I find this is a bit of a surprising action from Google. In 2005 they changed the mapping and geospatial web by providing a powerful, easy to use great API (eventually), and primarily free of charge slippy map platform. The term “GoogleMap” became synonymous with being able to pan and zoom through the entire world without any reloading of the page or poor user experience. Since then, there have been millions of sites that have used GoogleMaps to provide simple map views and location services. Assumedly this information has been of huge value to Google in understanding interest, spatial-context, and generally eyeballs to Google tools and content.

Google has also worked to monetize maps, often subtly through sponsored map markers, and other times more directly through in-map ads. Each of these decisions brought discussion and disent but it was difficult to argue with the fact that the tool was still free to use. Google has clearly put real value in content and engineering into Google Maps. The quality of geocoding, data availability and power of the API has always been extremely capable and arguably the best of breed.

Now, with a very direct pay requirement being imposed this will dramatically change the adoption of GoogleMaps. Developers will have to consider very carefully how they will afford the potential – and optimistically likely – fees that the service will require as it becomes successful.

Fortunately, there are still a few really good alternative options for developers of sites if they can’t afford the usage fees. MapQuest has really embraced the future of open by supporting and integrating OpenStreetMap into their sites. Microsoft Bing maps are very capable and there are many more – not least of which is a developer “rolling their own”.

This interesting change by Google also validates abstraction libraries such as Mapstraction. Mapstraction provides a common API where a developer can easily switch between map provider libraries without having to rewrite their code – something that would likely cost much more in the short term than paying for usage fees. On GeoCommons we use ModestMaps to be able to switch to any map data provider service.

I’m very interested to see the general developer reaction to this change.

It’s a little difficult to keep up with everything while I’m traveling. Pleasantly I noticed in my inbox that an announcement from O’Reilly went out that included my name.

Brady Forrest and I collaborated on producing a business-oriented analysis of the phenomenal growth around geospatial technology. The report, Where2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web covers various aspects of providers and potential opportunities in a variety of domains that are affected by the emergence of many factors.

Some of these topics include: the impact of open and user-contributed geographic data on traditional data vendors and subsequent tools that rely on the availability, coverage, and quality of this data; highly-connected mobile devices, now often with developer available interfaces for location sharing and high-bandwidth internet connections; models for location-based advertising; and next generation applications such as games, augmented & immersive reality; as well as many more.

It was definitely interesting writing the report from a more practical and business perspective. My background has been in pushing and developing new technologies. I found it eminently useful to think of it from a reverse perspective on evaluating the percolating usefulness across markets and uses. It is valuable for both business development as well as application development to connect.

In addition to the discussion and analysis of the current state of the geospatial web, the report includes a fairly broad directory of companies, applications, and organizations in Where2.0 across the multiple domains. It also includes in-depth profiles of some of the major players.

The report is primarily for businesses that are interested in starting up, or entering, the geo- space and want to get a view of the landscape. It should also be useful for existing organizations that want to understand how the various technologies, acquisitions, and developments may affect their current market.

You can get a discount by using this link.

The report was originally written this Spring and originally announced at Where2.0. We’ve been continuously updating the report with new information such as the completion of the TeleAtlas/TomTom and NAVTEQ/Nokia mergers and the implications as well as the iPhone 3G with built-in GPS and Core Location API. The GeoWeb is a fast-moving space, so it’s definitely difficult to attempt to grasp for a quick snapshot. We hope to update it more in the future as Where2.0 evolves.

It’s a compelling tale of emergent behavior by a community to leverage the tools it has at hand to enact powerful change. Too often large tools are built to be the end-all-be-all solution to perceived problems and pain points. However, the actual tried and true method of cobbling together solutions from a variety of tools, each as appropriate, leads to agile toolsets and better communication.

On a very similar note, my talk for FOSS4G 2008 in Cape Town has been accepted. Rebuilding a City through Community Participation, Neogeography and GIS will present the technical details of utilizing open-data, open-source and closed-source GIS tools, loosely coupled systems, workshops and open discussion to build cartographic visualizations. As a developer I enjoy tech-talk, I find the application based presentations much more interesting.

The presentation will use the New Orleans mapping as the case study, and while I can’t convey the “in-the-field” experiences Alan, Francine, Karen, and the others living in the city can tell, I hope I can share the experiences to inspire other communities to employ similar tactics to engage their neighbors and government.

The project is still very much a work in progress, but it’s exciting for exactly the reasons Alan gave in his talk – people are already doing the effort and passion – just help them pull the pieces together to have a great impact.

What has been most amazing about the project is that there were emergent, self-induced projects that were actively addressing many areas of capturing information. They are using Flickr for geotagged photos of historic buildings, spreadsheets of demolition permits exported as KML, and key historic maps that outline the original city planning.

The project was selected as a finalist in the NetSquared challenge, which means they were given the opportunity to come out to San Jose to meet with the other 20 projects and discuss their ideas, goals, progress, and cooperations. While the conference itself will award three top-voted projects with funding, the point of the conference and discussion isn’t solely this monetary support.

In planning for the conference, the entire discussion occurred publicly on Alan’s Blog at http://thinknola.com/post/gis. Through open discussion, numerous other projects and individuals contacted Alan to share support, data sets, ideas and future collaborations. NetSquared served as a catalyst for focusing a specific set of projects, but the longer effect is that it has brought together people that will carry the project forward and make sure everyone succeeds.

As a prototype, I used Mapufacture to combine together Francine’s Flickr photos, planning documents of school rebuilding, and the 1924 Taylor’s planning map of New Orleans. It is just a simple demonstration of what is possible using a combination of Neogeography, GIS, and community participation. The next step will be to build better tools for basic analysis and discussion. In addition, the data is open and available for other people to download for their own visualizations, analysis and collaborations.

Prototype: http://mapsomething.com/demo/neworleans

libkml was originally “announced” about 6 months ago as part of the kick-off of the standardization of KML within the OGC.

libkml is interesting in several ways. KML itself is just an XML specification for geographic data. Nothing really special compared to other XML formats. However, as I’ve championed there is a big difference between types of developers that use and read schemas, and those that use libraries or simple examples and documentation to implement parsers or tools. This is justified in that developers (both consumers and producers as discussed here) are usually trying to solve some other problem and want to use a format like KML merely as a mechanism to publish and visualize their information. By providing a stable and full-featured library, developers are free to build tools around the library without having to deal with the intricacies and issues of the format itself.

Similarly to the effect of opening the standardization of KML to the OGC effected other organizations like Microsoft to embrace the format – an open-source library also encourages other implementations, or competitors, of KML applications. Google is primarily in the business of data organization and search – so the more tools that publish or utilize a format they can then index is a win.

Another implication of libkml is that a single library can grow with versions and features, again freeing the developer from having to track future versions or bug fixes to the format.

Lastly, libkml is written to be fast – which is essential for handling large KML documents, realtime visualization, and potentially even mobile/limited-resource clients. However, how small libkml can be made is left to be seen.

As Michael Ashbridge pointed out, this is a very “alpha release, not Beta in the Google sense”. In fact, in the documentation there is the very clear disclaimer: “THIS IS ALHPA SOFTWARE. Expect changes. We do not yet recommend use in production code.”

There are still a number of features that are not yet implemented that are forthcoming, or can be accomplished by the broader community. They’re looking for feedback from developers on the interface and functionality. The library is C++, with SWIG bindings currently in Ruby, Java, Python, Perl and PHP. There are examples for developers to get up and running quickly.

It’s released under the new BSD license. It is meant to be as open as possible for developers to use in both open-source and closed-source projects without worrying about interference with other licenses.

It’s great to see Google pushing on the open-{source,format} in geospatial. They’ve obviously done a lot to raise public awareness of placemarking and geospatial data with GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth – they’re now engaging the GIS community and helping them.

Hopefully people, at least developers and users in the know, can soon stop referring to KML strictly as “GoogleEarth format” or “GoogleEarth Layer”.

Dealing with Reality

An issue we commonly run into is the reality that there are a lot of KML and other data sources in the wild that are malformed. There is the common response “it works in GoogleMaps, why doesn’t it work elsewhere?”

libkml is able to handle, to some extext, ‘bad’ KML, but is very strict in outputting KML that is generated using the DOM API in the library. Hopefully this generally raises the quality of available KML.

lib{geo}

A potential extension to libkml that excites me would be the ability ingest a KML document and publish it out as other formats such as GeoRSS or GML. Especially if a higher-level interface was built onto libkml that abstracted away the specifics of KML and instead provided an interface for general geometry (and feature) creation and manipulation.

Unfortunately since my laptop hard drive died last week, I don’t have a development machine to build and play with this yet. But I expect to use this library in a number of projects.

Google Code Project: libkml.

The primary take-away I gained insight on was how much human is behind the machine/network for a great solution. There is a lot of research and effort spent designing better algorithms, faster processors, and automation. While we may be able to achieve better results and understanding through mass computation and filtering, it’s the human ability to pattern match and understand complex, arbitrary concepts that make for the best tool.

So the question remains, where is the boundary between the human-machine operation? How much effort do you let the machine perform, and how best can you allow human-bias to influence the results at a sufficiently high level that the entire thing scales. Are users tagging sites enough, or should their be a concierge type service that users can submit questions and get semi-realtime responses or aggregated similar historical responses (similar to an *answers site)?

Searches that are filtered by our social networks provides a very good solution. I’ve specified by preferences by the friends I’ve chosen. However, this is a very passive solution and doesn’t account for the fact that I may like Bob and his taste in music, but I wouldn’t trust his recommendation with food. It seems like there is some solution between tagging, IRC/IM, forums, and traditional search.

Speaking of search

Another very exciting thing was pimping the new OpenSearch-Geo. It’s interesting how few developers who are usually “in the know”, know that OpenSearch is a very much alive, and easy to implement, standard that can greatly enhance their service.

I think we’ll soon seen a number of popular sites get OpenSearch capabilities and also some better browser support.

Now that the weekend is over, I get to enjoy a relaxing vacation for a week in Hawaii before heading off to the UK for more conferencing.

To use it you can just click on the map, or enter a location in the form field. Then click on the link for the format you want to see. Read more about it on Mickaël’s blog. One of the neatest improvements, and very useful for integrating into another application, is the webservice:

• http://geotruc.net/gt.php?q=Detroit,%20Michigan&format=georss
• http://geotruc.net/gt.php?q=Detroit,%20Michigan&format=w3cgeo
• http://geotruc.net/gt.php?q=Detroit,%20Michigan&format=machine
• http://geotruc.net/gt.php?q=Detroit,%20Michigan&format=geo
• http://geotruc.net/gt.php?q=Detroit,%20Michigan&format=geojson
• http://geotruc.net/gt.php?q=Detroit,%20Michigan&format=gml
• http://geotruc.net/gt.php?q=Detroit,%20Michigan&format=html
• http://geotruc.net/gt.php?q=Detroit,%20Michigan&format=kml

What is really great about geo:truc is that it provides a very simple and easy to use tool for users to get somewhat complex information. I believe his primary purpose was to provide scientists a mechanism for geocoding their specimen identification experiments. These are non-GIS users who want to store geographic information. Now, they can do it and include it on their websites/documents and share with the world.

But why geo:truc? Mickaël’s reasoning behind the name explains it very well:

“Truc” is a french word meaning an undefined thing, so I joked by calling it “geo:truc”.

Tags: geo, neogeography, geodata, formats, geotruc, mickaëlgraf, korbinus, standards, georss, w3c, kml, machinetags, html, gml, geojson, webservice

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

It was a tough time to be away, a lot of amazing news came out. First and foremost is that Google adds support for GeoRSS. This is exciting news because it demonstrates the maturity and interest in the syndication of geographic content in blogs, CMS’s, sites, and news.

This will also add a little bit of more difficulty moving forward in GeoRSS. Now that a major company has added support, and assumedly a lot more developers will add support now as well, then the specification has to be much more cognizant of future changes, users, and upgrades. Before, the specification was really guided by the majority of developers using the standard itself. If some spec was changed, we all went out and updated our libraries. Now, however, we really need to denote versions, and how users can update their tools to accomodate both the new version and backwards compatibility.

On top of that exciting news, Google also open-sourced part of the GoogleMaps library. See the
gmaps-utility-library-dev FAQ. Currently this is limited to the GMarkerManager, but demonstrates their interest in opening the library up for interesting projects, ideas, and hacks.

Tags: googlemaps, programming, georss, geo, neogeography, javascript, open-source,

There are already two twitter-map mashups: TwitterMap, and GeoTwitter. GeoTwitter is a simple “red-dot” map, which parses a twitterer’s home location and plots that using Googlemaps XML.

TwitterMap is much more full featured. It actually polls the current public profile feed looking for “lat: lng:” specification of your current position, and then puts that on a full-frame map, with different colors depending on how long since you’ve updated. The problem is that Twitter has gotten very popular, and updates happen frequently. TwitterMap only polls the public list every so often, so there’s a 1 in 20 chance your post will actually be grabbed.

The developer, Patrick Kollitsch is hard at work on an updated version that should fix this issue and have more features to boot.

I definitely like the idea of showing a fading history of when the person last updated, or to see a trail of their travels. Also, seeing the user’s community of friends with lines linking them – especially if mixed into the history, so see as they come together and apart, would be very cool.

More to come on possible geocoding & picoformat ideas around Twitter, and like services (dodgeball, plazes, et al.)

Update (3/28/07): another TwitterMap has shown up that offers a very simple and effective interface. It also offers TwitterVision, which is a semi-realtime updating of twits as the show up and their location.

I disagree. If a mapping API vendor is required to (or tries to) stay within an agreed upon ’standard’ API, then that could stifle features/innovation. They would have to all agree on a standard to, say, add polygonal overlays, or moving objects (e.g. tracking realtime position of other vehicles)

However, when this ‘abstraction of API’ is relegated to other projects (as he points out Mapstraction, OpenLayers, and MyMap do this, they don’t just attempt it) then each of them can decide if they are a minimal set implementation (only allow what all allow), or a maximum set, or somewhere in between.

What is better if they just support mapping using data format standards. They should all consume open/non-partisan standards such as GPX, GeoRSS, GML, etc. That way someone doesn’t necessarily need to know the entire API if they can just load and map their common data source.

Is there a way to vote for the anti-request.

cross-posted from comments on Geonames

Tags: googlemaps, api, standards, geonames, georss, gpx, gml, ogc, google, marcwick, openlayers, mapstraction, mymap

There is some basic information about elected representatives that makes politico mashups easier: the ability to tie a name to a state, the district and zip codes that they represent, their office telephone number, and so on. We have put together a simple labs “datakit” that does this for us, drawing from several publicaly available data sources. We are making this fully available and have provided a fully documented API for the methods we have developed for those sources. Find out about the datakit here.

Of course, any API needs a nice little client to tie it into your applications. Here is my Ruby client. It’s very simple, because is uses the fallback method_missing to handle any function passed to the class. This also allows the class to be extended by implementing specific methods if more processing of the response is needed.

require 'open-uri'
require 'rexml/document'
require 'cgi'
SUNLIGHT_HOST = 'http://sunlightlabs.com/datakit/'

class Sunlight
  def self.method_missing(service_method, *args)
    params = args[0].collect {|k,v| CGI.escape(k.to_s) + '=' + CGI.escape(v.to_s)}.join('&')
    url = SUNLIGHT_HOST + service_method.to_s + "?" + params
    open(url).read.split("|")
  end
end

resp = Sunlight.getDistrictFromZip5({:zip => 20740})
puts resp.inspect
  # MD:5
  # MD:4

resp = Sunlight.getRepresentativeNameFromCityState({:city => 'Detroit', :state => "MI"})
puts resp.inspect
  # Kilpatrick, Carolyn C.
  # Conyers, John  Jr.
  # Levin, Sander M.
  # McCotter, Thaddeus G.
  # Dingell, John D.

The Sunlight Datakit currently offers the following functions. Check out the documentation for information on the parameters and returned values.

• getDistrictFromZip5
• getStateFromZip5
• getDistrictFromZip9
• getStateFromZip9.php
• getRepresentativeNameFromDistrict
• getRepresentativePhoneNumberFromDistrict
• getRepresentativeRoomNumberFromDistrict
• getCityFromZip5
• getCityStateFromZip5
• getLatitudeFromCityState
• getLongitudeFromCityState
• getZipCodesFromCityState
• getTimezoneFromCityState
• getRepresentativeNameFromCityState
• getRepresentativeNameFromState
• getStateAbbreviationFromStateName
• getStateNameFromStateAbbreviation

Now GoogleBooks supports mapping of locations mentioned in books they’ve archived. See Lonely Planet USA for the locations mentioned in this travel guide. A great way to preview what locations the book focuses on and covers. (via hobu, via import cartography)

Or for fictional books, such as Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver it can help you decipher what happened where.

Google has the benefit of being able to store and share the text for currently copyright material, which is a definite benefit. But the integration of maps really adds to the information and understanding of the material.

Tags: books, googlebooks, googlemaps, mapping, geo, maps, gutenkarte, copyright

His claim is that they take their bounding box parameters in different order: bbox=x1,y1,x2,y2. vs. box=x1,y1,x2,y2. However, based on my research of the API's, they look comparable. For example, Google Earth's view based refresh will do a bounding box request:

longitude_west, latitude_south, longitude_east, latitude_north

and the Flickr photo search expects the following BBox:

minimum_longitude, minimum_latitude, maximum_longitude, maximum_latitude

You can see that minimum_longitude is the same parameter as longitude_west, and so on. So I’m not sure why Dan Catt uses that as his explanation that the parameters don’t line up.

However, as Brady points out, what would really help everyone is if the services all spoke common languages, like Flickr outputting KML, or GoogleEarth consuming GeoRSS (since Flickr can output GeoRSS). My money would be on the latter, since there seems less impetus for a company like Flickr/Yahoo to export their data in a proprietary format.

Of course, the translation between the two formats, especially for basic geometry such as points, is trivial, so implementing both on both sides, or simple conversion utilities in the middle, would be straight-forward.

Extra Credit

For extra credit, implement said conversion utility to convert KML <=> GeoRSS using XSLT, or other language of your choice.

There are also various other Flickr/GoogleEarth utilities out there like displaying grids of the # of Flickr images in GoogleEarth.

Pleasant Surprise

While researching parts of this post, I found a new Flickr API method that I didn’t know existed before:

flickr.photos.getWithGeoData – “Returns a list of your geo-tagged photos.” However, you can’t do a search within this set other than by date. But at least now you can pull up a trail of your travels based on your photos.

“Where were you on the night of the 13th?!”

In the past, when using my Feed URL to get geotagged photos, I just made sure that photos had a tag “geotagged” and then grabbed all the photos with that tag.

Tags: flickr, google, googleearth, georss, kml, standards,

Now how do I compare to those around me (vs. globally) – or within my “genre”? not that real “ranking” matters, but in general having ‘authoritativeness’ in search results is very useful, and supposedly how the back-end algorithms at Google (and I’m sure many other search engines) work. The more link-love you get from authoritative blogs, then the higher ranked you are.

Now, if this is the case, why when I search for various howtos and problems in programming do I just get links to Forum posts asking the same question, but not to the blog entry, IBM/Apple doc or whatever with the solution?

I want something like Amazon’s: 37% of the people that viewed this product, bought this other product

But instead, I want: 70% of people that viewed this webpage, found their solution (stopped searching) by going to this other webpage.

Tags: blogging, technorati, search

Ajaxian discusses Adobe’s new “Apollo”:

Apollo is client-based software that will run Flash applications separately from a browser, whether online or offline

The image shows an example travel application developed in Flash, and deployed to a desktop via Apollo. (via Digital Backcountry)

I also saw that Chris Messina is helping out on a project WebKit on Rails, whose goal is to make it easier to deploy Apple’s WebKit and also to “come up with new ideas and practices that leverage the WebKit platform”. WebKit is an excellent platform to develop desktop web apps, as it can be baked straight into a Cocoa application, but be accessing a “web application” that may be running locally on the users’ machine.

rails-app-installer allows you to bundle and install/uninstall a Rails application, including required gems.

$ gem install my_app
$ my_app install /some/path


Tags: web3.0, desktop, deployment, rails, webkit, chrismessina, mattwebb, tixe, adobe, apollo, railsappinstaller

Out of the Ruby realm, BlogHelper has a good set of tools and howtos for Using Microformats in WordPress.

Tags: ruby, microformatsstandards, , hatom, assafarkin, cheatsheet, wordpress, bloghelper

There is a link to some good articles on how to extend RSS by adding your own namespaces. A discussion like this is currently ongoing in GeoRSS on how best to add named locations, addresses, non-Political features (oceans for example), and general areas (like USGS regions). It’s a mixture of what is understandable by the user (web devs & programmers who will actually use these extensions), covers most use cases (so users are happy and use the extension and don’t go and try to make their own), and hopefully builds or uses existing formats.

Pat Cappelaere, who developed the very cool GeoBliki, proposed the following extension:

    
      BR
      Brazil
      
      

      729
      Antarctica
      50
      Antarctica

      Sítio do Mato
      Estreito
    

which does a good job of providing a fairly simple format for users to produce and parse when developing tools. This is important because while people aren’t really meant to read RSS, they’re still developing the tools to handle the RSS, and therefore need to understand it.

RSS-Extensions Wiki also a great list of RSS Syndication Hacks, which is full of ideas for projects, or integration into your existing projects, like programming/code todo’s (@todo in source or repository commits), or finding media to add to your iTunes.

Hidden underneath the “taken…” line is a bit of Microformat geo:

<span class=”geo” style=”display:none”>
  <span class=”latitude”>38.017804</span>,
  <span class=”longitude”>-78.475342</span>
</span>

Additionally, in the RSS output, you can get GeoRSS tags. You need to add the following to your URL: &georss=1.

It’s a great example, and source, of how easy it is to add some simple markup to your HTML and RSS to add geographic annotation.

Now you can see the effect for your self. ocarto allows you to overlay 7 layers of maps from Google, Yahoo, MS Virtual Earth, and Terraserver.

Search for: 44.300572,-78.339096 in ocarto, and zoom in all the way. It’s the town of Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

You can search for the nearby town of Royal Oak, MI to see a lot of new development, roads that don’t exist on many maps, existing on Google. (I’ll send them a cookie)

Tags: maps, ocarto, googlemaps, michigan