High Earth Orbit

State of Transit Routing

2008-12-16T03:16:43Z

Jim Stogdill and I had a conversation a week ago about the new iPhone 2.2 firmware that includes walking directions as well as similar projects in the space. In my Where2.0 Report I talked about the convergence of mobile devices and the effect on multi-modal routing: your phone changing from auto to walking to metro directions based on your context. However, I didn’t go in-depth on example projects and services.

Jim posted my notes of our discussion on O’Reilly Radar. So check them out there. It’s just an overview, but let me know if I missed an interesting project or story about open-data (or lack of).

Where2.0 Proposals ending on Monday

2008-11-26T15:18:34Z

It’s been mentioned elsewhere - but wanted to remind you to work on your Where2.0 proposals over the US Thanksgiving Holiday. They are due on Monday.

Each year Where2.0 has demonstrated the migration of location technology from the bleeding edge and locative media art to mainstream businesses and practices. Yet we have just begun to realize the potential. Where2.0 is the conference to hear the newest announcements, learn from experts in the industry, and meet and collaborate on new projects and ventures.

I know people out there are doing amazing work on bringing advanced climate change analysis coupled with user-contributed data to pinpoint carbon emissions or the changing migratory paths of endangered species, repurposing outdated mobile phones for biological sensors, application of geospatial tools to community building, humanitarian and disaster response and citizen media, immersive, augmented reality through wearable and interactive devices - and of course the holy grail, how to realize a viable business plan amongst all this great potential.

Submitting a proposal is easy to do and speaking at Where2.0 is incredibly rewarding. You’ll find it difficult to find such an absorbed and forward thinking crowd to share your work with.

Flat Maps are not Hyper

2008-11-24T19:50:13Z

A week ago the New York Times ran an interesting opinion article on the new NYC interactive map. I’m sure it’s been discussed elsewhere, but wanted to make sure and highlight some of the keen insights Mr. Klinkenborg offered. It echoes my feelings that we have done very well at putting static map images into digital interfaces, but are only just beginning to make these maps dynamic and linked - like any medium on the internet - explorable, annotated, and dynamic.

The map itself at first is not very impressive by modern digital mapping expectations. It has simple smooth panning or zoom, with an interface reminiscent of MapGuide style portals.

Where it becomes impressive is after turning on some of the layers of public safety, services, and infrastructure that simple markers that open on hover make it very easy to move around and discover information and links to other municipal databases such as census, architecture, neighborhoods, polling information, lot information, and much more - all without overloading the user. The impressive connection of so much data, especially in a city of the density of New York, is impressive.

The map is an example of simplicity, familiar interfaces, and rich data presentation that As Mr. Klinkenborg states,

There is a pleasing logic to this kind of organization, to layer after layer of data embedded within a scalable map. In a sense, it approximates how we tend to know the world… Think of returning to your neighborhood after a trip or driving to your parents’ house. You can almost feel the increasing depth of your knowledge as the terrain becomes more familiar. What you know isn’t just the superficial arrangement of streets and highways. You have a rich array of geographically organized information, some of it practical — how far to the good grocery store — and some of it emotional.

Obviously I would hope the underlying data is also made available. Imagine if the map existed as a feed of data sources that linked to one another - any queried point returned a GeoJSON item that linked to the Sanitation Collection Schedule in GeoRSS, Elected Officials as hCards, Building outline as a KML, and lot information as GML. The map portal is just a single, simple entry point into this information that the NYC.gov can guide and control. However, the data can and will be available via any number of interfaces that go beyond the device itself, but provide for a seamless integration of this information at our fingertips to query and drape over the very urban landscape as we navigate and interact with it.

Mr. Klinkenborg summarizes,

It’s easy to assume that the real revolution in mapping is the global positioning satellite and Google revolution… But the real revolution lies in the layering of data onto these already kinetic methods of viewing the world. In a very real sense, the virtual planet becomes our index to what we know about the actual planet.

I’m looking forward to future incarnations that include boundaries estimating daily resident happiness, suggesting cultural relevance, and heatmaps of amount of sunlight and sky-view.

Does the OpenDatabase License need CC style Modules?

2008-11-24T19:47:41Z

In the OpenStreetMap community there is a known problem with the applicability of Creative Commons licensing to geographic data. The CC licenses are truly meant for creative works and not for the creation and aggregation of factual data.

To address this, the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board has pursued the development of a more applicable and friendly Open Database License, ODbL. The goal of this license would be to make it clear the legal protection of geographic data gathered and how it can be used with other data or derived from.

It is a sign of maturity that an open-data project like OpenStreetMap is dealing with the legal issues that surround the otherwise grassroots crowd-sourced community. Similar parallels occurred with the development of GPL and BSD with open-source software and the Creative Commons in user-generated media. Open-Data is following in the footsteps of open-source, from grassroots “hackers” to disrupting some industries and redirecting others.

You spilled your legal all over my data

However, one difference that has affected these two examples is a valuable guide with how the ODbL and other similar licenses should progress. Software licenses are currently a myriad of acronyms and terms: BSD, MIT, GPL, Affero, Apache, and more. SourceForge has a deprecated license guide and in fact offers at least 72 license options.

The result is a confusion to both software producers and consumers. What licenses enforce which restrictions and usages? How can I bring together software under different licenses and their miscibility. This is a question that even after a decade of mainstream open-source experts still ask for advice.

A working model

Creative Commons headed this off through some nice modularization of the most popular options. Through clear naming, definitions, and iconography users can understand the concepts encased in otherwise unapproachable legal contracts such as Non-commercial, Attribution, Share-Alike, and No-Derivatives with straight-forward choosing of which modules any user wants to apply to their work.

This results in easy, lightweight sharing - encouraging people to contribute to public repositories and also make use of these works. By having simple, well understood licenses, one example is Flickr’s simple search filter that makes it easy to find Creative Commons only images for use in third party materials and presentations. It’s even possible to visualize and determine how you can mix together content released under various modules.

The overall result is that the license has become popular and encourages both sharing and use of shared media - effectively ending the future of traditional stock photography.

Open Data Modules

My point of highlighting Creative Commons is to look at how simple mechanisms can promote effectiveness around licensing of information. The ODbL’s primary purpose is making it clear how to produce and use OpenStreetMap data, but in this action it is addressing the growing need to easily define how the true underlying strands of the web will be shared. You can read a draft version of the ODbL.

The opportunity is to lead the charge on clear, understandable data licenses that citizens can take to their governments to demand the data be released under these terms. There would not be the need for click-throughs of unique terms of service or agreements, but easily shareable data that magnifies the power of any available datasources.

One counter-point to the pre-defined modules is that users that want variations can “select, modify, or delete” sections as necessary. This is definitely not an option - as it will create unclear and probably invalid licenses. In addition, these variations and spin-offs will be unvetted and untrusted. By handling the majority of cases under one common umbrella, the validity and attractiveness of a standard license decreases the difficulty of any organization to claim it wouldn’t work for them.

I posited this question to the OpenStreetMap Legal mailing list hoping to spark a discussion with the various people currently involved with the license. So far the feedback has surprisingly been negative on the benefits of modular based licenses. OpenStreetMap has a long road ahead even after a new license in drafted in convincing the very large community to switch licenses - an effort I hope does not negatively impact the organization but instead illuminates the need for clear licenses from the start of any open data collection project.

With GeoCommons, we are spending a lot of resources gathering, annotating, and sharing out open data sources. Our metadata catalog is shared under a Creative Commons Attribute, Share-Alike license. And nominally all the data we bring in is somehow open, under different monikers. But right now it is very difficult to easily share out the terms of these licenses - so the onus is upon the user to properly use each dataset. With our goal of making geospatial data easy to use for non-experts, we have a very high interest in making geodata licenses as easy to understand as photographs or articles are under Creative Commons.

An open question to open data licenses

The question here is whether the module concept of Creative Commons is an effective mechanism that should be applied to the Open Data License. The goal is to make it so easy for anyone to share information that it would take more effort not to do so. That this type of easily shared information is highly preferential by consumers that other datasets under various and unclear licenses such that these other sources conform to best practices.

What do you think is the best path?

FortiusOne is hiring - help build GeoCommons

2008-11-18T21:05:22Z

Excited about the GeoWeb? Want to help build the next generation social mapping tools and work on some really awesome technology?

The GeoCommons team is expanding and we’re looking for some cutting-edge developers and designers to join us. We’re using a wide range of technologies to build an easy-to-use and incredibly powerful geodata sharing, visualization, and collaboration platform that is being used in organizations from the government, to enterprise, to international NGO’s, to local communities and groups.

With GeoCommons, we’re integrating Neogeography with GIS to provide powerful tools to users: if you can make it fun on the web where users aren’t required to stay, then customers will love you. And by integrating with other tools that each user is comfortable with, whether it is Excel, Notepad, GoogleEarth, or ArcGIS Desktop and QGIS; we help bring GeoCommons to them rather than making them come to GeoCommons. We’re also pushing the next generation of GeoWeb standards: KML, GeoRSS, GeoJSON, and making them more powerful and supported. These are ideas we started with Mapufacture and are quickly integrating with Finder!, Maker! and the rest of the GeoCommons suite.

As a part of our team, you would investigate large-scale data sharing and linking, geospatial and data visualization mechanisms and tool development, web native API integration and community building. We’re working with many other groups in the open-source as well as GIS communities to help integrate data and tools to broadly disseminate all this quality data that has otherwise been inaccessible and make it easy to visualize and use in decision-making.

We’re looking for developers with real programming chops - you should be comfortable considering Mongrel and Nginx versus Passenger, know when to use unobtrusive Javascript or call ActionScript Flash hooks, have played with ActiveMQ and Stomp, beanstalkd, Starling or other queueing systems, read technology news and blogs and preferably have a site yourself where you share your experiences and code with the world. We’re looking for community members and developers that like working in teams, attending programming groups, and are comfortable sharing their ideas. We encourage you to have hobbies and side projects - we’ve built quite a few ‘lab’ tools ourselves such as context-free music and touchscreen whiteboards. And you don’t have to be an Apple user, but it helps.

Welcome to Washington, DC

FortiusOne is located in Arlington, VA - directly above the Courthouse Metro on the Orange line into DC, and a short walk into the district directly. The DC area is on an incredible spike of growing technology community. Where else can you live in a “metro area” that encompasses at least 3 states, all of which are metro accessible? The area is also renowned for it’s bike accessibility. The recent election has cast a spotlight on the future of technology in the government with President-Elect Obama’s Change.gov initiative. The upcoming inauguration is sure to be an incredibly historic event and you could be here to help map it.

As for the community, there are at least three Ruby-specific groups, a NOVALang where learning new programming languages is the prime objective, RefreshDC, TwinTech, and one of the most open governments to geodata standards and sharing. We’re also quite big fans of the local beer selection and hard to beat the food variety.

Let us know

So if this sounds exciting to you, and you’re interested in joining the team - please let us know! You can also check out the formal listing.

Apps for Democracy ending - need a quick mashup?

2008-11-10T18:06:41Z

The Apps for Democracy innovation content that I talked about previously is ending this week. There have been 15 submissions so far, with probably many more in the works - for a potential of 60 awards!

So with 4 days left to build your App submission, you may be in a scurry for inspiration or more data to mashup and visualize. How about over 40 additional datasets in GeoCommons Finder! specifically about Washington, DC (or more tagged District of Columbia) available as KML. Combine that with the DC CTO data and you have a good number of combinations.

Here are some potential examples:

Kid-friendly map of Public Libraries with Signed Bike Routes
A slightly-belated Halloween/Fright Application Cemetaries, Haunted Places, and poor Air Quality
Or driver-friendly Speed Detectors, Traffic patterns, morning departure times
and finally potentially a nice “day out” planning site with parks, farmers markets, local weather and Chowhound reviews of restaurants for dinner

So pull out your Mapstraction or OpenLayers examples, grab a template from CSS Blueprint or Open-Source Web Design, throw in some feeds and perhaps a geographic search from GeoNames.org and you’re well on your way to fame and glory in the District.

Amazing vote reports

2008-11-05T04:00:49Z

Now that the day is wrapping up, offering a very small selection of some amazing reports of good and bad incidents on US Election day:

my designated voting location was closed for repairs with no signs…: Buffalo, NY (link)
police were waiting to ticket me and challenge my ability to vote due to incorrect license plates: Kings Beach, CA (link)
I was sworn at by a poll worker to stop “bitchin’ and complainin’”: Tulsa, OK (link)
…everyone was in a good spirit, and the electoral officials did a wonderful job handling such a large crowd. My hats off to them…: New York City, NY (link)
Very organized and quick. Fie on computer voting machines - paper works great!: South Lyon, MI (link)
My First day voting, and went very smoothly … I’ll remember this day for the rest of my life…: Irvington, NJ (link)

Thank you Team!

Election night at NPR

2008-11-05T02:02:27Z

I was lucky enough to be invited to enjoy the US 2008 election night at NPR main headquarters in Washington, DC.

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.

VoteReport mapping and data feeds

2008-11-01T18:42:52Z

Over the past two weeks I’ve been working with a great team of people helping to build VoteReport - an open public reporting system to be used during the 2008 US Election to track the situation as citizens cast their ballots. The simple goal is to make it easy for anyone to send in a report describing the wait time, overall rating and any complications that are impairing their ability to participate in the election. For more information check out http://twittervotereport.com.

Dave Troy has put together a solid backend that is aggregating together Twitter, SMS, voice, iPhone and Android native applications, and even YouTube. Others have built the iPhone specific applications. I’ve been working on the mapping and data sharing side of the project. The first goal was to provide a number of mechanisms to share the data that we’re gathering with everyone. Additional mashups and visualizations are free to use the data streams to pull all the data that VoteReport itself has - so definitely go wild with your ideas. A quick breakdown of what’s available:

OpenSearch - http://votereport.us/opensearch.xml: This is the OpenSearch description document that outlines all of the feeds and various filters that you can use when getting to the data. Always check this as we’ll update it with new parameters or data streams. In addition, the various responses discussed below include OpenSearch styling pagination so you can walk through the entire database of reports without having to drink right from the firehose. This also includes the OpenSearch-Time extension.
KML - http://votereport.us/reports.kml: Getting the reports.kml will give a Network Link - this is useful for GoogleEarth and other KML clients to automatically update every 60 seconds with new reports. You can append live=1 to get the full KML document. I have included all the useful attributes in the ExtendedData element of all the Placemarks. Each Placemark also has an id for easy reference.
GeoRSS-Atom - http://votereport.us/reports.atom: Just want to subscribe to the feed in your RSS reader, this feed is useful for getting updates.
GeoJSON - http://votereport.us/reports.json: JSON is super nice for doing client-side mashups and visualization. This is what the VoteReport Map itself is using. It includes a lot of information for each report, including reporter, icon, location.

All of these feeds even can take a dtstart= with an ISO-8601 date for getting reports after a certain time (and optionally dtend= for getting time-bounds of reports). A useful geographic filter is to use state= with the capitalized two-letter state code to just get reports within a state. So for example http://votereport.us/reports.atom?state=VA is a GeoRSS feed of reports in Virginia. As I mentioned, I did build a quick map that you can view at http://votereport.us/reports/map.

We’re continuing to build it out with new features as more data comes in. You can easily embed the map in your site using (and optionally remove the state=):

<iframe src="http://votereport.us/reports/map?state=VA" frameborder="0" class="stream" width="535" height="500" scrolling="no" ></iframe>

The difficulty with creating more visualizations is the lack of pre-election data. This system has been built to primarily capture a huge amount of valuable information for one day. We’re not sure before hand what this data will look like, coverage or attributes. Typically visualizations are made by exploring and playing with the data to see what emerges. In this case, we’re making estimates (and guiding via the tutorials) on what data we’d like. Therefore, the map itself has simple mechanisms for styling markers based on the user-supplied report. But the data is far to dispersed so far for something like a heatmap.

Fortunately, the team consists of a large number of public advocates that are spreading the word which should encourage more citizens to use the system and contribute both good and bad reports. Andy Carvin of NPR put together this NPR coverage, and we’ve also received coverage from Time, Huffington Post, New York Times, TechCrunch and even Craig Newmark. Check out the TVR press page for more coverage links.

And if you would like to help contribute to the project, check out the VoteReport Wiki. I imagine there will also be a number of post-election visualizations and analysis to come out of the reports.

OpenStreetMap mapping party in Arlington - November 1 & 2

2008-10-31T13:24:04Z

It’s just about here - we’re hosting the first Washington, DC area mapping party this weekend at the FortiusOne office in Arlington. You can also meet the GeoCommons team!

If you haven’t been to a mapping party - essentially anyone can show up throughout the day, borrow a GPS unit (or bring your own), get a quick tutorial on how to collect data for OpenStreetMap and then head out for a gorgeous day around the town gathering tracks, points of interest, road data, bike trails, walking areas, etc. It’s a great way to explore the city and also make maps that are useful to you! While the OSM map for Arlington and DC “looks” fairly complete it’s missing a lot of useful information such as directions, metros and more - so it still needs a lot of TLC.

Once you get back with your data we can show you how to upload it to OpenStreetMap. Of course, there is also typically post-mapping socializing somewhere nearby. Overall the day is very free and you can come for as short as an hour or two - but I’ll warn you that it’s very addictive.

The event is listed for both Saturday and Sunday - but my recommendation is to come on Sunday. Saturday is SocialDevCamp East up in Baltimore, and also on Sunday Mikel will be in town to provide his mapping expertise to the party.

Here are the event details (in hCal of course).

OpenStreetMap mapping party - Washington, DC:
November 1 or 2, approximately 10-5PM at the FortiusOne Office

2200 Wilson Blvd.

Suite 307

Arlington, VA 22201

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Washington_DC

- We’re on the 3rd floor above BB&T - above the Courthouse metro. There is street parking as well. OSM of the area

O’Reilly WebCast: Trends and Technologies in Where 2.0

2008-10-23T14:33:13Z

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a webcast presentation with O’Reilly: “Trends and Technologies in Where2.0″. It will be a short presentation - approximately 20 minutes - then with about 40 minutes for question and answer discussion.

So if you want to ask anything about new and upcoming GeoWeb technologies, communities using geospatial technology, or businesses that are growing in the various spaces of geodata, locative mobile, or even just cool hacks then definitely register!

My apologies to people in timezones that makes this occur on your Friday evening. Since it’s participate at home, you can enjoy it over a nice beverage or meal.

I Voted

2008-10-23T12:59:41Z

…and so should you. And why not take a photo to capture your exercising democratic choice. Make sure to check out and add your “ivoted” photo to the Flickr ivoted group.

If you’re not sure where to go, I posted a dataset in KML (and CSV and Shapefile) to Finder! of Early Voting Locations for the US so you can find your nearest polling location.

BarCampDC2 - Open Government Data

2008-10-18T15:34:04Z

The very first session I attended was moderated by Peter Corbett from iStrategyLabs and Dmitry Kachaev of the Office of the CTO for DC talking about open data from the government.

The Princeton research paper “Government Data and the Invisible Hand” proclaims the need for government agencies to first and foremost share their data via open and broadly used standards (via Ars Technica).

The DC government is already sharing a large amount of data via a variety for formats: GeoRSS, KML, CSV, Shapefiles. Check it out at http://data.octo.dc.gov and also CapStat: Building a City That Works

Information. Knowledge. Progress. Welcome to CapStat, your resource as a District of Columbia resident to track how District Government is working for you. You can use these pages to track the performance of individual agencies, find neighborhood statistics and learn how your government is responding to the city’s most pressing challenges. As the District of Columbia works to become a world-class city, visit this page to follow its progress and find out how you can become part of the solution.

When the Office of the CTO for DC wanted to update their site and services they brainstormed how to do this - the typical method of hiring a very expensive contractor to build a complicated tool that would be poorly implemented - or open up the system for the community and see what emerges.

Fortunately they chose the latter and recently launched Apps for Democracy - a contest that anyone can submit an entry for a mashup or application using the DC data services.

Data stream of data

One comment that came up was the desire for a feed of the available data and updates. Right now there is a web page and some of the data is available as GeoRSS - so continually updated. However, what would really be great and facilitate federation would be a published GeoRSS feed of datasets that links to each of the available formats, updated times, filesizes, metadata, etc.

FOWA London - Beyond GoogleMaps

2008-10-17T12:50:09Z

Last week I was fortunate to speak at the much lauded Future of Web Apps London (FOWA). Ryan Carson and his team put on a well-crafted conference with a great line-up of speakers such as Blaine, Kevin, Matt and more.

I was the only geo related talk, with quite a broad title “Beyond GoogleMaps”. The space is quite broad and is evolving quickly. Especially coming from a series of conferences at Web2.0 Expo New York and FOSS4G in Cape Town, in addition to the work we’re doing on GeoCommons, there was a bevy of new concepts and technologies that we worth highlighting.

As for the title, I actually didn’t pick it (or at least don’t remember choosing it). In fact, I think Google has done tremendous strides in pushing web mapping through their own toolkits and applications. GoogleMaps has some advanced capabilities such as interface styling, alternate tilesets, encoded and simplified geometries, and flash interface. However, a strident claims gain interest and again the purpose was to engage developers to look beyond just slapping a map up on a site and calling it done. They really need to consider the usability, accessibility, and design of their cartographic interface as much as any other component.

My goal with the talk was to inspire developers and designers to play with new tools, and for managers to realize what is possible and appropriate and spur their teams into creating compelling applications with geospatial capabilities. The actual implementation of this desk was 201 slides in less than 40 minutes. One attendee commented afterwards that it was like “watching a del.icio.us stream.” The 178 slides in the uploaded deck have the “Nonline” and AtomPub slides removed. I did not give proper coverage of these major issues and in the end felt they were best left out of this deck.

I concur that overall the presentation is was quite fast. I hope it was inspiring and enjoyable and that people walked away eager to find out more about the possibilities of web mapping. Fortunately you can get the full video and highlights and watch at half or quarter speed. You can also get the slide deck.

I actually have some plans for this presentation to expand out into a better and discoverable walk-through of mapping technologies. Stay tuned. And thanks Carsonified and the FOWA team!

FOWA Interview - Future of Web Maps

2008-10-08T13:17:16Z

I just landed in London and rolled into the ExCeL London conference center. Simon let me know that he posted a short pre-interview we did a short-while ago on my thoughts on the future of web mapping.

Where2.0 Radar Report

2008-10-08T10:07:25Z

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.

GeoCommons Maker! launches

2008-10-01T11:48:16Z

I’m excited to finally post about the launch of GeoCommons newest application, Maker!. It has been awhile in the making and the team is proud of what we’ve created.

The goal of Maker is to push the boundaries of web mapping to provide easy to use and powerful cartographic design tools along with access to a huge amount of complex geospatial data. We’ve integrated Maker into Finder!, so any interesting or datasets can be immediately dropped into a map, customized and styled.

Geographic Visualization

There has been a lot of discussion on the differences in viewpoints of mapping from traditional geographers and cartographers when faced with Where2.0 tools. In general, map applications have done a lot of work creating digital versions of physical maps and also throwing hundreds of markers onto a slippy map. But that was just the beginning. We worked with AxisMaps to create an understandable and accurate cartographic design interface. Hopefully the result is a more versed public in the proper use of map design as well as push traditional experts into considering new possibilities.

Current map interface are quite limited in their ability to display large and interactive data sets. It is getting better with better Javascript engines, so there is a future - but current implementations cope by rendering static image overlays. The result are often non-interactive or explorable maps. This was the reason to use Flash as the map engine in Maker!. It’s used solely for map rendering - and not overdone as can happen in many “Flash applications”. The data and metadata is fully available as parsable, findable, open formats.

Pushing KML

Another key aspect of the openness of GeoCommons is the key feature to export your maps as styled KML. This means you can build up a rich cartographic visualization, export to KML and open in something like GoogleEarth or WorldWind and retain the styling. This was a goal of the OGC OWS-5 testbed that I wrote about quite extensively. The styling is actually sort of difficult due to the design of KML itself. In the future, it would be quite nice to have better handling of rules or cascading styling that also linked to attributes in ExtendedData.

A step in the right direction

Maker! is really meant to push what is possible in Where2.0 - but it’s just the beginning. It is a great geographic visualization and interrogation tool, but we have much more planned. When Mapufacture joined with FortiusOne this summer, I talked about the potential of combining the whole range of data from complex and authoritative to dynamic and personalized. The maps and data should be accessible via a variety of interfaces, annotatable, analyzable, and more.

Please give Maker! a try - and let me know what you think. Even better, send me some of your maps - I’d love to feature some. I’ll be sharing mine on my GeoCommons profile.

Presentation: “Rebuilding a City through Community, Neogeography, and GIS”

2008-09-30T09:23:57Z

I just finished my presentation at FOSS4G in Cape Town, Rebuilding a City through Community Participation, Neogeography and GIS. It was part of the Disaster Response session and was a nice way to conclude the group of presentations that talked about disaster preparedness, response, reporting, and the importance of maintaining data across situations. The work in New Orleans is a model of the citizens actively involved in the data collection, analysis, and discussion that affects rebuilding their city.

I think overall it went very well - and lots of interest in the processes and successes and how it can be applied elsewhere.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: us neworleans)

Many thanks to those involved in making the work a reality. Especially to Francine Stock, Alan Gutierrez, and Karen Gadbois who provided much of the material in the presentation.

Mapping in Nairobi

2008-09-29T10:08:32Z

Mikel and I have spent the past week having some incredible meetings and adventures in Nairobi - the first stop on our multi-city trip around eastern and southern Africa. We arrived in Nairobi without a clear plan for who we would meet up with, but in the end it was a very productive and informative visit.

I had a house…

Of course, for proper introduction to Kenya, my college friend Kate took us on a day hike up through the Ngong Hills - famous by a land-owner, Karen Blixen, and the setting of the book and movie “Out of Africa”. The real introduction came with the alert that you must register your hike at the Kenyan Wildlife Services office and hire an armed escort. In the past there had been various violent incidents, though this has dramatically decreased due to such efforts as more patrols, gates, and armed escorts. Despite the camouflage uniform and automatic rifle, our escort Michael was a terrific guide. He walks the hills several times a week and is very familiar, as are most local Kenyans, with the landscape, various towns and villages, flora and fauna.

Cradle of Civilization

Kate is based in Nairobi as part of her doctoral research on the pastoral farmers of eastern Africa - primarily northern Kenya. While here she is working with a number of researchers and attachés that are going a number of activities in the field on surveys as parts of larger teams in remote villages and areas, cataloging artifacts in the lab, collaborating with researches in the museum and around the world, and then deploying back to the field each season.

The more we spoke with them, and their current use of GPS and some GIS tools, it was apparent that there were some straight-forward suggestions of tools and techniques that they could employ to make better use of their data collection and meet their needs while also reducing their overhead costs of data and software licenses and meeting their objectives. A couple of evening chats over Tusker beers and nyama choma turned into a concept for a talk. So we met with the directors of the British Institute and Archaeology departments and proposed a seminar for the researchers and staff.

The result was that this morning we gave a presentation to a number of staff on the use of free, open and easy to use mapping tools for visualization, communication, and collaboration. For example, using APRS (such as the Garmin 520HCx) to do in the field location sharing, GPSBabel to store GPS tracks to KML, Google Earth for visualization and annotation, EditGrid and GeoCommons Finder! for online data sharing and visualization in Maker! (coming soon). In addition, we briefly talked about the use of Wikis, Content Management Systems, and Blogs to make it easy for researchers to publish work progress and information.

Another interesting discussion was around the lack of available road and infrastructure data of small villages along Lake Turkana and east Africa in general. Major providers such as NAVTEQ, and even Google have some data in major regions, but not very useful for the staff heading to remote areas. One project is the history and culture of Somalian banditry that now resides in northern Kenya. There is some data available in larger villages, but the smaller villages are not even on the map, let alone with any infrastructure data.

United Response

Another unexpected outcome of our trip to Nairobi was some great meetings with various individuals throughout many UN agencies. On arrival to Nairobi we were pleasantly surprised by the near complete mapping of the city in OpenStreetMap. A quick inspection of the metadata showed that the majority of the data came from a single person working at UNICEF that used Yahoo! satellite imagery to trace the city. We immediately exported this to our GPS units so we could have a detailed map on our excursions.

In addition to meeting with Bo from UNICEF, we also had in-depth presentation and discussions at the UNHCR-Somalia offices with the SIMaC - Somalia Interagency Mapping and Coordination. These are a group of cross-agency people that work together in data sharing, cooperation, tools, and discussions. They are faced with problems that we’ve heard repeatedly from other UN agencies about the difficulties in data sharing with regards to availability, access, and control.

We are still working through the specific outputs, but the overall interest and desire to help was very encouraging. Offers of data and hosting services. One potentially difficult issue is the provenance of some of the data. As many emergency and humanitarian response organizations may be familiar with, issues like copyright are pushed to the back in priorities. Responders tend to use whatever data it is they can get to achieve their goals. The result is that their built up datasets aren’t clear of IP and copyright. Hopefully, they can be pulled apart so that appropriate data can make it’s way into open data repositories and be more easily shared and updated.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up

Between the various discussions at the National Museum and the UN, there were two emergent patterns of innovation and coordination.

At research organizations like the British Institute and Museum, researchers and staff are very busy working on their specific topics, seeking funding, publishing, and getting back to the field. They have a need for collaboration and visualization but are typically just using the typical tools, banging their heads into walls and then moving onto the next issue. The higher-level coordinators are more interested in ways to store and share data between projects within a department, across an institution, increase external visibility, and capture knowledge on turn-over. They are looking at various options, what fits in timeframes and budgets, and then instituting pilot projects.

By contrast, larger bureaucracies like the United Nations are driven by workers and staff to innovate within their own groups and on specific problems. They develop and pull together configurable solutions, get buy-in across organizations but at a “low-level”. Eventually, these working solutions start bubbling up the organization chart based on successes and efficiency. Eventually, upper-level coordinators become interested and seek to institutionalize and mandate the use such tools. The unfortunate effect can be stagnation and over-weighting what was a loosely-coupled and straight-forward solution.

Somewhere in between these two methodologies there is a true solution. In reality, there has to be acceptance, encouragement, and flexibility from all parties. Implementors (staff, researchers, workers) need to be looking at various tools, building them into their workflow, and feeding use-case scenarios. Coordinators need to be aware of what their teams need, as well as the organization, and what successes can be easily, and without reorganization, be carried to other groups to organically build an organization wide set of solutions.

Asante sana

The entire week in Nairobi was very encouraging. There are endemic problems that afflict the country: government corruption, lack of quality infrastructure, and on the technical side, slow and unreliable internet bandwidth. However, almost across the board Kenyans are incredibly welcoming. I’ve never shaken hands with so many people combined with true smiles, kind words, and a ingrained feeling of camaraderie.

Our last night in town we went to dinner with a number of the team that are volunteering with Ushahidi. This was definitely the incredible cap that verified my optimism. The group were incredibly involved in a number of cutting edge technical tools and concepts. We met with a GeoDjango users doing vehicle tracking over APRS, an iPhone developer pushing mobile mapping interfaces, PHP framework builders, and a female civil engineer doing a wide range of infrastructure design and development (a interest of mine based on Corrie’s experiences). Thanks Laban, Jason, Brian, Mworia, and James.

And one last note - I encourage and enjoyable ride on a matatu, but make sure to wear your seatbelt! (and maybe bring some earplugs)

OGC Geospatial Search Summit

2008-09-23T11:25:26Z

Last Monday I participated in a Geospatial Search Summit hosted by the OGC as part of the quarterly Technical Committee (TC) meetings. The TC’s are primarily about various working groups discussing progress and status of standards or interoperability demos.

By comparison, this summit was meant as a brainstorming around geo and search interfaces and responses. Pulling from the announcement:

We would as much as possible like to bound the discussion to: 1) common ground for geospatial search for web resources and 2) integrating spatial search into search protocols. As part of the discussion we would also like to get advice from the other communities about which catalog/registry search protocol is the ‘mainstream’ one (or more?) that we (OGC) should align with and in turn, be sure that spatial search is supported in a thoughtful but not cumbersome way by the broader IT standards community.

You can see a partial list of attendees here.

There was a good overview of existing, albeit often quite complex, search interfaces. As is potential in meetings like this where attendees have their own history, investments, and beliefs in standards, the discussion can become difficult to easily resolve.

A couple of interesting agreements came out of the meeting. Foremost was the understanding for guidance of using simple, common formats as they already exist when appropriate. This means using OpenSearch as a base URI templating mechanism and follow GeoRSS-Simple specification for geographic data. Of course, a format can expand upon this and offer more complex formats that conform to more complex specs. But by at least providing a common baseline means that almost any service can easily interconnect with another service.

One difficult mechanism that is missing is a way for geographic search to specify the type of spatial operation. Typically most services assume a “within” or intersects”. For example, what restaurants are within a 5-mile radius of my position. However, it’s apparent that this can be confused based on assumptions and also does not provide for any other type of operations. Again, for example, find me all the hospitals that are not within the hurricane path.

A long-standing model for this is called the DE-9IM spatial operation set. It was presented by Eliseo Clementini, and also frequently attributed to Egenhofer. You can read more about it. Granted, a majority of geospatially-capable search interfaces may not require this, but it’s nice that there is a relatively straight-forward model that everyone can agree on.

I hope more attendees share their thoughts and outcomes. There are definitely many who point out the problems of designing standards in a smoke filled room, and I much rather bringing the discussion out into the open where more people can chime in and contribute.