Science Library Pad

Ottawa Minecraft map

The City of Ottawa Open Data initiative has released a Minecraft map of the city

geoOttaWOW: A Minecraft world of the City of Ottawa

However you have to know a few things that aren't really explained:

• This is a really big map which means it is slow to load and will tax your computer system.  It may crash on some older systems, particularly if you try to move around very quickly.
• The starting point (world spawn point) is, for some reason, currently set to near the Rideau river, Old Ottawa South (Glengarry & Onslow).
• You can teleport to other locations but you have to know the coordinates.

Fortunately some locations are listed under the Showcase link

Spawn point tp -5.5 129 -2.5

is near the Rideau river, Old Ottawa South (Glengarry & Onslow)

Parliament: tp -2266 139 -2061

Exp. Farm traffic circle tp -2851 163 1744

What does this mean?

As this is a Creative map with Cheats turned on, you can teleport, using the /tp command.

To get to Parliament Hill, just type

/tp -2266 139 -2061

Otherwise, since you spawn in a forest without any familiar landmarks, and Ottawa is very big, you may wander around for a long time before finding anything.

Parliament (Centre Block) looks like this

(Despite a CBC article which may make you think you are looking for a blue-and-white castle.)

I don't know the details of how the map was generated, but I'm guessing mostly through an export from Ottawa's Geographic Information System (GIS).  This would give the shapes of the major buildings (if you live in an apartment tower you will probably see it, if you live in a single-family detached house you will just see your lot full of grass).  The generator has some eccentric parameters set, so you will find water and lava in various places, including flowing down buildings.

It is cool to wander around Ottawa with animals grazing on Parliament Hill and more than the usual number of zombies wandering around Centretown.

The city really should set the world spawn to Parliament Hill though.  But since it's open data you can modify it and share the modifications as you wish.

another commute-time map, powered by open data

I've written previously about different ways of visualising transit on a map, including commute time, in my post visualising city transit layers.

Some Twitter buzz today and recently about Mapumental mashing up public transit open data with properties available to buy and rent - effectively letting you search for homes within a commute time range that you set.

Mapumental: The “I want a better commute” Property Finding Service for Britain bit.ly/RKPyrv via @mysociety @steiny

— Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) November 8, 2012

It's actually been around for a while with just travel times.

#lift12 @rufuspollock showing Mapumental bit.ly/z8E4UQ as an example of a map that helps one make decisions

— Richard Akerman (@scilib) February 24, 2012

The property part is new.

Here's the map with just commute time (20 minutes to arrive by 9am at SW1A 0AA which is Westminster, the UK Parliament)

and here's the map with available homes to rent overlaid

You can check it out at property.mapumental.com
or the specific one I showed is http://property.mapumental.com/map/SW1A0AA-a-0900/44d71ed3

Chicago has a Snow Portal - should Ottawa?

With a nice snowstorm underway in Ottawa on this Friday the 13th, it seems timely to have a look at the state of the art in online snow information.

Chicago got a pre-launch writeup of its "snow portal" in the Economist - Winter strikes Chicago: Shovel ready.  UPDATE 2012-01-14: And a launch writeup in the New York Times: Snow Site Lets Chicago See if Plows Are Really in a Rut.  ENDUPDATE

The site has now launched, with the simple URL http://chicagoshovels.org/

It includes realtime GPS positions for snowplows on a map, as well as the ability to "adopt" a sidewalk for shoveling (sharing your adoption over social media) and to volunteer to shovel snow.

I was unable, however, to find any plow-specific datasets in the Chicago Data Portal (there are datasets about snow route & winter parking restrictions, as well as snow alerts).

Ottawa is a pretty snowy city too, although so far we're not close to our near-record 432 cm of snow received in 2008.  (Yes, 4.32 metres of snow.)

Ottawa also has GPS-equipped plows.  What would you like to see in an Ottawa "snow portal"?  I'm not sure live positions of snowplows on a map is the most useful, although it's great as a demo.

Some ideas:

• Snow & accident & quality based directions.  "I want to get from X to Y, what routes are available for walking / driving / cycling that are cleared and safe, how recently were they cleared and when will they next be cleared?  What do conditions look like?  How busy / slow are they?"
  This could use e.g. data and images from Ottawa's existing sensors, traffic cameras & incidents reports, and crowdsourced condition reports from ottawabikingproblems.ca and ottawawalkingproblems.ca
• Since the snow & ice are not just problems, they're also recreational opportunities, you could expand this to include e.g. sledding hills, canal & outdoor rinks (including the Rink of Dreams) skating conditions, cross-country trails, ski hill conditions etc.

 A few resources that are already available:

• NCC - Rideau Canal skating conditions
• Ottawa Open Data Portal - Cycling network
• Ottawa Open Data Portal - Outdoor rinks (2009)
• Ottawa Open Data Portal - Sledding hills (2010)

I'd like to hear your ideas, or if you prefer Facebook, Open Data Ottawa has also asked this question.

Since snow is common across Canada and the northern US (as well as in northern Europe), is this something that the Civic Commons or the Canadian G4 group of cities could work on?

I also wonder about where we could get more data.  Now that we have "smart" parking meters with wireless payment capabilities, could every parking meter also be a local realtime weather sensor?

Twitter:

• Hashtag for Chicago snow portal is #chicagoshovels
• Chicago CTO: @ChicagoCTO
• Chicago Chief Data Officer (CDO): @ChicagoCDO
• Ottawa Open Data lead (city): @rob_giggey
• Ottawa Open Data (citizen advocacy): @opendataottawa
• I don't know if there is an equivalent Ottawa hashtag.  #ottsnow ?

Ottawa cycling map open data

The good news: the City of Ottawa has been steadily increasing its support for cycling, including a dedicated bike lane trial downtown.

The bad news: the official cycling map site, http://www.capitalcyclingmap.ca/ is awful, with incredibly awkward pre-GoogleMaps navigation and no real interactivity.

The good news: the city has released its bike routes data on its open data site, so now anyone can make a better map, apps, and integrate the cycle map info onto websites.  (There was an initial glitch with the release, but the files are now up.)

Ottawa Open Data Catalogue - Ottawa Cycling Network

formats available are KML (Google Earth format), SHP and DWG. 

Here's a wide view of the KML data (the cyan grid lines and other colours layered around Ottawa in the centre - Ottawa covers a huge area):

Ottawa's Mayor, Jim Watson, is a cycling supporter and does a good job of interacting on Twitter. Here's a little Storify of how things spread through Twitter:

visualising city transit layers

There are many layers to the city.  There's the city seen through its people, the city seen through its food, the city seen through its landmarks, and the city seen through its transit, amongst many others.

Our understanding of transit has been pretty static, access points connected by lines.  Go to this dot, be transported along this line, change at this dot...  Here's a section of Manhattan from Google Maps with the Transit layer enabled.

Map data ©2011 Google

(To get additional layers in Google Maps, click beneath the Map icon in the upper right.  Options include Traffic, Transit & Bicycling - some of the options require you to click "more" in order to see them.)

Or here's the complete MTA New York Subway map.

But computer power and storage, combined with new (ideally real-time) data, and new ways of visualising can give a very different view of the transit layer.

One of my favourites is TripTropNYC, which gives a "heat map" showing subway times to a given location.

For example, for Elsevier headquarters at 360 Park Avenue South you can see in an instant that there is a band of short travel times up and down along the east side, and blocks of short transit times even across the East River near subway stations (there are probably short routes from across the Hudson too, but TripTrop only shows subways and the subway doesn't go to New Jersey).

Map data ©2011 Google

(I don't remember how I originally found TripTrop, but there's a kottke article about it from May 2009.)

On June 5, 2011 The Economist wrote about another time-based transit visualisation

@TheEconomist The Economist

A new application shows you the places in your city that you can reach in a given amount of time using public transit http://econ.st/iN9Zpc

http://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/77417110925606915

STEFAN WEHRMEYER, a 23-year-old German programmer, has developed a Google Maps application called Mapnificent (harhar). It's pretty cool: it shows you the places in your city that you can reach in a given amount of time using public transit.

Mapnificent: A time-based transit map - Economist Gulliver Business Travel blog - June 5, 2011

Here is Mapnificent's view of the same 360 Park Avenue South problem space, showing a 15 minute transit time window (the light coloured bubbles over the map)

Map data ©2011 Google

I have to wonder if it includes the Roosevelt Island Tramway though.  One of the challenges in urban transit is capturing ALL the different possible modes.

With Settings->Show color map checked, you get a TripTrop-like view.  With a live (if rather finicky) slider so you can see how the bubbles expand and contract as you increase and decrease transit time.

Map data ©2011 Google

Stefan Wehrmeyer's blog post about how it all works, A Mapnificent World, tells a key part of this story, which is open transit data... and licensing problems.

Data

Google specified the GTFS format in order to be able to use public transport information in Google Maps. The public transport providers publish a file with all necessary information inside and the magnificent GTFS Data Exchange collects these files and keeps them up-to-date in one place. So getting the data for the cities is easy. The hard part was that I have to read and adhere to the license agreement of every single provider. Some providers like New York’s MTA do it right by not having any complicated license text at all, some like San Francisco require me to put a text of 98(!) words on the site. I don’t know what they hope to accomplish, but I can work with that. However, I have a problem at the moment with the Terms of Use of Los Angeles Metro and San Diego Metro where they say that I’m only authorized to reproduce the data  in the form provided by them. What? Shall I show users the raw GTFS files? I guess not, but Mapnificent aggregates and converts data and I’m unsure if this is covered by the license. I have tried to contact Metro LA on two different channels, but did not get a response (their sites also make it extremely difficult to contact them by email). If you can change anything about that, please feel free to do it.

Ottawa provides GTFS. The local transit agency, OC Transpo, doesn't say much about it

Every service change (4 times per year), Scheduling and bus stop data is provided in zipped format to certain developers, including Google.

from http://www.octranspo1.com/about-octranspo/reports

Other than saying "certain developers" (while the file is open for anyone to download), it's not clear what license agreement applies, presumably the site-wide Terms of Use.  But Ottawa also has an open data site

http://ottawa.ca/opendata

Which includes more information and a pointer to the same file

http://ottawa.ca/online_services/opendata/info/transit_schedule_en.html

and with more generous Ottawa Open Data Terms of Use.

I mention this mainly for two reasons: 1) licensing is a big inconsident mess 2) open data sites are helping to fix this.

Here's a map.  NOTE: To switch to Mapnificent Ottawa, you actually have to click on the Mapnificent Ottawa icon, otherwise it will say "your point is out of the covered area".

Here's the 15 minute transit window to get to World of Maps at 1235 Wellington (Wellington and Holland).

Map data ©2011 Google

But again we see the river is a barrier - across the river is Gatineau in Quebec - which has a completely different bus service, the STO.  Some of the STO routes cross into Ottawa.  But while STO provides its routes in a PDF they are not available as GTFS as far as I can tell.

And the actual situation of urban mobility is much, much more complex than this.

Typical urban options include:

• walking
• cycling
• surface transit
• underground transit
• taxis
• car share services (Vrtucar in Ottawa)
• bike share services (Capital Bixi in Ottawa and Gatineau)
• car pooling including "just in time" matching of passengers to cars going near their destination
• traditional car rental and bike rental services
• helicopters, funiculars, aerial tramways, The Monorail and many more
• (sadly no dirigibles that I know of, although there really should be dirigible transit)

And there are all kinds of levels of complexity, where cycling encompasses everything from high-speed commuter cyclists who ride in traffic to more leisurely local cycling, and transit is a mix of commuter services with surface and underground stations (e.g. the RER trains in Paris and the coming Ottawa Light Rail) and local services (local bus routes and surface trams).

Onto this add the realtime layer: Where is the bus? Is it on time?  Is it faster to walk?  Is the path chosen for walking pleasant?  Safe?  Are there bikes at the nearest bikeshare station?  Are there empty slots at the destination bikeshare station?  What's the probability there will still be an empty slot by the time I get there? Is it likely to rain?  Does it pass through a location where many pedestrians or cyclists are killed by car & driver?

Here's a visualisation of Capital Bixi usage (which is only 100 bikes at 10 stations) - you can see stations fill and empty.

http://bikes.oobrien.com/?city=ottawa

Click Animation and Start Animation to see the bikes at stations change over time.

(You can use the pulldown menu to see other cities, e.g. Washington DC.)

Just to round out the story, remember that people may not have good time-based mental maps of their cities.  When London posted simple walking maps for Tube stations (with concentric circles showing the destinations you can reach with 15 minutes & 30 minutes of walking) some people discovered it was faster to walk to their destination than to take the Tube (here's King's Cross Station).

And remember that this requires not only transit data (ideally realtime) but layers upon layers of map data (also ideally realtime).  What are the walking routes?  Which are high-speed pathways for cyclists?  Which are recreational paths?  Is there road maintenance?  Has the sidewalk been plowed?  Is the road closed to cars to allow Sunday cycling?

Cities have so many different types of paths, like the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, the Manhattan High Line Park, the Ottawa Capital Pathway - ideally all of these get combined together computationally into an integrated route planning picture.  That's a lot of data, usually provided only as PDFs generated from internal systems, from many different organisations, to try to somehow get into machine-readable frequently-updated integrated formats.

And layers of policy details: Can you put your bike on the bus? On the train?  On the subway? 

And layers of computation and user feedback.  Does the fast transit route put you on the opposite side of a busy highway from your destination, while a slower one drops you right at the door of the building?  Is this sidewalk covered with slush and ice?

And even a social layer - are there friends nearby or friends along the way to your destination?

We have fairly elaborate systems to track and react to car traffic flows, but basically zero to help pedestrians and cyclists flow around the city as conditions change minute to minute and day to day.  Ottawa's Traffic Operations Control Centre looks like something you would use to monitor the launch of the Space Shuttle.  But I suspect none of those screens display anything about pedestrians or cyclists moving around the city.

The ideal system would give lots of different options, incorporating all the different mobility scenarios - walk to a bike rental station, then ride to a transit node, take the bike on the train, the ride to a drop off station and walk the rest of the way - you need a lot of data working together to be able to construct these kinds of routes computationally.

Some elements to take away from this:

• having a data standard (GTFS) with downloadable files is already enabling innovation
• innovation is being stifled by incomprehensible licensing
• open data sites can help to centralise the discovery of files and provide a single clear license
• visualisations can help people understand time and movement through their city in ways that static transit maps can't
• multi-mode transportation requires surfacing the different durations and aspects of all the different ways to move around the city
• realtime data can add even more benefits
• we need better maps (OpenStreetMap can help here)
• we need better ways of feeding updates and opinions into the system (things like FixMyStreet.ca and OttawaBikingProblems.ca can help - if they feed into city 311 systems and are acted upon)
• we need mobility operations centres, not traffic operations centres
• we can benefit from this data in many different roles: as citizens, as tourists, as city planners, as reporters
• there may be great partnerships possible, for example cycling map open data from the city, transformed by cyclists/citizens/hackers to be the most relevant and usable for their real cycling experiences
• UPDATE 2011-06-07: while people can move easily across administrative boundaries, data does not; we need to make data integrate across boundaries ENDUPDATE

Two groups in Ottawa who look at these issues from a data perspective are @opendataottawa and @hackshackersott  To the extent that we get better at cracking this problem we will improve the urban experience for everyone - including local businesses and local technology entrepreneurs.

NRC in AuthorMapper

Just testing the new AuthorMapper embed widget, with a search on my organisation.  (Search set to Institutions: National Research Council of Canada,National Research Council Canada)  In case it's not obvious, it's a clickable map - click and drag to move around (e.g. to the left, where you'll see the red node of NRC activity in Ottawa, as well as click to zoom in (there's a lot more detail than you can see in the high-level map).

Powered by AuthorMapper.com

Springer AuthorMapper

Springer has a site that displays a bunch of information for a search, including a map, a list of results, a keyword cloud, institutions and publication dates.  It also allows you to search for OA articles only, in the "show all options" search.

Shown is a screenshot of the top of the page for a search on 'akerman'.

http://authormapper.com/search.aspx?q=akerman

There's more information down the left hand side of the screen below the part I cut out.
The Download PDF link takes you to SpringerLink.
You'll probably have to click several layers down (several zoom levels) before clicking on a particular "pin" will give you a popup saying something like "x articles from y institutions" followed by an institution list.
The search results list doesn't change as you zoom in on the map.

Despite the name, you can also search by topic, or by combinations of criteria (an example given is Map migraine articles published by authors from the USA).  The default starting screen shows the locations of the last 100 articles published.

This is a great example of making your existing data work harder, as Lorcan says.
I don't know exactly how they're doing it (one could guess some reasonably straightforward term extraction).  There's not much info about how it works in their AuthorMapper blog.

via Twitter

Ottawa crime map

They're using a third-party service, CrimeReports.com , for the mapping.

I'll give you a direct link so you can skip the giant disclaimer they present on the OttawaPolice.ca site

http://www.crimereports.com/map?search=Ottawa+Ontario

Looks like the Market and Bank Street are popular amongst the criminals, which won't be much of a surprise to Ottawa residents.

If this doesn't seem too novel, keep in mind that chicagocrime.org was one of the original crime map mashups, and it was only created in May 2005 (see In memory of chicagocrime.org ).

UPDATE 2008-10-30: Story was via 24 Hours and Metro - Cops Net crime hubs.

Geolocation: 7 things you should know

The latest in the EDUCAUSE "7 Things You Should Know" is the topic of geolocation.

Geolocation, also called geotagging, is the practice of associating a digital resource with a physical location. Location information is typically given in terms of latitude and longitude coordinates, which can pinpoint any place on the planet with a high degree of precision. If a photographer includes the coordinates for where a picture was taken, for instance, the value of the photograph is increased, for both the photographer and others who have access to the photo and its metadata.

7 things you should know about... Geolocation (PDF)

For more info from EDUCAUSE, see

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAbout/47212

NOTE: Cross-posted to my GPS technology blog.

mobile innovation, crowdsourcing and more in Economist Tech Quarterly

Economist Technology Quarterly for September 4, 2008

The meek shall inherit the web
Computing: In future, most new internet users will be in developing countries

Following the crowd
The internet: The idea of “crowdsourcing”, or asking crowds of internet users for ideas, is being tried out in some unusual quarters

Armchair archaeology
Computing: Archaeologists are using free satellite imagery from Google Earth to make discoveries, develop theories and plan expeditions

and there's more at http://www.economist.com/science/tq/

carbon footprint tool is an Android winner

Jeff Kao was supposed to go to law school this fall, until a phone call from Google Inc. prompted him to put those plans on hold.

On Thursday, the University of Waterloo graduate found out the cellphone application he and his four friends spent more than six months designing in his parents' living room was one of 10 winners of Google's Android Developer Challenge.

That means their program, Ecorio, will be one of the first applications capable of running on Google's new mobile operating system, Android, when smart phones equipped with the software go on sale this fall.

They're feeling lucky – Google has called in Globe and Mail, September 2, 2008

The program

allows the user to accurately calculate their travel carbon footprint. Given awareness of their travel carbon footprint, the user can take action in three ways: Reduce, Inspire, and Offset.

...

Android's background GPS capability allows accurate always-on tracking of the user's travel carbon footprint, and suggests carpool and transit options.

Ecorio - Android Gallery

citizen science: camera in space

Some amazing images from a $1000 consumer camera sent 30+ km up into space on a sounding balloon as part of a Oklahoma State University project.  (Can't show the images here as they are all rights reserved.)

Check out Pentax k10d in Space - Flickr Blog - July 28, 2008

Previously:
September 05, 2007  schoolteacher's balloon photographs edge of the earth (unrelated project)

where in the world are users generating?

In my NISO presentation I made a rather imperfect metaphorical point, which is that there is too much darkness (in the sense of "too little access to information") on this map.  1 billion of us have incredible (and some would claim overwhelming, or "too much") information access, and 5 billion of us do not.

• Credit
  NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio - Earth at Night 2001
  http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=11793

Night illumination is of course a pretty weak proxy for "level of development".  One would hope actually that a truly developed society would not be wasting energy letting light leak up into the sky, and would instead have directed lighting with minimal sky glow.  But it gets the general point across.

I have argued in the past (in reference to Flickr and "peer production), that you could take the "Earth at Night" image and map it pretty closely to user-created content, on the theory that the main driving force behind user content is leisure time, and it's in the industrial, light-blaring nations that we have the most of this Internet time spent.

Dinah Sanders had an excellent counterpoint in her presentation, which was (something like) "where you don't see light, there are people using mobile phones".  Which is very valid, the idea of developmental leapfrogging, where countries and individuals are able to take advantage of new, less energy-intensive, advanced technologies to leap right into the next generation of Internet use.

However, I present as my counter-counterpoint, the Meebo Map, showing use of their IM tool (and with lots of caveats about dependencies on IP mapping tools, different tool use depending on language and location, and population densities)

http://blog.meebo.com/map

context and location awareness

A lot of buzz about the next generation of technology providing better information and services by being aware of the context in which the device is being used and the location.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of Nokia, came to the Mobile World Congress... to declare that Nokia will "reshape the Internet."

Nokia believes it, not Google, can deliver operator-independent, cross-platform phones through new software and services. How does Nokia presume that it can reshape an Internet so firmly established already? Nokia's answer lies in Maps 2.0, which the company claimed enables a "context-aware Internet" that combines multimedia features, Internet and Assisted- GPS, "We can bring more relevant and powerful context" to users browsing on the Internet, claimed Kallasvuo.

Niklas Savander, Nokia's executive vice president of services and software, added: "By adding context--such as time, place and people--to the Internet, the Web will become something very different from the one you have today."

EETimes - Nokia, not Google, sees itself reshaping the Internet - February 11, 2008

Some of those in the thick of battle are resigned to having a lot of company. “If there weren’t competitors, there wouldn’t be a market,” said Dan Harple, founder and chief executive of GyPSii, a mobile social network based in Amsterdam that is a contender. “Maybe there are 30 or more now — in three years, there will be 5 that matter.”

The prize, as these start-ups see it, is the 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers, a number that far surpasses the total of Internet users. The advantage over computer-based communities, they believe, is the ability to know where a cellphone is, thanks to global positioning satellites and related technologies.

...

Most mobile social networks seek to capitalize on location information. The SpaceMe service from GyPSii, for instance, will show users where friends and other members are in real time.

New York Times - Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone - March 6, 2008

Well established as the business mobile device of choice, the BlackBerry may soon become a much more social smartphone, says the co-CEO of creator Research In Motion Ltd.

Jim Balsillie says RIM wants the BlackBerry positioned to tap into the growing trend of Internet social networking sites such as FaceBook.com that allow consumers to share information about their lives, and access multimedia content, particularly music, on their mobile devices.

"Architecturally, music and the social networking are going to merge," Balsillie said ahead of a Thursday speech to the Canadian Music Week festival in Toronto.

CP - RIM looks to make social networking part of BlackBerry's strategy - March 6, 2008

Although the above is about mobile, Google is already "location aware", to the extent that each country version of Google ranks results in a different order, presumably based on language and click tracking, amongst other things.  So e.g. Google Canada will list hits in a different order (for the same search) than Google France.

It gets pretty complex to try to make meaningful context decisions though.  If it knows you're in a coffeeshop, should it return higher ranking results for "java" as it relates to coffee?  What if you do all your computer programming in coffeeshops?

This applies beyond mobile devices, to context awareness for any app being used on any platform anywhere, whether at work, at home, or on the go.

Of course, there is an extent to which the computer either implicitly or explicitly knowing more about the context and location of your activities is very privacy intrusive (e.g. hypothetical location-aware shopping application "I see you're passing a drug store on the way to your girlfriend's apartment, perhaps you should purchase some prophylactics?")

To rephrase something I wrote in my Twitter, I find my online and mobile walled gardens either have too many walls, or no walls whatsoever.  I would like to have a lot more control over the barriers and translucency of those barriers.  If my friends want to know my exact location down to the metre, that's fine, but as my circle of acquaintances expands outward, I want the the precision of my location to decrease, so that maybe people I know less well are shown what city I'm in, and people I don't know at all only get to see that I am currently somewhere in the vicinity of planet earth.

In a way, this is old news anyway.  The next thing that was supposed to follow on from the e-commerce bubble in 2000 was "m-commerce".  The cellphone companies conceived this as the m-commerce "value chain", by which they meant, extracting value FROM you, FOR them, all the way along the chain.  So they wanted not only to charge Amazon for placement on their wireless portal, they thought they should get a cut of everything you bought from Amazon.

I thought this was ridiculous when they were talking about it in 2000...

"E-Commerce value chain has many more steps and players than standard"

Notes on Wireless Internet for E-Commerce seminar - April 28, 2000

and when Tod Maffin talked about "CRM M-Commerce" in 2001, my general feeling was that the day a coupon pops up on my phone screen when I pass a store is the day I throw my cellphone into the river.

Accordingly, given people's widely varying expectations of privacy and "value", we are going to need much more granular and much more interoperable tools in order to achieve workable context awareness (including location).

Yahoo`s Fire Eagle is an infrastructure piece, an architecture for sharing location information between applications.

Plus which, this is all very nice in theory, but given that in Canada our mobile providers near-total control over their nextworks, and have data plans that are expensive and/or limited, mostly incomprehensible, and don't cover roaming outside Canada anyway, I think it will be a while before most Canadians are willing to use any sort of advanced mobile applications.

I actually think the carriers are setting themselves up for a fall, because Canada is concentrated in a few cities with lots of WiFi, so as soon as more phones have WiFi, people will use that to the exclusion of wireless data, and may even try to do a lot more VoIP over WiFi as well.

Related:
February 15, 2008  CNet reviews Nokia 6210 Navigator GPS phone [including Maps 2.0]
February 05, 2008   Nokia Location Tagger: in-phone photo geocoding

cyberolfactorcartography

Carleton University cybercartographer Fraser Taylor and his colleagues have already developed multimedia maps and atlases that use sound, music, photos and artwork to convey information about places such as Antarctica and the Arctic. Now he and doctoral student Tracey Lauriault are working on maps with scents.

...

Ms. Lauriault is developing a scented digital map for the Bytowne Museum in Ottawa. She is considering, for example, using the smell of sawdust to help convey the importance of lumberyards that once dominated a large working-class neighbourhood.

Globe and Mail - Planning your next vacation, with dollars and scents - February 27, 2008

Also see Lauriault's Nature Network profile.

standard geotagging logo?

Bruce McKenzie of bioneural.net proposes a standard icon to indicate geotagged information, postings etc.

In A web standard icon for geotagging, he writes

co-ordinates are typically encoded within metadata (or microformat) tags making them visible to machines but hidden from people. We have de facto web standard icons to help identify feeds, OPML, and sharing—so why not for geotagged content?

Sounds good to me.

via Geotagging Flickr group, further discussion in Flickr Ideas group

UPDATE 2008-02-29: http://www.geotagicons.com/

conferences to maps: a demonstration

For some reason, our lists of library conferences are, how shall we put it nicely?  Geocoding challenged?  Semantically unrich?

The easiest way this could be fixed would be for the list creators (or others) to run the lists through a simple geocoder and produce GeoRSS.

In the meantime, here's a demonstration hack to show how easily it can be done.

"Library Related Conferences" list from

http://homepage.usask.ca/~mad204/CONF.HTM

Let's chop it up with an online tool.

RSSxl - Convert an HTML Web Page to RSS

Item start/end: <tr> and </tr>
Description start/end: <td> and </a></td>
Link to extract: 2

http://www.wotzwot.com/rssxl.php?pageurl=http%3A%2F%2Fhomepage.usask.ca%2F%7Emad204%2FCONF.HTM&sf=&si=%3Ctr%3E&ei=%3C%2Ftr%3E&sd=%3Ctd%3E&ed=%3C%2Fa%3E%3C%2Ftd%3E&linkno=2

Ok, we've cooked some RSS.

http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/geotest/wotz-conf.xml

Pass it to GeoNames RSS-to-GeoRSS encoder.
It doesn't like some embedded unicode - com.sun.syndication.io.ParsingFeedException: Invalid XML: Error on line 46: An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x13) was found in the element content of the document.

Strip out everything except legal characters using BBEdit.

http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/geotest/wotz-conf-zap.xml

GeoRSSify

http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?feedUrl=http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/geotest/wotz-conf-zap.xml

Result: GeoRSS test file

http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/geotest/wotz-conf-zap-geo.xml

Visualize!

Acme GeoRSS Map Viewer

http://www.acme.com/GeoRSS/?xmlsrc=http%3A%2F%2Fscilib.typepad.com%2Fscience_library_pad%2Fgeotest%2Fwotz-conf-zap-geo.xml

It's that easy.  Yes, the placemarks on the map are clickable, and the hyperlinked dates will take you to the particular conference URL.

You can also feed GeoRSS directly into Google Maps

http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=http:%2F%2Fscilib.typepad.com%2Fscience_library_pad%2Fgeotest%2Fwotz-conf-zap-geo.xml&ie=UTF8&ll=7.325,-53.266667&spn=179.115283,360&z=1&om=0

I've been thinking a lot about how you could cleanly parse these lists and accurately geocode them, but this was the simplest demo I could come up with, without any programming involved.

Flickr Places launches

Flickr has launched Places where, if I can borrow a term from Lorcan, they are making their data work hard, providing a (dare I say it) portal to each location, with a map, temperature, time, popular tags, groups, and "interesting" photos (where photos are selected with a fairly complicated algorithm including explicitly mapped photos, along with photos that just have been tagged e.g. "ottawa", with interestingness metrics mixed in).

You can see this evolving in various fairly obvious social networking, travel, and discussion directions.

Check it out:

http://flickr.com/places/Canada/Ontario/Ottawa

They've also changed the map display for photos, the default global view now shows tags placed at locations, rather than just dots

http://www.flickr.com/map

Personally I find it's actually less intuitive to navigate their new interface than the all-dots one.

GIS Library 2.0

I honestly don't quite understand this, but I think it is possibly cool

Library Floor Plans 2.0: The Spatial Information Manager for the Library

If I understand it it's a sort of idea about using GIS as a foundational tool for managing a wide variety of information in the library.

Once developed, our GIS-based Spatial Information Manager for the Library could serve a wide range of applications including but not limited to:

• a method for the analysis and optimization of existing space within the Tisch Library
• a tool used to orientate new staff to the Tisch library building
• a real-time high quality map generator
• one-click access to the square footage of any room in the library
• a web-based room locator for patrons attending Author Talks and other events
• a tool advertising the placement and content of exhibits and art galleries within the library
• a database of geo-encoded uniquely identified objects - public access terminals, rooms, etc. - accessed by a web-based graphical user interface
• a searchable query engine showing what software exists on the computers in the library

schoolteacher's balloon photographs edge of the earth

While surfing the net two years ago, the 41-year-old Albertan came across some visually stunning photographs of the Earth from way, way up that a man from California had captured in the 1990s, all with a big balloon and a "regular old" camera.

Mr. Rafaat's imagination soared.

...

Using a Kaysam weather balloon (bought as part of six-pack from New Jersey), a used Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera purchased off eBay, and a global positioning system tracking device, Mr. Rafaat and two of his balloon-enthusiast friends, Barry Sloan and James Ewen, released SABLE-3 (Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment) at 9:31 a.m. on Aug. 11. The camera - set to take photos at one-minute intervals - and the GPS were put into a Styrofoam box. That payload, built by Mr. Rafaat's Grade 7 science class, was affixed to a parachute, the parachute to the helium-filled balloon.

Globe and Mail - A view from the stratosphere - September 5, 2007

SABLE-3 (Note: site is slow)

For electronics they're using a Byonics Micro-Trak 300 transmitter (it's not a data logger).  Presumably attached to one of the Byonics GPS modules.  UPDATE 2007-11-10: In the comments they indicate the GPS is from SparkFun.

bulk buy of Globalsat DG-100 in Canada

B. Mann's GPS purchasing plan continues, so if you're a Canadian wanting to get a GPS logger, you might want to check it out.

Good news! I've been in touch with Corey Leach of Expansys / Mobile Planet, and he's agreed to help out with both a bulk buy and with getting a loaner unit out to the Chief Babelhead for the open source GPS Babel project

...

Corey Leach has suggested that the easiest way to make sure we get the discount applied is for everyone who is interested in purchasing to email him directly. We'll wait a couple of days to see if you get above 10 buyers, and then apply the discount and it will get shipped to everyone directly.

bmann's blog - Bulk buy of Globalsat DG100-GPS through Expansys - August 31, 2007

See GPS loggers and Macs: why can't we all get along? and dg-100 gps logger review and comparison for background information.

Google Earth Book Search Layer - geobooking is here

Google pushed out a new "Featured Content" layer today called "Google Book Search". This layer, when you turn it on, shows little book icon placemarks when you zoom into different places around the world. You don't have to enter a place into the search, just browse places and the placemarks will appear. These placemarks are results from search of places found mentioned in books indexed by Google's search engine. For famous places like "Rome", you will see a huge array of icons in a series of concentric circles. Each icons shows the results of that city mentioned in a particular book. There may be dozens of such references, but you you can click on a summary link that will take you straight to the book search results on a web page.

Google Earth Blog - New Google Earth Book Search Layer

This is very cool, but there are still loads of problems.
Click the book in the centre of the Ottawa ring

and you get The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, which is all very grand.  The hits are for Nepean, which is indeed an Ottawa suburb.  A suburb named for Sir Evan Nepean.  Unfortunately, Nelson is writing TO him, in his early days as Evan Nepean, Esq.  Nelson isn't writing about the town of Nepean at all.

Scanning the table of contents for the book points out another issue, which is that Google's digitisation is far from perfect, e.g. page xi where the left-hand side is cut off, losing about 10 characters.

Problems aside, it does turn up gems like Hudson's Bay: Or, Every-Day Life In the Wilds of North America by Robert Michael Ballantyne (1859)

On Sunday the 19th of October we commenced descending the magnificent river Ottawa, and began to feel that we were at last approaching the civilised nations of the earth.

Previously:
January 29, 2007  Google geobooking
January 12, 2006  libraries as warehouses of dead paper: set your books electronically free

GPS loggers and Macs: why can't we all get along?

The state of the union between inexpensive GPS loggers and the Mac is not so good improving.

As far as I know:

• The AMOD AGL3080 mounts as a USB drive on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and is therefore fully compatible.
• The Sony GPS-CS1 / GPS-CS1KA will mount as a USB drive but only on Intel Macs running OS X 10.4.9 and 10.4.10 (it doesn't work under Leopard 10.5 or 10.5.1) and is fully supported under Mac OS X 10.5.3 ONLY
  • However note: the GPS-CS1 is obsolete.  The new model that replaces it, the Sony GPS-CS3KA mounts as a USB drive under Mac OS X without any problems.  Tested with OS X 10.4.11
• The Globalsat DG-100 uses a serial interface protocol and only works on Windows
  • there is an initiative to get it to work using gpsbabel
  • there is an initiative to get it to work using LoadMyTracks
  • a combination of C code and a USB driver is reported to work on a Mac
• The Qstarz BT Q-1000 only works on Windows is supported on Windows, and on Mac using BT747.  (I have reviewed this GPS logger.)
• The Holux M-241 also works on a Mac using BT747, including over Bluetooth.  (I have reviewed the M-241.)
• The Wintec WBT-201 / 200 / 100 is supported via gpsbabel on a Mac.  This support is also incorporated into HoudahGeo for the Mac.
• The GISTEQ PhotoTrackr and PhotoTrackr Lite only work on Windows is supported on Windows with GISTEQ's own software, and on Mac with a version of JetPhoto.  (I have reviewed this GPS logger.)

Support efforts:

• Sony GPS-CS1 for Mac
• Boris Mann wants to use used Crowd Clout to buy at least 5 Globalsat DG-100s and (I think) gave one to the LoadMyTracks developers so they can make the software compatible.
• Hexten has info about the WBT-201 compatibility developed for gpsbabel.
• gpsbabel is also working on DG-100 support
• BT747 supports i-Blue, iTrek, and Qstarz, and the Holux M-241 GPS loggers on the Mac and other platforms (note: I have only tested Qstarz BT-Q1000 and Holux M-241 compatibility)
• Kevin Jaako has modified Mirko Parthey's dg100.c code, and successfully compiled and run it on a Mac (using a Prolific USB driver from SourceForge)

I suggest:
* Get Semsons connected with Mac GPS driver developers, in particular, free units to gpsbabel developers (which has the advantage of being cross-platform, so many users benefit, not just Mac users).

* Someone buy Steve Jobs a GPS and get him into geocoding photos.  Or convince him to put GPS-compatible mapping in the next generation of iPhone / iPhoto / MacBook / OS X and his reality-distortion strange attractor field will have developers clambering over one another to make their devices compatible.

UPDATE 2007-08-15: A question from me about Mac support for GPS loggers has now been posted to Macintouch

Also as you can see in the comments below, Mac support for the DG-100 in gpsbabel may be coming.  Please lend your support to these efforts if you can.

UPDATE 2007-11-20:  Updated info above based on Sony GPS-CS1 for Mac blog (Leopard and 10.4.11) and additional comments.

UPDATE 2007-11-23: See Sony GPS Logger On The Go - bridge to your Mac for one possiblity to use the Sony GPS-CS1 with a Mac or any other device that supports USB storage.

UPDATE 2007-12-21: It is reported that new versions of the Amod AGL3080 GPS Data Logger (SiRF III, Driverless, 128MB, Push to Log) (Windows and Mac Image Software included) are working well (there had been some GPS sensitivity issues as reported in a number of reviews).  It supports Windows and Mac out of the box, it works like a USB memory key (the same as the Sony GPS-CS1).

UPDATE 2008-01-03: AMOD is offering 4 AGL3080s for review by Mac users only.  First come, first serve.

UPDATE 2008-01-08: All four AMOD units have now been sent, the offer is now closed.

UPDATE 2009-02-16: Apple did in fact add GPS-compatible mapping to iPhoto 09.

manually geocoding photos on a Mac with GraphicConverter 6 and Google Earth

The new GraphicConverter 6 ($35 new or $20 upgrade for this venerable and invaluable Mac app) has an option to manually geocode photos, but it is so well-hidden I suspect few people will find it.

UPDATE 2009-01-06: The geotagging interface and capabilities of GraphicConverter 6.2 are considerably different, I will post an updated review.  The new version includes the ability to automatically geotag photos using a GPX track.  ENDUPDATE

1. Download GraphicConverter 6 and Google Earth Mac

2. Install the GraphicConverter Contextual Menu (this will come up as an install option, or you can do it from the menu GraphicConverter->Preferences... Plugins

You have to logout and back in, or reboot, for the contextual menu to activate the first time.
As far as I can tell, the Contextual Menu only appears in the GraphicConverter browser
File->Browse Folder...

3. Launch GraphicConverter browser.
Launch Google Earth and position your cursor at the precise location you want to geocode.
Switch back to GraphicConverter (e.g. using Apple key and Tab to switch applications).
Select photo(s) to geocode.
Select terribly-named menu item (right button contextual menu) "Set GPS from current Google Earth position" (it really should say "Set GPS-EXIF ...").

(You'll probably need to click through the above screen capture and look at the large image to read the menu clearly.)

Photos with GPS-EXIF have a little world icon in the upper right of their browser thumbnail.
You're supposed to be able to view geocoded photos in Google Earth using menu item "Show Position in Google Earth"

but I couldn't get it to work.

I know there are other tools out there (it would be nice if this was built-in to iPhoto 08, but I haven't seen any info about that).  You're welcome to list other Mac or web tools in the comments, I also have some of them listed on my geocoding photos page.  I thought it was worthwhile going through GraphicConverter since it's a very common/popular Mac image editor and the GPS-EXIF feature is really buried and obscured.

For Windows, there is a much nicer and easier manual workflow using Picasa and Google Earth.

UPDATE 2008-01-10: I have reviewed the Mac program HoudahGeo, as suggested in the comments.

GPS on a plane 2: San Francisco - Toronto - Ottawa

I have been interested in small, inexpensive GPS loggers mainly for geocoding photos.
My current fave is the Globalsat DG-100, despite its terrible software.
(It has the SIRFstar III chipset, which is sensitive enough to do this.  SIRFstar II may not be able to, at least I've never been able to get a lock on a plane using my Sony GPS.)

I have been interested to see if I can capture entire plane flights, including geocoding photos that I take in the air.  This is possible.

Please note however:
1) Ask the flight crew for permission (well, at least once per airline, anyway)
2) The logger I use is self-contained.  If you have a Bluetooth logger, or some other kind with some transmission facility, you may not be allowed to use it.  Only a few airlines permit Bluetooth, and I don't think any of them permit it during takeoff and landing

You have to be next to a window, the GPS needs a good sky view.  I usually hold it in my hand about 10-15 cm below and to an angle to the window during takeoff and landing, the rest of the time it can just sit on your seat tray.  You can see examples of the positioning at the bottom of this post.

So, what do you get?

Google Earth can read GPX files directly, this is the result of loading San Francisco to Toronto.
Just to emphasize, this is real data from my GPS.  There's a little leg there on the SF side which is my taxi ride from Mountain View.

If you want to get fancier, GPS Visualizer.com can take GPX files and do all sorts of cool things with them, including colouring by altitude or by speed, as well as making time-based tracks for Google Earth to play.

People often complain about GPS altitude estimation, but it looks fairly reasonable to me, 11000 metres.  The speed estimates on the other hand were way off, it estimated the plane was going like mach 3 if I read the numbers right.

I imagine the relative speed information is correct though.

Here's a view of my Toronto to Ottawa flight coloured by speed

And here's the same flight with Google Earth tilted, with a track produced using GPS Vis setting "Altitude: Absolute (flight)"

How accurate is it?  Well here's me landing in Toronto (cyan line)

And here's what I think is an amazingly cool comparison of a view in Google Earth compared with a photo whose geocoding tells me it was taken in the same spot

Google Earth, with geoposition of photo taken indicated within the screen cap, full photo below.  The zigzag road makes it pretty obvious they are images of the same location, one (probably) satellite, the other taken by me this morning

Positioning of GPS:

I will upload the GPX and KMZ track info later, so you can load the tracks into Google Earth yourself if you want.

Previously:
June 24, 2007  GPS on a plane