What I really need and want is a really flexible and useful “geo-tool” software application.

I have been gathering a lot of waypoints, tracks, location histories, notes, geo-photographs, etc. Yet when I want to put my location in a blog post, an email, a website, an article, or add metadata to a file, I have to dig through many programs, files, and then copy and paste. Perhaps even convert between DMS and DDMMSS.

This application should be enable me to store my waypoints and tracks. These would either be loaded from GPX files, hand entered, CSV files, drawn on a map, or geolocated by an street address. In addition, these tracks and waypoints could have time component.

I can then add notes or photographs to these locations and tracks, share these with friends, or easily search for things like “what photos have I taken in Southern Germany before 2004?”, or “what’s a good 3-5 mile hike I’ve done?”

Lastly, this tool would easily allow me to do local searches, enter the location latitude/longitude, address, or track information into text fields, as GeoRSS, XML, Microformat, or anything else. Place it directly on my clipboard for pasting, or pop-up a window with the information for me to edit, fill-in, then copy and paste. Or provide a Mac OS X service/hotkey that I would quickly enter this information into the current field in a program, or website.

Any other ideas on what this type of application should do or look-like? Is it a web-application? A desktop application would let me use it “in the field” where I may not have net access. So it could run a local-webserver if that were the case. But my data would have to be able to be private, though shareable is nice too. I could bundle up a track and photos/notes and send them to a friend or post them to a webpage.

So, I’ll be making it to the Where 2.0 conference coming up in San Jose, CA, June 13-14. I’m super excited to meet a lot of people I’ve corresponded with, but haven’t had the chance to meet yet. The Where 2.0 program looks really good. Some developers are even offering various internal organs to go.

I agree with Matt Croydon’s take on the 5/15-minute presentation schedule. It seems very “lightning round”, but also a really good way to get lots of ideas out and then move the interesting discussion to the sideline and various nightly gatherings.

In particular, the Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetings should be great. There is a Microformats meeting to discuss the possible directions microformat. also hope to meet with some of the GeoRSS developers and bloggers.

I’ve even secured a place at the Google Geo Developers day on June 12 - so I should get a chance to show off my cool mashup projects. Not to mention discussing other possibilities of visualizing geo-specific driving simulations in GoogleEarth.

I think my biggest concern about attending is wanting to meet everyone and discuss all the current ideas and possibilities in location information & mapping.

Of course, to get to California, I’m heading out of Vienna early, by way of Detroit, then on to San Francisco. Yay lots of time on a plane. Here’s to hoping for flying on something nice like an Airbus 330.

Technorati Tags: google, mapping, maps, where2.0

Last night I got to attend a talk given by Robin Chase, Founder and Former CEO of Zipcar. Her talk was titled “Sustainable Transportation and Accessibility Research & Transformation”, where she discussed how to decrease the impact of transportation on the environment and also using new transportation paradigms (such as shared car ownership) as a vehicle for bringing out mesh networks.

Mesh networks are simple: everything is a sensor and can connect to other sensors. She referred to it as “Ad Hoc Wireless networking”, but I think that confuses the issue, because then people start thinking it just means WiFi everywhere.

What it really means is that all of these sensors and network devices can talk to one another, gather, share, and use information. For example, if every car was a member of the mesh network, they would all share traffic information, road conditions, and driver destination, perhaps. Then your in-dash display would update real-time traffic ahead of you as each of these cars shared their data. Also, you may be able to get internet down the line as you all shared a common network system.

Other examples that have popped up in the past include finding potential mates/friends around you by a profile you broadcast, or tracking birds with RFID.

Of course, now that you have all this data, how do you share it? Robin says she envisions all of this being built on open-source technologies, to allow for “innovation” (aka ‘good hacking’). Open standards like GeoRSS could also be used to begin disseminating all of this data as it streams in and share it between devices. See the notes on Mikel’s XTech talk for more inspiration along those lines.

If the devices are cheap (< $100), open-design, and run on open-software, this is a great future. If, however, it is run by proprietary, expensive technology, and closed standards, then you’ll have a future where you get fast connections in your Ford car from other Ford cars, but no connection to all those BMW’s or Toyotas on the road.

A couple of days ago I mentioned some Greasemonkey scripts I wrote. One of them, which I didn’t discuss, is particularly devious.

What happens when users have the ability to hijack sites and how they expect to be used? For example, there are scripts to provide mapping functionality within Flickr!, or to compare book prices on Amazon.com with other vendors.

MapThis! overrides the “Map This!” link that shows up in GMail when an address is detected. Instead of linking to just a plain-ol’ googlemap, the link is “hijacked” to provide routing directions from the user’s geolocated position (using HostIP) to the address in the email.

This is useful, for example, if a friend sends you the address of their house, or that cool roller-rink with disco ball that you’re meeting up at and you want to quickly get directions.

It also demonstrates how a user isn’t limited by the interface a site-designer supplied, allowing them to customize and use the site as they wan.

For the past several months I’ve been playing with the Delorme Bluelogger GPS. It’s a very nice GPS receiver in its own right, but has the unique feature (for BT receivers) of including onboard logging. This is an great feature as it allows me to turn on the unit, toss it in my bag (somewhere on top, so it can still get a view of the sky) and forget about it. I don’t need to grab multiple devices, such as the receiver and a PDA or computer in order to receive and store my GPS waypoints.

This article will give a short overview of how to use the BlueLogger for a variety of applications. I use it primarily for geolocating photographs, but it’s also nice for any location-based activity.

The Bluelogger comes with the following:

• Bluelogger device
• Carrying case (with belt loop)
• Car charger
• Wall charger
• Charging stand (can work with either car or wall charger)
• Bluelogger Windows software

Connecting to GPS

To connect to the Bluelogger, you will need a bluetooth adapter. Many computers now come with bluetooth built-in or as an add-on option. If this isn’t the case, I would recommend the D-Link DBT-120. It’s probably the only D-Link product I can recommend, but I’ve had great luck with them, and never run into any device that it hasn’t worked with (and I have had problems with other BT adapters, especially on my Mac).

Once you have a bluetooth adapter, you will need to setup a connection to the device by pairing them. See your devices’/operating systems’ manuals on how to do this.

A very slick option is to run gpsd, which is a service-daemon running in the background that allows multiple connections to the single GPS device. Normally, only 1 software instance can connect at a time. With GPSd, you can “serve” your location. What would be really cool is to have GPSd be able to connect in with Geolocation by IP or Wifi as well as an actual GPS device to seamlessly switch between location technique.

GPSUtility is a nice, compact, graphical GPS application for Mac OS X. It can connect either directly to the GPS bluetooth port, or via gpsd. You can view location, satellite strengths, verbose NMEA output, and speed.

KisMac, while not a GPS-specific applicaiton, has excellent GPS support. KisMac is actually a wireless stumbler, which can also mark the latitude, longitude, and strength of detected networks and plot these on a map.

Storing & Viewing tracks

The Bluelogger software (currently Windows only) can export the tracks as GPL files. GPSBabel can convert these to a more useful format, such as GPX, which an XML format for GPS data.

Since using the bluelogger usually entails turning it on and off often, the entire track log will contain many separate trips. GPSBabel supports splitting up tracks based on a time separation. Each segment will be a self-contained track.

The following example will convert a GPL file to a GPX file, and make a individual track for any separation of 4 hours between points.

$ gpsbabel
  -i gpl -f Track_2005_11_23.gpl
  -x track,pack,split=4h,title="LOG # %c"
  -o gpx -F Track_2005_11_23.gpx

Displaying tracks

There are several options for displaying your tracks:

GPX Tracks

GPXLoader

• GPX Tracks HTML file

GPS and Nokia 770

ThoughtFix has a fairly comprehensive tutorial on setting up GPSDrive with a Bluetooth GPS receiver. They went with the i-Blue High Sensitivity Bluetooth GPS, which looks like a nice unit, but lacks logging.

Resources

• NMEA Protocol fields
• GPS Running Log -> GoogleMap on website
• Geocode Photos
• RoboGeo Windows photo-geocoding
• OziPhotoTool