I was looking at a certain area in North East part of India ( State called “Arunachal Pradesh”) which is integral part of India.

Both URL’s have different take. [Google Maps] shows it as Disputed Territory ( with Dash lines) and [Google Ditu] shows it altogether as part of China!

So, that got me unruffled and to question validity of both these sources. How does Ditu differ from Google maps? Whats association between the two and does Ditu has autonomy to change the boundary of the maps as per its wish.

Arunachal Pradesh is a border region between China and India – with 70% of the land being claimed by the Chinese as South Tibet. The border in question was decided in 1914 and called the McMahon Line, but never agreed upon by the Chinese. The Google Ditu vs. Google Map views.

Territorial disputes are definitely not a new thing – however what is perhaps alarming is that there are two different representations of reality from the same vendor and data providers. So this is entirely a representational decision that is most likely driven by business and government pressures.

What’s particularly interesting here is that primarily these definitions of boundaries derive from the data providers. You can look in the bottom right corner for who the data providers are. For both versions the providers are the same: TerraMetrics, Mapabc, and Europa Technologies.

So it seems that the cartographic designers at Google Ditu have decided to represent it a certain way. Unfortunately, the map has no additional metadata. As broad consumption of maps increases, there is a commensurate interest in the why and what behind them. Who said these are the boundaries, when were they set, and why are they shown in this language?

And I don’t mean the long reams of unreadable metadata that are the current standards in the geospatial community, I mean human understandable descriptions of the various aspects of the data, while allowing additional discovery to deeper data.

One place that you can look at the data behind the source of the map is in OpenStreetMap. Arunachal Pradesh is shown similar to Google Maps version, and a user could optionally download the data to see the attributes, edit history and sources. Alternatively I can look in GeoCommons for the GADM Admin boundaries of India and see pertinent data on who provided the data, sources, and so on.

Boundary disputes in a bi-directional medium

The representation of boundaries is obviously a very contentious issue in mapping. Maps are perceived, and often do inform, territory. There is a long history of map representation being used to influence, coerce, and force land rights.

Unfortunately, even in a “Web2.0″ world of bi-directional sharing and collaboration, with maps we’re still often forced to accept a particular viewpoint. They have on-the-ground meaning and political impact. A well known example of this were the first “edit wars” in OpenStreetMap with the names of places in Cyprus. The resolution was to by default abide by the on the ground signage, but also store both versions and allow users to provide their own personalized perspective.

Understanding, awareness, and discussion about these issues is the reason for projects like OpenStreetMap or GeoCommons where you can download the information, build and share your own maps that represent your perspective.There

There isn’t an easy answer here – with companies such as Google there are obviously market, and government, forces that direct how to represent contentious issues. The best solution is to offer background, open data, and alternative perspectives. Without a voice, citizens are relegated to discussions by officials they may, or may not, have elected – and no meaningful way to illustrate their interpretation.

When you register, you have to vote for at least 5 projects (to make sure people don’t just vote for their one personal favorite, but actually investigate other projects), and you can vote for up to 10 different projects.

I’ve personally been working with Alan Gutierrez of Think New Orleans on his incredible work in bringing awareness, and a stop to, the improper demolition of houses after Katrina. He is digitizing City Buiding permits, demolition plans, notifications, and incentive options to help citizens protect and rebuild their homes. He runs GIS coworking at Trinity church to educate local citizens on the use of GIS software for doing a lot of the heavy lifting – and we’ve been working with him to help bring all this together into the web to share and utilize by a broader community.

You can check out that project here: City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery

Another great project is Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya – where they’ve built a preliminary site to accept user-contributed information on violence outbreaks.

The projects are addressing real world issues with real solutions – so far they have had success on their own and are making a difference. Independently the projects will still be successful and important and their success will only be improved upon by support of the NetSquared community.

It can be daunting to hunt through the rest of the projects. It reminds me of going through conference submissions – I would recommend going through topical areas such as “Health”, “Community Improvement”, “Arts”, etc. to make it easier to compare all the great ideas and potentials.

Remember, voting is only open until this Monday, March 24, 2008 – so please register and vote!

24ways to impress your friends

I wrote a very quick introduction tutorial on adding maps to your web site using Mapstraction as part of the 24ways advent calendar.

KML 2.2 Request for Public Comment

The OGC recently announced a request for public comment of the first “OGC” version of KML, essentially a stamped 2.2 that is the currently documented Google version. The standard is available at the OGC site. This comment period runs from December 4 until January 3 – conveniently timed over the popularly vacant winter holidays, but that means nice fire-side reading.

Global Child Stories with the OLPC

Reading over the large catalog of applications available an in development for the OLPC, I ran across the “Our Stories” application, developed jointly with UNICEF nad Google support, to provide a platform and site for children to annotate their communities and lives. The companion site, OurStories.org is a simple, but intriguing map of the stories from around the world. Makes me really think I need to get an OLPC to work on projects like this to help enable story telling and community building. Oddly the projec is using a unique OurStoriesXML rather than something like Atom which supports all of the desired functionality (title, description, photos, location, audio, author). I’ve suggested this on the wiki discussion.

I’m setting up a special “travelog” installation of GeoPress that I’ll be using while traveling through China and will drop a link here when it’s ready.

So in the style of LabNotes, I’m going to periodically drop a quick post on the various topics and ideas I’m tracking. It’s kind of a mix of my del.icio.us feed (which I removed auto-posting to this blog, if you want the feed, just get that feed), twitter, tumblr, and my blog reader.

Location Patents that shouldn’t have been awarded – Apple recently applied for a Locative Media patent and Google was awarded a Geo-Ranking patent – both of which, on the surface, appear to be common techniques implemented in other systems. But obviously the USPTO knows.

http://my.templated.url/{-prefix|/iscooler/thanWho} – BitWorking has a draft for advanced URI templates that address some of the vocalized shortcomings of the otherwise very powerful, and widely used, OpenSearch. Namely the ability to specify several search endpoints for a single service and also rulesets for additional information required depending on the type of search. This could be very useful for continuing development of RESTful OGC services like WMS and WFS. Check out the Addressable rubygem for easy parsing and template completion of these types of URI’s.

GeoAppleTV? – someone wrote a GPS Plugin for AppleTV extensions of AwkwardTV – it’s called Road Trip and would be useful for an in-vehicle carputer. Though I still think the MacMini makes a better platform due to the optical drive, full install of OS X, and multiple ports. But the AppleTV is small and boots fast.

?q=open+mobile+software-gphone – It’s not really surprising that Google isn’t doing hardware, but instead is developing and supporting a mobile software stack. That’s what they’re good at. Leave chipsets and electronics to the SaMotorachi’s of the world (oh, and Apple).

I’ll be in Chicago later this week and I am completely psyched about the Chicago Festival of Maps. I’m just annoyed by the lack of GeoRSS/KML export of the events and locations. Looks like I’ll need to spend some time on Platial and Mapufacture to make my travel itinerary and access it on my mobile in the field.

It’s a really interesting experiment in your ability to track, both through your eyes, and perception of the objects as they move about in your periphery. Perhaps it’s a good indicator of “multi-taskability”.

However, for me, the most striking thing I found was while playing with the object tracking, I felt just like I often do when working on several projects at once. There are some ‘primary’ goals, objectives I want to or need to achieve. Bouncing around with these are a bunch of other tasks that do a lot to distract: blogging, IRC, chat, cats, food, etc. Can you track the projects for the distractions?

By the way, I got a perfect scores on all the levels, so I guess that bodes well for my projects – or perhaps I just didn’t go to a high-enough level of spies.

Tags: multitasking, guelph, tigert, faces, fun, game, psychology,

Therefore, it was a happy surprise when one of the hosting companies I use (such as this blog), Dreamhost, announced they are carbon neutral. What this means is they’ve purchased certificates from a carbon offset provider. You can be carbon neutral by planting trees, using renewable energies, use carbon sequestration techniques, or the easy (yet effective) method of buying carbon offsets from an organization that will do this for you.

The internet, and computing usage, has a huge, and growing, impact on the environment. Companies create power stations just to power large internet companies and their hosting requirements. Therefore it is important to understand this impact and alleviate it through any of those means mentioned above.

In some ways, it is buying yourself the “Green” label, but in the end the effect is the same. You’re putting your money where the need is, saving the environment.

So the question you should all be asking yourselves: “Is my hosting provider carbon neutral?” If not, make them, or move to one that is.

Update: for the low-down on how carbon offsets reallythis informative-info-graphic from Salon. (thanks to Sean Gillies for being the sleuthy detective in finding this gem via Reddit).

Tags: environment, environmental, dreamhost, carbonneutral, carbonoffset, verdantconcepts,

iCommunity.tv is a fore-runner in providing video media primarily centered around geography in addition to focusing on citizen journalism , and not just videos of crazy stunts and movies served up by other media sites. Users can create custom channels and collections based on their interests and locations.

They offer a GeoRSS feed and a KML feed of the postings – which means it works very well in your Mapufacture Maps. See the feed map. Now you can add the feed to any of your Mapufacture maps to get update when a new video shows up in your community (or area of interest, for example where your family lives or you’re going to take a vacation)

Lastly, under the hood, iCommunity.tv is built on top of the Drupal CMS platform and is an excellent example of the power behind building a GeoCMS. In the future, Chris possibly plans to offer the ability for users to aggregate their video blogs through the service to allow for easier posting.

iCommunity.TV is a service of eParticipation.com

Locality also varies scope depending on what you’re talking about. Are you physically going to a restaurant? You probably are looking fairly close. Do you want an update on news? Then the larger metro area is more interesting. Weather? You’re looking at national regions (or local too, if you live near interesting geographical features).

But what do you call it?

To add to the concept, or confusion, is what people refer to these localities as. Is it: NoVA (’no-vah’), Northern Virginia, or just DC? And what would a tourist guide from Madagascar refer to it as?

Of course, English speakers are often have it a little easier because many locations have an English name – even if the location itself isn’t an English speaking location. Of course, this happens all of the time in other languages as well for English locations. But you probably recognize Roma is Rome, and España, is Spain. However, do you know where Vereinigte Staaten is? Or what about 中國 (Zhōngguó)?

We’re constantly referring to locations by names we’ve given them and not as they’re known by the people that live there. The term for giving a name for a location that isn’t used by the locals at that location is an exonym. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

An exonym is a name for a place that is not used within that place by the local inhabitants, or a name for a people or language, that is not used by the people or language to which it refers.

The name that a location is referred to by the locals is an endonym.

What is interesting looking at exonyms is that they are a marker of levels of foreign involvement in the region. As cities and areas became colonized or visited by outside people, they would typically be bequethed a name in the new language. Some of these names would just be used by the visitors, but in many cases, for long periods of time this exonym would be the official name of the city. For example, look at former Soviet states or India (Bhārata Gaṇarājya).

There was a lot of this in New Zealand as well, where the Pakeha (Europeans) would bestow English names to the large ports and coastal cities. But as you venture out of the cities and leave Auckland or Christchurch, you start passing Whangarei, Tonagariro, or Oamarau.

For a demonstration of some variations of the names in Europe, check out the Interactive Map of EUROPE and database of exonyms.

We can all just get along

Internationalization of applications has long been a difficult task and subject. It is made even more relevant as the internet, and websites, becomes widely available in many more countries. Users speaking their native languages will want to view maps of their localities, using the endonyms, localized names.

This will be especially important for projects like OpenStreetMap that seeks to create a global map, for the people. There are projects in many other, non-English speaking, countries that are doing similar projects for their own regions, and presumably in their own languages.

And excellent example is the Mumbai FreeMap that seeks to “develop an open-access spatial data infrastructure, and a set of simple tools and applications in localised in Indian languages, for knowledge transfer and participatory urban planning by communities and citizens in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.”

How do you find all the names for a location? Flickr geocoding leverages people’s own terminology for location and maps it to a location. So a photo taken by an English speaker in Germany may be labelled: Germany, Munich. Whereas taken by a native German speaker may be labelled: Deutschland, München. Together, these tags describe the same location, but with the exonym and endonym.

So when developing web applications, in particular geographic services, keep in mind who your users will be and how they will use your tools. They may be locals and want to use their own names, or they may be visitors or virtual tourists and interested in learning more about the world outside their window.

Tags: locality, location, local, earthcode, geo, exonym, endonym, linguistics, languages, mumbaifreemap,

In a project known as PigeonBlog, sensors in the backpacks collect data on toxic gases, such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, as the birds wing through city skies.

The information is then sent back to a central computer, which automatically posts a map of the pollutants’ concentration on the Internet.

The entire package costs just $250 USD and weighs 1.3oz. Not a bad size for distributing these to people to carry around as well. Apparently the sensor itself is a modified smoke detector.

Go check out PigeonBlog

Tags: pigeons, sensorweb, environment, monitoring, nationalgeographic, pigeonblog

The other day he fixed his brain by speaking rhyme. Not only was he able to say the rhyme using a normal voice, it rewired his brain to now allow him to speak normally!

An excellent example of how really odd and complex the human brain is.

- via BoingBoing

Tags: scottadams, speech, health, boingboing, spasmodicdysphonia, brain, amazing

In particular, it covers how GeoRSS can enable environment monitoring and notifications and is useful for more than (though in addition to) tracking your friends and travel photographs.

You should also see the NG article on Global Positioning Tech Inspires Do-It-Yourself Mapping Project, about OpenStreetMap.

Tags: georss, environment, nationalgeographic, geo, rajsingh, mikelmaron, timhibbard, openstreetmap, osm

I think this is a simply marvelous idea. I’ve been in several European cities when they’ve had “Car Free days”, most recently in Brussels during EuroOSCON. The idea is one day of the week that everyone will go car free, and enjoy the relative quiet and easy biking/strolling about town.

Overall, I am an idealistic technocrat. I really enjoy technology, gadgets, programming, etc. However, I also enjoy natural beauty and the environment as it is. I hope that towns here in the US start promoting these sorts of activities. I mean, what’s the worse that can happen, people actually think its a good idea and turn off their lights at night?

You should also check out Sustainable Detroit, which is working to promote the idea of sustainable living. Power to them!

Technorati Tags: michigan, sustainable

Craig is definitely a geek, but also a geek who has gained some interesting experience with web society. To start-off, Craigslist currently has 190 sites in 35 countries, 10 million viewers per month looking at over 3 billion pages. All this with only 21 employees. For me, that was the biggest suprise of the night. With the amount of moderation, infrastructure, support, development, accounting, managing, selling (real estate, job, and apartment postings are paid), for 10 million users per month, this seems rather amazing.

Overall, the discussion was around how Craigslist, while not radical in its own right, has been steadily at the forefront and plodding along with the forefront of web culture and a connected society. The moderator brought up the points that Craigslist has been accused for the: death of newspapers, end of proper scientific study, and even the demise of pimps. It is an excellent example of user-created content made for other users creates an entire culture. It came at a time when the technology was becoming widespread and people wanted a new method of disseminating information, thoughts, and odd items for sale nearby. Craigslist was also the inspiration behind what I think was the first Web 2.0 mashup, HousingMaps (which retains as stark a UI as Craigslist itself).

Traditional media and culture is complaining that this “free for all” is ruining their revenue streams while also bringing down quality. Yet, people continue to seek and use this truly level forum rather than the Top-Down, one-way direction of traditional media. As Craig pointed out, for example, online/electronic forums can “deal with” information that is out there by correcting it, removing it, moderating it or otherwise, whereas traditional media will not be able to react, retract, or correct the original (and possibly inappropriate) classified ad or news article.

Lastly, there was discussion of the various “wars” that are waged on online forums like Craigslist. The current big war is the hot-bed discussion between pet-breeders and people who want their animal companions au naturál. There are also continual problems of dis-information ala certain public officials.

You know you’ve done well as a Website when you warrant your own Wikipedia article.

I recently put together another project, the Forest Images Registry Project (or F.I.R.), for GreenerMagazine in conjunction with Dirty Greek and SustainaBlog. This project is a response to the recent US Government decision to approve the sale of US National Forest lands to raise money for rural buildings. See the recent Environmental News Network press release.

The FIR is to gather photographs and stories of visitors to these wonderful forests before they’re gone and to hopefully raise public awareness of the situation and contact their government representative with the citizen’s viewpoints.
If you would like to contribute images, check out the Forest Images Blog and join the Flickr! Group and triple-tag your images.

fir:forest=nameofforest
and/or
geo:lat=latitude
geo:lon=longitude
and/or
fir:state=statename

As a colophon, the Forest Images Registry Project site is written in Ruby on Rails (edge) and uses the Cartographer and rflickr plugins. The site is undergoing very active development, so stay tuned for some upcoming features.

Using all COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) parts, one can build a good, wifi-enabled, computer and VOIP station. Combine these computer specs with the free and distributable Wireless Networks in the Developing World, and you have very ubiquitous, low-barrier to entry, computing. (via Boing-Boing)

The total power is claimed to be:

• Computer: 10W
• Display: 10W
• Wifi: 3W
• VOIP SIP (phone) connection: 2-3W
• Total: 26W

Of course, the MacMini is purported to require only about 25W on idle, up to 40W working (without display or VOIP), and a Powerbook about 15W (30W on heavy usage).

For various reasons, they’re using Blogger to currently run their weblogs since it’s free, easy to setup, and easy to use for non-technical people.

The goal of GreenerEarth was to create a companion weblog that provided maps and locations to the various articles that will appear on GreenerEarth. The difficulty resides in the severe restrictions using an hosted blogging tool places on creating a dynamically generated maps. I wanted to allow the writers to easiliy create new posts, put in locations, and then just ‘post’. The actual page would handle parsing the post for the location data and then creating the resulting map.

The only access you have in Blogger (at least) is the main template page, and post templates. Therefore, the solution calls for a marked-up post with lots of tags, and heavy Javascripting of the DOM to dynamically create an array of locations and put these on a GoogleMap.

The result is the ability for any blog author to write a post using the template and the resulting post to have a map with the multiple (or single) locations and article body. As the user clicks on locations in the map, the detailed description shows itself and a bubble shows the summary and link to the site’s homepage.

The nitty-gritty

The post template looks like this:

The fields should be pretty self-explanatory. The GeoRSS microformat is still being standardized, and hasn’t yet been defined for marking up XHTML content. So I made an ad-hoc solution. A filled out post would then look like so:

Sustainable Diamaonds

  Diavik diamond mines are sustainable Mines
   located in the Northwest Territories.
  
homepage
Diavik diamond mine
Lac de Gras
Northwest Territories
Canada


  Some Interesting information
  about Diamond mines

If you have multiple locations, copy the template before the

“;

var marker = createMarker(locationPoints[locationPoints.length-1], i, html, mapLocation[i]);

map.addOverlay(marker);

}
map.addOverlay(new GPolyline(locationPoints));
map.centerAndZoom(locationPoints[0], 4);

}

Finally, the appropriate CSS markup also needs to be placed in the template. Modify it as you want to make it match the rest of your blog.

#map {
    float: left;
    text-color: black;
    font-size: 12px;
    }
#map .mapMarker{
  color: black;
  width: 250px;
}

#map .mapMarkerMore {
  text-align:right;
}
.location {
    font-size: 12px;
    border: 1px solid white;
    background-color: gray;
    padding-left: 5px;
    }
.location .summary {
    color: white;
    font-size: 16px;
    border-bottom: 1px solid white;
    background-color: #9ad;
    margin-left: -5px;
    padding-left: 5px;
    display:block;
    }
.location .detail {
	display: inline;
    }
.geo_name {
    font-size: 11px;
    border-bottom: 1px;
    }

.geo_city, .geo_region, .geo_country {
    display: inline;
    margin-top: 4px;
    padding-right: 3px;
    font-size: 9px;
    border-top: 1px solid white;
    text-align: right;
    }

.greenNav {
	display: inline;
	list-style-type: none;
	padding-right: 5px;
	margin: 0px;
    }
.greenNav li {
	display: inline;
	list-style-type: none;
	border-right: 1px solid gray;
	padding-right: 5px;
    }
.hidden {
    display: none;
     }

I spent a good part of my evening partying it up with a bunch of AARP-types and a very excellent gentleman that happens to be my fiancé’s grand-father. Enroute, after almost a year of “trying to remember”, we picked up a Olympus WS-100 digital voice recorder. The idea being to record all of the great stories, conversations, histories, and lives of our families for archiving, later reviewing and retelling, and other possible “mash-ups”. I’ll post a better review later, but it seems to work rather well.

A few resolutions for the new year:

1. Install bug-tracking software for my open-source projects
2. finish some of my projects – specifically, lay out a timeline, action items, and milestones and meet them before starting new projects.
3. learn another foreign language – teetering between Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. I really want to learn Japanese but the local course times and a potential future outlook preference Chinese.
4. Plan a wedding

For this year’s christmas we got a live Fraser Fir. I highly recommend getting a live tree. It’s definitely better than mounting a carcass in your living room, stringing it with various decorations, and watching it wither away. Instead, our tree will get to enjoy all the merriments of the holidays, and then return to the wild outside and join compatriots for the winter, awaiting the arrival of another holiday next year.

For your edification, here is a summary of some other winter solstice stories & traditions:

• The egyptian god Osiris was entombed: “At midnight, the priests emerged from an inner shrine crying ‘The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing” and showing the image of a baby to the worshipers.”
• In ancient Greece, the winter solstice ritual was called Lenaea, the Festival of the Wild Women. In very ancient times, a man representing the harvest god Dionysos was torn to pieces and eaten by a gang of women on this day.
• The popularly known Roman holiday Saturnalia began as a feast day for Saturn on December 17 and of Ops on December 19. About 50 BCE, both were later converted into two day celebrations. During the Empire, the festivals were combined to cover a full week: December 17 to 23.

However you choose to celebrate the solistice – have a good one.