Ed Parsons Blog, ex-Ordnance Survey, now Google has three posts that caught might attention:
Space data walk, hum…
Remember Telcontar? Now you can call them deCarta. And if you want to figure out how to use their DrillDown servers and services it is time to register ($250) for their Developers Conference:
October 4-5, 2006
Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF
San Francisco, CA
Google Map of 1675 Owens Street,San Francisco, CA, 94143, USA
(Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF)
Now that Brasil is gone from the World Cup, let’s get back to some blogging. GeoWeb will be happening between July 24 and 28 in Vancouver, Canada covering topics like GPS, OGC Web Services and Google Earth and “Location-based Social Networking and Crisis Response”. Registration costs US$ 300 apiece.
Just coming back from Menlo Park where Western Region USGS workers and their families and friends are given a really cool display of active governance. Very productive and instructive. I realized how little I knew about a fantastic example of goverment work.
Earthquakes sure. But there is so much more. And the people and their attitudes towards themselves and the focus of their work showed how dedicated their are to a cause. Earth.
I could have spent most of the day at their Map Store, if you do check for the 3D relief map of whole US, item #114587 and a topographic map from Yosemite Valley. Just those are worth the trip.
GPS is tracking earth’s crust movement. In millimeters, according to Karen. Ground stations using differential GPS and L1 signals make that possible. Plus software post processing.
Old examples of benchmarks are displayed at Bob’s cube where he uses GlobalMapper to create 3D reliefs by combining even 6 different images to make a single one. Pattern recognition makes the rest.
Alicia is testing new offers of online maps, like the project of the San Francisquito Creek. Still beta so take note of what might not be there yet and mail to the appropriate contact info: http://mapsonline.wr.usgs.gov/.
Try also the National Map Viewer and the National Atlas.
If you got a feeling of what you might be missing, check it out tomorrow. Here is the map, parking extends all the way to Ravenswood. Walk away from it a good block and half. Sunday 4th. From 10 to 4 pm. It is great kid program. Take yours.
I was just trying another Google Earth GPS support module available here when I realized that GE should have a way to handle the data by itself. There are at least half a dozen packages using which seems the only available way which is working through KML imports.
Google does give it to you when you pay an extra US$20 per year (like I did with the original Keyhole Pro) by activating Google Earth Plus.
With the upgrade you get a working GPS dialog (but not on the Mac) and can try to connect to a Garmin or Magellan receiver. Not all models are supported in fact based on the messages from the BBS Forum only old models are suppported.
(Is that because Google decided not to upgrade the GPS support code introduced by the time of the original Keyhole team? Guessing here, but does look like it. Why would they do it now that Volks is probably paying for its development?)
But reading those messages it doesn’t look too promising to fork twenty bucks to try it out. And why not have a NMEA 0183 option available if you are supporting it?
Earth Explorer
nmeage, the KML workaround code couldn’t get a hold of the GPS stream from the Bluetooth connection and that wasn’t too fun. I remembered that Earth Explorer from Mother Earth was still installed and tried to find if it had GPS support. But no, neat interface but no GPS anywhere to be seen.
Earth Explorer does have a clean interface, you can’t zoom down much with the trial version and you won’t get photos if you do, but Digital Elevation Models (DEM) with 3D maps with 1 km resolution (not the higher 3-arc second data which is better, with approximatelly 90 meters resolution).
Is this the same DEM data used to create the terrain in a GE photo plane? Anyway, if you want to give it a try, prices of Earth Explorer start at $39.95 and in its Version 4.0 it runs on MacOSX and Windows.
You can double-click on a country name and get there, or city. There is a whole toolbar for you to mess with. It would be cool if the developers could add a filter of cities by country, instead of showing all at once.
If you add GPS support (NMEA Sentences) to it, things will get a lot better, specially because you can have the DEM files already loaded without the need for a working wireless connection to a server somewhere else.
Sam Bacharach clarifies on the May Issue of GeoWorld the role of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the work of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The result of their work translates into OpenGIS Specifications.
Among the products that implement these standards are Open Source packages like the effort from the Open Planning Project with GeoServer, a fully compliant WMS server.
Page 9 of GeoPlace’s GeoWorld magazine has a fantastic Ad by AutoDesk GIS products. I which I could give you an URL to a PDF. But you can request the current issue to GeoPlace.com.
WongDoody worked on this campaign and they had the image up on their website for a while. Google shows a thumbnail of it.
Great mag, btw.
Spot is a GPS-enabled software developed by SkyLab originally designed for phones including the Blackberry 7250 model which has an integrated GPS receiver.
I couldn’t get Spot, the GPS enabled version to work with the IBM VM J9 in the PocketPC only Spot Viewer, the non-GPS version worked. It wasn’t that exciting. SkyLab also has an unsupported midlet called WMSClient that worked just fine with the Motorola i415.
WMSClient is a MIDP 2.0 midlet that can be used as a browser to OGC compliant WMS services, which translated to plain english refers to Open Geospatial Consortium compliant Web Map Servers.
The maps provided (free) by these servers include several layers describing a given area in the world layered one on top of another like those used by GIS applications.
WMSClient
After having the midlet installed to your phone start the app and select Key Setup. This will let you choose the corresponding key values for panning a map with your phone and switching between pan and zoom. Select then new OGC-WMS and type the URL of one of the servers listed on this page.
This will take a while. And you will need to do this everytime because the bookmarks only keep two entries: one for Nasa and another for the USGS server. After you have a sucessful connection to a server you will be presented with a multiple list of checkboxes with options to choose from. Those are the layers available at this particular server.
GPS Simulator
The screen of the i415 isn’t that great so if you want to have a better idea about the kinds of data you can get from WMS, check another app developed by SkyLab: GPS Simulator 2 which you can run on a Windows box. You will need Java version 1.4.1 or newer to run it.
If you want to simulate GPS receivers, that is what you get from this app in several different possibilities. But my idea was to use it as a full blown WMS viewer on a PC screen.
Launch the demo version and select the Map Input tab. Hit the WMS Map box and the WMS Config button. This will cause a little dialog to get displayed, select one of the URL’s from the drop-down list at the top and hit the Get Capabilities button.
That will ping the server and ask for its capabilities which means something like: “Tell me which layers you have available”. Click the ones you want holding the Shift key and when you are done hit “apply”. Close the dialog and wait for the download to complete. It might take a while depending on the amount of choices you made.
And you might end up getting a map that is not that useful but which looks kinda cool.
The full version of GPS Simulator costs US$99. Intergraph distributes the source code of a free WMS Viewer that you can run with IIS. You can also run it from a browser (IE 5.0 or Netscape 7.0 or higher). Other choices include the deegreeWMS viewer available at SourceForge and a standalone WMS viewer named Gaia.
The beta version of A9 Maps (Amazon owns A9) is being now offered covering a few American cities. The novelty to other related services is the addition of photos from the streets your are looking at on its maps. Data is provided by MapQuest.
According to PCMagazine:
“A9 […] employs SUVs equipped with mounted digital cameras and GPS equipment to record street images and document the location where they are taken”.
Check for example this map of Powell Street in San Francisco.
Look under Mapping Software for other reviews by PCMag on Local Maps from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.
Locate Me and let everyone know
Speaking of the devil, Live Local can locate your current position after you install an ActiveX control for your browser. [Correcting original post] According to a BoingBoing article that discusses the more than obvious privacy issues, this control is similar to the “Location Finder” developed by the PlaceLab project “which listens for the MAC address and compares it to a client cache of locations of known base stations”.
The idea is that if your machine has WiFi it can use it to find your current position. Somehow after reading the article I decided not to install it.
Today was hard to keep track of things, internal GPS went haywire thanks to Google Earth and the slew of data it is helping to generate. First there was the discovery of Ogle Earth, a blog dedicated to GE by Stefan Geens that shares tons of great material.
From there I jumped to TrackerGE and NMEA2KML, tools still in beta that generates .kml files from GPS signals that can be displayed by Google Earth as a moving map. These are some among other efforts along the same lines.
Also rediscovered the redesigned website of GPSVisualizer by Adam Shneider which now can help generate .kml files used by Google Earth plus a web interface to GpsBabel tools.
Then after running into a version of Opera Mini for the i870 Motorola phone I got distracted trying to get it to work on the i415 which kept failing for lack of memory.
Navizon & GeoTags
Finally I was able to get back to my original track and talk about the latest version of Navizon which brings location-based comments as we’ve seen with HereCast. Version 1.3 adds a new tag to the PocketPC app through which comments can be made to create a tag associated to a geographic location or GeoTag.
You will need to uninstall the previous version before installing the new one which will also include SQLCE 2.0. You can create tags at the location (after obtaining a GPS fix or location information from WiFi) or at your own account page at Navizon’s website. But I couldn’t see tags from other people last I tried. You can control the radius around which tags alerts should popup and how often a search for new tags should be made.
The issue I see here, which is the same brought up by GISUser on his blog is that we need to start talking about Open Data. Shared structured data with a common interface for use by different client & server apps. Navizon can be a client, as PlaceLab and A2B. Wigle.net already carries the best wireless database available, GeoUrl 2.0 comes back and is picking up speed fast with location data. “WikiTags” or similar effort to keep a single (replicable database) of comments, stories, reviews, notes about particular geographic locations plus photos. A common travel diary shared among all of us.
[Update] But the folks from Navizon seen to be on top of their game about this too.
