MapQuest uses an “Outie” tab (highlighted in the screenshot below). The design choice was clearly to make it very explicit for users to show and hide the sidebar as it protrudes into the map interface. The pan and zoom controls are on the right-hand side, so when you toggle the sidebar, the controls stay in the same location. Another interesting aspect is how the map resizes. In MapQuest, the same geographic center and extents remain in the screen center – so as the sidebar closes the map shifts to the left and expands slightly.

Curious about how this varies, I checked in Google Maps. They chose to be much more subtle about their sidebar toggle. It is an “innie” that is subtly hidden within the header. Closing the sidebar turns the selection to an “outie”, but still remains out of the way in the header. A particularly interesting decision is that the map remains in the same location – so the zoom pan controls move but new areas of the map are exposed. So while the user doesn’t have a context shift (points on the map remain in the same area of the screen) the map now needs to be recentered so that the focus area can be kept in the center.

Lastly, looking at Bing maps it’s a bit of a hybrid between the two. The sidebar tab is in the header like Google, but hiding the sidebar re-centers the map like MapQuest. The controls in Bing are in the header, so they don’t need to shift when the sidebar is toggled. What’s perhaps a little confusing is there is also an “X” close button next to the sidebar tab that clears the search results. It’s not really clear why you would want to clear results – and instead there should be an option to go back to the “table of contents” or similar concept that shows simple links for directions and more.

Much like the emergence of Pan-Zoom bars have become the defacto standard in web mapping interfaces – the sidebar has also become nearly ubiquitous. So it’s interesting to see the slight variations as interaction designers experiment with what users will find easy to understand.

So of course, like any village, it needed to be mapped. I went down Saturday afternoon and captured the locations and names of all the buildings and paths that will be up for the week. These are then loaded into OpenStreetMap with start_date and end_date tags that notify the renderer when the features should be visible. It’s a similar model to how Burning Man is mapped year after year as it walks along the Black Rock Desert.

It’s ephemeral mapping – objects that exist in real place, but just for small slices of time. Important as any other building, yet typically relegated to flyers or verbal descriptions.

The fascinating part of projects like this is that OpenStreetMap allowed me to create a map that was useful and immediate. Within minutes of uploading the data, it was available as rendered tiles, vector data, and downloadable to GPS units and iPhones. People on the mall could immediately view the local map with this new information.

It’s a nice demonstration of how community projects like OpenStreetMap will continue to innovate faster, and more openly, then other ‘crowd-sourcing’ options.

Of course, within minutes of walking in I started getting feature requests from reporters and bloggers. One of these was the ability to easy page through reports by state (hint: http://votereport.us/?count=200&state=VA).

We did our best to get a quick web-based map visualization up that would be usable by a large number of people with basic browsers. This limited the number of markers to 200 (one reason we chose to use Flash for our current rendering tool). However, one way of addressing this was to offer a KML file that works very well in GoogleEarth for large sets of markers. Here are the 10,000 reports as of this evening.

Another feature we snuck in recently are some simple statistics on the number and time of reports today at http://votereport.us/reports/stats:

To close out this post – we searched the database to pull up this great audio report by keema: http://votereport.us/reports/9240 – I highly suggest you listen to it.

There were several issues at hand – one was the lack of available, accessible data. I started adding data sources to the wiki page, and when available uploaded them to GeoCommons Finder! tagged ‘gustav’. Sean offers great reasons on the importance of data sharing (and some more really great previews of Maker!).

Ed shares his thoughts on the overall experience and also questions the impact? Having spoken often with people such as Jesse Robbins and Mikel on their work in helping out in disaster response technology development and deployment the primary lesson I’ve picked up is: iterate.

Of course, Gustav fading out does not mean everything is clear and over. New Orlean citizens are still not supposed to come back into the city, there are still major power outages, and there was already a huge amount of work continuing from the Katrina recovery. There has been a marked neglect of public assistance on non-US regions such as Cuba and the DR. In addition, there are more storms coming up this season – so make sure and pitch in to help out if you can.

There are several easy ways to fix this. The first was to look at the Ditu tiles, and confirm they are the same as Google’s nominal tiling scheme. Which means you can add the China Street tiles as a simple GTileLayerOverlay with Google Maps standard satellite view underneath. This was incredibly easy with Mapstraction and I put up a demo here.

For bonus points I even added a Mapufacture syndicated feed of Erik’s venues for LocWeb2008 and nearby Wikipedia articles from Geonames.

The other way

The terms of how mixing Google’s various tiles together isn’t clear. So the other way to address his issue is to use the freely available data.

Namely, OpenStreetMap for roads, OpenAerialMap or other remote imagery, and run in OpenLayers. Here is the same map done with open data and open source. The resolution or completeness isn’t there yet, but you can see where it’s going and the ability to be use the information as you want is very appealing.

On Tuesday I’m giving a lightning talk, “Beyond GPS – Neogeography Data Collection”. I’ll give a quick overview of what people are now starting to map with for aerial imaging, environmental monitoring, traffic, mileage, and more. The conference looks really great – particularly because it’s covering the future of a number of subjects I’m interested and participating in such as APP, REST, GeoRSS, KML, and more.

I’m going early because over the weekend we’re having a OpenStreetMap Victoria Mapping Party. This will be my first OSM Mapping Party – but I’ve heard great things about them, and always lots of Pub time after the good workout.

The map below is the OpenStreetMap coverage of Victoria. I’m embedding it using GeoPress and Mapstraction (end plug). If you read this post before Sunday, September 23, 2007 you’ll see a several holes in the coverage of roads. Hopefully, after this Sunday you’ll see nearly complete coverage.

And if you’re in the area of Victoria (either side of the border) this weekend or Monday, then definitely stop in with or without a GPS receiver to join in on the fun.

(250,400,openstreetmap)

Tags: openstreetmap, osm, victoria, britishcolumbia, canada, mapping, foss4g, foss4g2007, gps, crowdsourcing, party, mappingparty

First is Poly9’s FreeEarth. It is a 3D globe viewer that embeds in your browser and is surprisingly fast and easy to use. They also say they’ll be releasing a Javascript API for it. Who needs GoogleEarth in the browser now? You can do your KML, GeoRSS, or other visualization right in the browser. And definitely check out the mixed 2D/3D view that lets you slide a map to control the globe.

Another neat project that was actually released in April, but I just saw today, is ShapeWiki. It was made by Andre Lewis, who co-wrote the Google Maps Applications with Rails… book (review coming shortly). It’s a very nice little application for drawing shape outlines and retrieving the information in generic XML, JSON, or GoogleMaps Javascript.

However, ShapeWiki doesn’t support GeoRSS output (or any RSS) of new Shapes – so everyone drop Andre a lineand let him know this would be a useful feature!

Both projects illustrate how Geo-tools are becoming both easy to use and powerful. I can’t wait to see more of this stuff at Where2.0 (or Where2.2?) and WhereCamp!

Now, they know what mapping is, check out their cool transit services. There is even a 3D Atlas of Ann Arbor in Google Earth.

It’s not hard to make this into a more usable dynamic map. I used the MetaCarta’s Map Rectifier to take the campus map image, rectify it using several control points (intersections and circles work great for this) and created a slippy campus map.

You can play with the actual Campus Map here on MapSomething. The next steps would be searchable campus directory, click on buildings to get info on rooms, open times, phone numbers, a way to upload your schedule and have it plan out your route, etc.

Maybe I should send this on over to the School of Information or the Community Information Corps

Tags: geo, maps, university, universityofmichigan, metacarta, rectifier, michigan, cic

This is nice in a couple of ways. First, MaemoMapper, and the underlying Maemo, are open-source applications. So it’s nice to use open geodata. Second, using and caching Googlemap/Yahoo/et al. tiles is probably a violation of their Terms of Service, especially when you use them for realtime navigation. By using OpenStreetMap as the default mapping tile provider, MaemoMapper now provides a base functionality that is free for stringy ToS that could get it into trouble and question its existence.

Tags: nokia, n800, maemomapper, openstreetmap, osm, henribergius, geo, mapping, maps, opensource

What’s interesting is that the map has moved from the sidebar, or in post, to the most prominent space on the page.Michael also did a very nice job with unique marker icons based on the post/image/tour.

This is a feature I’d like to add to GeoPress, pulling in and aggregating multiple GeoRSS streams, to mix-in with your blog posts. Currently, you can do this with Mapufacture, but it would be nice to build this all into GeoPress itself.

Tags: dancatt, geobloggers, mapping, geoblog, michaeltyler, travel

Geoblogging is just becoming more common, and the tools around it are figuring out what the user should be able to do. GeoPress provides a web interface for making maps and location for posts, but doesn’t yet support additional metadata for setting the location via the XML-RPC interface that a blogging client would use.

One tool that adds geoblogging capabilities to ecto is this very informative Wiki on Geo-blogging extensions on Mac that works for Blojsom based blogs. The site is a great resource on various tools and accessories for posting KML and GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps for geoblogging.

The tool works by bringing up GoogleEarth where you can spin, point, or reference an existing waypoint to choose the posting location. The plugin will then add the location metadata, a GoogleEarth KML Link, and also a screenshot of the location. Check out the Screencast for a demo of how to use the geoblogging toolkit and its functionality.

After you’ve gone around and collected all the things you’ll want to do, you actually go into your travel planner. Here you can pull back up short descriptions, web sites, phone numbers and addresses of any of the collected items. You can also drag and drop these into a calendar to build up your itinerary. When you put successive activites in different regions a small link will appear that will give you travel information between the areas. This includes driving times and distances, airline carriers, or rail options.

If you’ve selected a “pre-designed trip” it will be brought into your calendar as several days of activities. For example, I brought in a 3-day driving trip of the southern cities of Dunedin, Invercargill, and Te Anau. I then added accomodations at the end of each day and other activies to do on the route.

And of course, after you’ve built up your calendar you can then view a map of your collection or your actual itinerary along with suggested or defined routes.

After you’ve done all this, you can then share your itinerary and contact information with a travel agent, friends/family (so they know where you’ll be and how to get in touch), or for your own use for saving or printing along the way.

For general information that isn’t part of a location you can add your own “Notes” and attach these at any point in the trip. This may be for suggestions you’ve received from friends or contacts.

Overall, NewZealand.com is an incredible resource and should serve as a model for any travel site.
Gusto uses the model of gathering up sites and locations, but just isn’t quite as smooth as NZ.com does it.

A couple of things I wish the site did:

• The map and calendar hold a lot of information and should be resizable to view larger
• Export a set of driving directions and option GPX file for loading into a GPS or Nav system. Obviously this also includes exporting GeoRSS and KML for viewing in other maps, feeds, or GoogleEarth
• iCal export of itinerary

Tags: travel, newzealand, gusto, maps, mapping, webbyawards, gpx, georss, kml, ical

Of course, this is a bright time in online tourism. There are a lot of resources out there for travelers who want to find out more about destinations and share their travels.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be reviewing some of the excellent New Zealand travel resources we used to plan our trip and of course arm ourselves with all the necessary mapping and neogeography tools.

Of course, I’ll be posting geotagged photos to Flickr, and using GeoPress in my Travel Blog.

Here is a quick list of basic travel sites for gathering & sharing travel stories:

• TripHub – Easily plan and organize your trip for free
• MapSack – Travel in the Know
• TripTracker
• GeekyTraveller
• World66 & WikiTravel
• TravelBlog – GlobeTrotting Documented
• Gusto – travel + lifestyle
• TrekEarth – Learning about the world through photography

He mentions the “Here be Dragons” experience of people really wanting to go out there and find the unmapped places. This is how OSM really got off the ground in the first place, as most of the world was “Dragon-land” and everyone’s individual contribution made a huge difference, at least in the UK/Europe.

Data as good and bad

The US still doesn’t have great OSM representation. One response I’ve heard from the OSM crowd is, “the US already has TIGER/Line data, so there’s less impetus for people to go out and contribute new data”. There were very few “unknown areas”, so people found less benefit to put effort into adding those few places. Now, with Yahoo’s imagery & an applet to automatically generate roads, will there be the same effect in the UK/Europe? Nearly overnight the amount of mapped areas with dramatically increase with little to no effort by the actual mappers. While their efforts made OSM what it is, and therefore made it possible and useful for Yahoo to give the imagery, I wonder if they’ll now feel they’ve partly “lost their voice”?

Will looking at the next generation OSM map and seeing 90% coverage make the developers/gatherers more apathetic about setting up mapping parties? What happens when you go from the underdog to the superdog? Google is dealing fairly well with it – they spend a lot of effort to seem like a “small company” – but when you have an open call to hire more than 150 engineers, you’re not small.

Bring out your users… <dong>

What this data definitely will do is bring more users to the project, whereas before there were mostly devs/contributors, and very few users. We’ve already seen some of the first commercial uses of OSM data, albeit for very specific locations. With more data, better coverage more developers can use OSM data for their projects. And perhaps we’ll even see people able to load the data into their GPS receivers or nav systems and use them as their primary mapping source.

Having users is a whole different set of issues than what OSM has dealt with in the past. Part of the growing pains is dealing with a quick increase in the community size which can affect the quality of data, reduction in a feeling of ‘community’, and also just dealing with common issues, support, and questions from new people as they start flooding in.

Simple Inspirational

The primary contributors to OSM have been in Europe, and they’ll probably have the largest change from development to users. European contributors will have to deal with the possibility loss of identity that they had with OSM as a grass-roots organization and helping shape it as a larger, more stable entity.

But another benefit of this huge surge in usefulness and visibility of OSM is that it should inspire contribution and development around the world. It can spur users in Asia, New Zealand, Africa, and South America what the power and purpose can be in contributing new data. They’ll now see OSM not just as a bunch of geeks “over in Europe” running around with GPS units, but a solid, useful, system where they can contribute to and really use this new data and services.

Of course, all this will still take some time. OSM just got the imagery, and they’re still working out the bugs and features of the applet to convert the images to real street data. But it’s definitely a turning point in the open-geodata front, one that will cause quite a bit of excitement.

And good luck conquering the last of the dragon-lands.

Tags: openstreetmap, stevecoast, geobloggers, osm, yahoo, mapping, maps, geo, neogeography, gps,

The quality of the resulting maps from data gathered by “people on bikes” is rather incredible. Granted, the maps are currently mostly used around places like the Isle of Wight that have super-good coverage due to the enviously fun mapping parties.

It’s interesting in that a very commercial site is using and supporting an open-initiative to gather free geodata and finds it high enough quality to use for selling high-priced items to customers. So instead of paying continual royalties to large mapping suppliers, or dealing with possibly incompatible (or variable) terms of service, companies can help guide and support open-source projects with the desired functionality, and get to use the resulting products in a much more amenable manner.

And to give them extra-special open-source goodness, Nestoria supported the development of Mapstraction, the free and open-source “cross-mapping” javascript library that is used in GeoPress.

Tags: openstreemaps, osm, nestoria, mapstraction, maps, geo, realestate

What is really exciting is the ability to load up personal POI. For example, I am going on a road trip and want to get all my favorite restaurants, WiFi locations, friends’ houses, and hiking trails for Michigan and sourthern Canada. This could be a GPX file, or GeoRSS feed from Mapufacture.

The Garmin Nuvi supports this using their POI Loader, which will take a GPX or CSV file and load it onto our GPS. The Nuvi looks really great, but is an external solution. Built-in navigation systems offer better integration into the interior and usually better sensors. For example, my Prius (Akius) has in-wheel hub sensors for integrating distance traveled when GPS isn’t available. Now if only the in-car navigation systems (which cost a bundle more, on an order of magnitude) offered similar functionality, upgradeability, and best of all: hackability.

Maemo Mapper is a free and open-source mapping application, designed from the ground-up for the Nokia 770. However, a large caveat is that it uses GoogleMaps in what is probably a violation of the terms of service (realtime navigation and downloading), not to mention annoying in that you have to “pre-drive” your route to cache the appropriate GoogleMap tiles.

GPSDrive now supports OpenStreetMap for downloading free maps.

I’ve gotten slightly involved in the new GeoClue project – an effort to provide an easy “location service” backend for devices. The location on the device may be served up by GPS, WiFi, GeoIP, Mobile Cell/GSM, or even just the user clicking on a map or entering an address. Then, an application can subscribe to the location service and get updated with the current location of the user/device and use it as appropriate.

At FOSS4G I attended a BOF (Birds of a Feather – people interested in the same stuff) on Mobile GIS. The software and technology all exist, it just needs some coordinated efforts to define the use cases, interfaces, and approaches. However, one solution won’t fit everyone. There are users who want to do “real GIS” in the field and there are users who want to do “neogeography” to say, find the nearest coffee shop on their mobile.

Tags: neogeography, mobile, gis, mobilegis, nokia770, geoclue, maemomapper, gpsdrive, openstreetmap, navicore, maps, geo

However, with the increasing number of interplanetary rovers, observations of moons, and perhaps future excursions, it is still useful to define how to properly handle these other reference frames. Luna and Mars are two suggested Microformats that are starting the discussion on how one might mark locations on the two bodies. Additionally, the OGC is working now on determining standards for scientists and developers to publish and share data sources of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, ‘oh my’.

And why does the Earth have to be the only one with cool, “slippy maps”. I quickly put together a map of Mars. It uses the powerful OpenLayers Javascript mapping library to display the tiles from a NASA WMS server.

To produce the locations for the map, I put up a Space Blog, using WordPress and a slightly modified GeoPress to publish Mars lander locations and landing dates. I altered the published Microformats produced by GeoPress to make the class “geo mars” as a suggested way to markup Mars coordinates. The published GeoRSS feeds from the Space Blog then produce the locations and layers automatically on the OpenLayers Mars Map.

To Do: CRS and You

So this is all very neat, and in the end, really easy to setup. However, this is just a demonstration and in no way should be construed as “the way to do it”. Specifically, there are these questions left unanswered:

1. How to define the Microformat and GeoRSS for non-Earth (and non-WGS84) reference frames
2. How to define the Microformats and GeoRSS/Geonames location for non-Earth locations (like “Ares Vallis”)
3. More sources for interplanetary map servers
4. Ways to syndicate, and subscribe to, specific bodies
5. Support for publishing, consuming, and drawing lines – in order to plot out mission profiles
6. Support for publishing, consuming, and drawing areas – in order to plot out mission profiles, landing sites, and expected areas of “mission failures”

I’m sure there are more issues, so please speak up. You know who you space geeks are.

In addition, your photos are only geotagged in Flickr – and therefore not easily usable outside the service. The better way to geotag your photos is to actually write the Geo data to the EXIF of the photo. Then the metadata is carried around with the photo itself (until you pass it through some mean, metadata chomping machine like Photoshop).

The way I geotag my photos is to first get the coordinates of photos:

1. Carry around a GPS and store the tracks as GPX files – then you can mesh the GPS with the photos using WWMX (Windows), GPSPhotoLinker (Mac), or various scripts in Linux (fend for yourself, but check the geowankers mail archive)
2. Mark GPS Waypoints – or lookup addresses of locations and use MultiMap to get the latitude/longitude of these points
3. Guess

After I’ve either meshed up my coordinates, or have a list of locations, I fire up iView Media Pro, or iPhoto, and use my Applescript scripts in addition to ExifTool to actually write the GPS metadata. Because photo editing applications (like the aforementioned Photoshop) are usually very mean and don’t restore geo-metadata on edit and save, I suggest you edit all your photos first, and apply the geo Exif as the last step before uploading.

Now that you’re going to upload your photos, you first need to make sure Flickr uses these geotags for actual mapping. Enable Flickr to read your Geo EXIF tags. If you already have uploaded photos with geo-coordinates in the Exif data, Flickr will add these to the map (after a short wait – queueing and all).

You can my Flickr Photo Map, and you should go take some photographs! (especially for Pentax Day)

This work is a perfect example of the point of my talk at FOSS4G, Enabling Users to Produce Personalized Geodata. It’s more important for developers to add geographic capabilities to existing, and widely used tools than to make geo-specific tools and expect users to come and use them. People are already using Drupal for their content, and now they can easily add location data and share it with their users and consume feeds.

Check out his GeoRSS and KML Drupal announcement here.