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Last month we pushed out our largest amount of new imagery EVER in terms of square kilometers. This month, we’re blowing THAT record out of the water. You thought 1 million+ sq. km. was large? How about 6.7 million square kilometers! It’s pretty much unfathomable. The big winners? Aerial: The Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and most places in the US where we had black and white imagery. Bird’s Eye: Sweden. Deets:

 

Aerial

Australia    524,645 sq. km.
Botswana    61,433 sq. km.
Estonia    618 sq. km.
Hungary    3,369 sq. km.
Mexico    236,624 sq. km.
Morocco    13,303 sq. km.
Namibia    72,162 sq. km.
New Zealand    14,987 sq. km.
Poland    6,254 sq. km.
Romania    3,695 sq. km.
Russian Federation    553,244 sq. km.
South Africa    123,138 sq. km.
Turkey    16,148 sq. km.
United Kingdom    15,221 sq. km.
United States    4,961,758 sq. km.

Oblique (Bird’s Eye)

Austria    238 sq. km.
Belgium    898 sq. km.
Denmark    718 sq. km.
Finland    1,634 sq. km.
France    2,001 sq. km.
Greece    931 sq. km.
Ireland    1,340 sq. km.
Netherlands    1,709 sq. km.
Norway    2,425 sq. km.
Portugal    2,184 sq. km.
Romania    1,534 sq. km.
Spain    5,143 sq. km.
Sweden    6,747 sq. km.
Switzerland    424 sq. km.
United Kingdom    13,094 sq. km.
United States    56,007 sq. km.

Check out the Bing Maps World Tour for visuals. Also, Johannes has a sweet application for viewing imagery based on shape files. Niiiice.

CP – Follow me on Twitter @ChrisPendleton

Slashdot discusses a story named 3D Graphics For Firefox, Webkit. Webkit is the open source engine behind Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers. Their summary: ""A group of researchers plans to release a version of the Firefox browser that includes the built-in ability to view 3D graphics. They've integrated real-time ray tracing technology, called RT Fact, into Firefox and Webkit. Images are described using XML3D, and the browser can natively render the 3D scene." The browser will be released within a few weeks, the researchers say, and they are checking with the Mozilla Foundation about whether they can call it Firefox."

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

The open source project GeoMOOSE 2.2 has been released two weeks ago. Since it's been a while we mentioned the GeoMOOSE project, here's a reminder of what it is: "GeoMOOSE is a Web Client Javascript Framework for displaying distributed cartographic data. GeoMOOSE has a number of strengths including modularity, configurability, and delivers a number of core functionalities in its packages. GeoMOOSE is also very light weight for servers making it easy to handle a large number of users, with a large number of layers, and a large number of services without stressing a server. The GeoMOOSE core is written using JavaScript and HTML. It is entirely possible to run GeoMOOSE with nothing more than a basic webserver (Nginx, Apache, IIS). But besides the basic client core, GeoMOOSE also comes prepackaged with a number of built in services written in PHP. These services add the ability to perform drill-down identify operations, selection operations, and search datasets. If you have existing scripts that perform similar functions, GeoMOOSE can be tuned to work with those services, no matter which language they were written." See also related stories below.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.