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Recent GeoNews: Maps, iPhone, ArcGIS Virtualisation, Intergraph and much much more
posted by Satri
on Friday June 19, @02:48PM
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from the cleaning-the-desk-before-the-holidays dept.
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from the cleaning-the-desk-before-the-holidays dept.
Here's the recent geonews in batch.
There's a new release of the open source geometry engine GEOS, now at version 3.1.1.
There's an essay on the comparison of the most suitable single multi-purpose map projections out there, with a focus on Fuller and Cahill map projections.
There's an hour-long interview about Bing Maps internals.
All Points Blog informs us about Garmin and Linux, conclusion: forget it for now.
The iPhone supports location sharing in its browser. There's even a pay-as-you-go iPhone turn-by-turn app, VS informs us most major navigation companies are going to the iPhone, plus there's surprising augmented reality such as Layar (also for Android). You can now talk to Android maps.
Henri Bergius argues that browser geolocation without GPS is quite accurate enough, this all related to GeoClue and Gnome's Empathy.
Mapperz has an entry named OpenStreetMap & FireFox 3.5 (RC1) Geolocation.
Off the Map tested Google Table Fusion for geospatial capabilities (mentioned last week).
If you're looking for a map of Tehran, use OpenStreetMap or Google.
TMR shares an entry on mapping of North Korea, FGT also discusses topographic maps of North Korea.
There's a NYC interactive homicide map.
On the ESRI front, there's a whitepaper on ArcGIS Server and virtualisation. SA continues on his critics of the ESRI Web ADF 9.3.
GWG offers a two-parts article on Plug & Play Maps, a free tool to design thematic maps.
Ed Parsons informs us SPOT Image is ambitious with their future satellite launches.
The EiS offers an entry on 3D building in NASA World Wind.
You can see this example of using Google Earth for urban development projects.
SS shares an interesting NASA interactive Climate Time Machine.
There are a bunch of new cities in Google Transit and Refugee mapping efforts.
APB has several entries on Integraph recently, one on GeoMedia 6.1 and an entry about Loran has funds now and will stay alive for some more time.
See also some related stories below or perform a search.
Related Stories
Reviews: GeoMedia Professional 6.0 Review 2 comments
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GeoPlace offers a GeoMedia Professionnal 6.0 review. From the review: "GeoMedia Professional 6.0 ties up the "loose ends" by providing new tools and approaches for organizing, standardizing and accessing data across the enterprise. [...] Because GeoMedia Professional is targeted toward GIS "power users," it includes an impressive array of data creation and editing tools, including "construction aids," which are temporary placement aids that will be familiar to CAD users. The basic "Insert Feature" command has been completely rebuilt to be more flexible and intuitive, and several editing tools have been improved."
The GeoClue Project: Geographic Information Service for Apps
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The High Earth Orbit blog links to the GeoClue project which aims at providing a geographic information service for applications. This project in development will be presented at the GNOME conference in Birmingham, UK. From the website: "GeoClue is a project that provide all kinds of geography information to an application. This is through a very abstract DBus interface in which a variety of backends can be used to provide this implementation. Although we implement a few reference backends, creating your own is encouraged.
There are many separate APIs that are planned including
* Position
* Map
* Routing
* Geocode
* Track Logs" From the presentation's synopsis: "Emerging open-standards such as GeoRSS, KML, geo-uri, and Geo W3C all enable easy publishing and sharing of geographic information from many data sources. GeoClue aims to provide users with a application that can determine their position from a variety of location providers and find information that is local to them."
Technology: eLORAN as a Backup of GNSS / GPS 1 comment
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The SatNav blog runs an informative entry on eLORAN (enhanced LOng RAnge Navigation) and its adoption by the U.S. and the U.K. as a GPS/GLONASS/GALILEO satellites backup. From the the entry: "As such it is the best insurance policy money can buy to secure the benefits of GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] for safety and commercially important applications.
The US recently made the decision to upgrade its LORAN system to eLORAN capability and at the same time move the operation of the system from U.S. Coast Guard to the Department of Homeland Security’s National Protection and Programs Directorate. [...] An excellent rationale for eLORAN highlighting its role as a complement to GNSS is here [pdf]." In mid-January, APB discussed the U.S. call for comments on shutting down LORAN-C.
Technology: SPOT Globe For Google Earth Enterprise
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The Anything Geospatial blog brings us this news : "Google Earth users now have direct access to SPOT satellite imagery in the Google Earth (TM) environment, enter SPOT Globe For Google Earth Enterprise (fusion-ready SPOT imagery) The SPOT Globe offering includes the entire line of 2.5m SPOTMaps mosaics. These off-the-shelf products provide seamless uniform coverage comprised of 2.5 meter, natural-color SPOT 5 satellite imagery acquired in the past three years. Offered in regional and nationwide orthorectified mosaics."
Industry: China Opening Up to Neogeography while North Korea Resists
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Last week, Ogle Earth offered an informative entry on China opening up to neogeography. See the previous related stories below about China's past attitude. Meanwhile, APB informs us North Korea is doing the inverse, no car-equiped GPS or GPS phones will be allowed in the country: "But with the new measure, the North will expel any South Korean found with a mobile phone or GPS and confiscate the equipment, Unification Ministry officials said."
From the OE entry: "Reading between the lines, I can think of two specific reasons for this change of heart:
1. It was embarrassing that everyone but the Chinese could see satellite imagery of Beijing transformed by glorious new stadiums during the Olympics. In fact, there were plenty of informal ways for those behind the Great Chinese Firewall to see the imagery — just not officially.
2. The earthquake in Sichuan on May 12, 2008, drove home beyond all doubt to Chinese leaders what a huge boon easy access to satellite imagery is in disaster relief operations. (That earthquake struck just a week after China announced it would investigate Google Maps for maps "that wrongly depict China's borders or that reveal military secrets.")"
Location-aware Software Comes to the Linux Platform
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APB links to an Ars Technica article named Location-aware software comes to the Linux platform.
From the article: "A framework called GeoClue aims to enable integration of location-aware technologies in Linux desktop applications. It is an abstraction layer that makes geolocation functionality accessible through a standardized desktop-neutral API that is easy for applications to consume. It will provide a C library and also expose its functionality through D-Bus, an interprocess communication system that is widely used on Linux. [...] There are also some impressive open source frameworks emerging higher up in the stack that help facilitate the development of location-aware applications. One of these that has recently become popular is libchamplain, a GTK+ library that provides preintegrated mapping controls that can be embedded in applications. It leverages the GObject-based Clutter canvas framework for rendering and uses free map images from services like OpenStreetMap and OpenAerialMap."
We discussed GeoClue before, see related stories below.
Technology: First Turn-by-Turn Navigation App for iPhone and mapNinja
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From the cars.com blog : "The
iPhone has unquestionably dominated the mobile phone industry for the past two
years. One of its biggest advantages over other devices is the long list of
applications of every variety that can be downloaded to it. There are “apps”
for everything from keeping track of your Twitter feed to following your
favorite baseball team. Finally, after nearly two years, a developer has
released the first real-time, turn-by-turn navigation application for the
iPhone. XROADS G-Map ($19) is clearly the best real-time navigation option for an
iPhone right now, but we ran it through the same tests we would a stand-alone
TomTom, Garmin or Mio system to see how it fared with the big boys of
navigation. Update: 03/10 16:44 GMT by S : I dare add this to lxnyce's story: AnyGeo links to mapNinja, a commercial mapping SDK for the iPhone.
Industry: GEOS 3.1.0 Released
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clever elephant informs us the open source GEOS 3.1.0 has been released.
From the entry: "Version 3.1.0 includes a number of improvements over the 3.0 version:
* PreparedGeometry operations for very fast predicate testing.
o Intersects()
o Covers()
o CoveredBy()
o ContainsProperly()
* Easier builds under MSVC and OpenSolaris
* Thread-safe CAPI option
* IsValidReason added to CAPI
* CascadedUnion operation for fast unions of geometry sets
* Single-sided buffering operation added
* Numerous bug fixes."
A reminder: what is GEOS? "GEOS (Geometry Engine - Open Source) is a C++ port of the Java Topology Suite (JTS). As such, it aims to contain the complete functionality of JTS in C++. This includes all the OpenGIS Simple Features for SQL spatial predicate functions and spatial operators, as well as specific JTS enhanced topology functions."
See previous stories below.
Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec [updated]
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SS links to an entry about Firefox 3.5 to bring geoawareness of browsers to the masses.
From dougt's blog: "We decided to investigate bundling a technology that would provide an end-to-end solution, so that the feature would work out of the box for users, and would give websites a large enough potential user base to kick start the development of innovative apps and services. [...] Web developers can use a standard way of accessing geolocation data and not have to worry about the underlying geolocation provider. [...] When a web page wants ask you for your location, you get an dialog similar to the one below."
See also related stories below - geoawareness in Firefox has been discussed in the past.
Update: 05/01 17:16 GMT by S : APB links to announcement related to the use of Google Location Services in that upcoming version of Firefox.
Technology: Intergraph GeoMedia Viewer Now Available
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Jeff Hobbs informs us Intergraph's GeoMedia Viewer is now available for download.
From the entry: "You can now download it from Intergraph Support site. [...] So, if you’re looking for a tool that will do any of the following:
* Read a GeoMedia/GM Pro workspace.
* Connect to Oracle Spatial and SQL Server.
* Have the same look and feel as GeoMedia and GeoMedia Pro.
* Free."
The same blog also links to GeoMedia's wiki.
See also related stories below. It's been a while since we addressed Intergraph specifically.
iPhone OS 3.0 Geo-Wrap-Up: a Location-Based Services Mobile Device
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The iPhone OS 3.0 was announced yesterday and, without surprises, it includes several new capabilities that makes it important in the location-based services mobile devices world.
If you want a good overview of what's new or improved, see Tidbits.
What's in there more specifically for geospatial? The O'Reilly Radar runs a story named "What the iPhone 3GS and 3.0 OS Means for Geo Devs", mentioning TomTom has a turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone.
APB runs an entry about Intermap bringing their DEMs to the iPhone.
There was a Slashdot discussion named "Using the iPhone As a Pointing Device For the Real World" but that was just before the actual announcement. Slashdot inevitably discussed the iPhone OS 3.0 afterwards.
I expect to see more iPhone geonews on the geoblogs in the coming weeks.
See also recent related stories below.
Geonews Wrap-up: Wrong House Demolished, WTO, Google Fusion Tables, SVG and more
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luke writes "This is why you should care about GPS precision AND proper training.
United Press International shares an article about how wrong can things go if you don't get your facts right, misusing geospatial technology. From the article: "A Georgia man said he received a phone call saying the three-bedroom house his father built had been successfully demolished — by mistake". The full article is here"
In addition to this geospatial trivia, here's recent geonews in batch. First Map Hawk links to a pretty informative interactive map of disputes between WTO (World Trade Organization) Members. Then Mapperz shares a fast batch geocoding tip using the new Google Fusion Tables. The same blog informs us that Yahoo Maps has been updated in Europe. There's an interesting entry on the combination of symbols on maps, screenshots included. If SVG matters to you, read to entry on converting shapefiles and KML files to SVG. Finally, APB informs us about Blockbuster offering an interactive map that highlights movie locations.
In addition to this geospatial trivia, here's recent geonews in batch. First Map Hawk links to a pretty informative interactive map of disputes between WTO (World Trade Organization) Members. Then Mapperz shares a fast batch geocoding tip using the new Google Fusion Tables. The same blog informs us that Yahoo Maps has been updated in Europe. There's an interesting entry on the combination of symbols on maps, screenshots included. If SVG matters to you, read to entry on converting shapefiles and KML files to SVG. Finally, APB informs us about Blockbuster offering an interactive map that highlights movie locations.
Browser Geolocation - FireFox 3.5 1 comment
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As a couple of blogs are reporting (Henri Bergius, Mapperz, GeoWeb Guru) there is a new major release of FireFox (version 3.5). The GIS related part of this release is the new support for browser geolocation. To quote Henri Bergius blog : "With both Firefox 3.5 and iPhone OS 3.0 out, a significant number of browsers suddenly have geolocation support. It will be interesting to see how quickly web services start to follow up, providing more meaningful content through the location context.
"
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