Sixth Sense is a multi-component wearable multi-function device invented by Pranav Mistry, a researcher at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group. It was demonstrated at the TED conference in February this year by Belgian Patty Maes, leader of the MIT lab, and this fabulous video describes the various features, and potential applications. Since one of the demonstrated applications is a map interface, I’m including it here, but the coolest thing (to me), is a watch created by drawing a circle on your wrist. As I perpetually lose watches, this would be the perfect solution.
Archive for the 'Technical' Category
The USGS which calls itself “the nation’s largest water, earth, and biological science and civilian mapping agency” yesterday announced the availability of free vectorized topographic maps for the US in GeoPDF format. Details are on their Digital Map-Beta home page. Raster images of topographic maps have been available in GeoPDF form for some time, but the new series will include vector “layers” which can be switched on and off - contours, water, transportation, labels, etc. … just like a real GIS, but much easier to share. So far, only Arizona is available from the USGS, but much more will be released this year.
The GeoPDF reading software (TerraGo Desktop) can be download free from the developer, TerraGo Technologies. It is essentially a toolbar which is added to Adobe Reader which makes it possible to see the layers, to do a few spatial calculations (distance and area), and with a single click, hop into Google Maps. This is a fascinating development for the GIS world. Late last year ESRI announced an extension for ArcGIS 9.3 for exporting to GeoPDF. The US government is embracing GeoPDF in a big way, so little TerraGo will probably go a long way. After three venture-capital financing rounds will they go public, or be gulped by Google? Could we be looking at the ultimate Google/GIS Mashup? More later.
An article in the New York Times today discusses the use of a GIS spatial analysis technique referred to as ”cluster analysis” for an unusual application. Researchers Elizabeth Currid of USC and Sarah Williams of Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab presented their conclusions at a meeting of the Association of American Geographers recently. The researchers geocoded 300,000 photos and 6000 events from the Getty Imges database. With this data set, the Global Moran’s I statistic was used to find hotspots in New York and LA. The conclusions may not be so very surprising, but the use of photo media is interesting. This type of social research is likely to show up more often as people begin to mine data from geocoded images (e.g. Picasaweb and Flickr) or geotagged Tweets.
The study was partly inspired the work of Richard Florida who developed the concept of the “creative class” and created a stir with Amsterdam planners at a 2003 conference titled “Creativity and the City”.
The NY Times published this Imigration Explorer interactive map with some fascinating information about immigration in the US since 1880, a great example of using Flash for visualization of data over time. You can view populations by country of origin as well, through time, though unfortunately not Dutch settlers. Note all the Russians in Alaska! (Of course a small number, but significant percentage.) The map was made with data from Social Explorer, which looks like an interesting service, though their pricing is not clear.
NYT seems to have their own flash developers, like Matthew Bloch, who studied at the University of Wisconsin - Madison (go Badgers!). Matthew, with Prof. Mark Harrower of Colorbrewer fame, also developed Mapshaper, an online service for simplifying shape files. I can use this! Note: the map on the right is extreme… many usable gradations exist between the two. (This is really for GIS techies.)
There’s a nice article in Technology Review, How Google Maps the World, with a simple explanation of the process from satellite to website. Makes it sound so easy. By the way, the company producing most of the high resolution satellite images is DigitalGlobe, and if you want to buy just one of the little snapshots, say a shot of the Dam Square as an 8 x 10 print, it will cost you $19.95, so I guess we can be happy Google is footing the bill for the earth. (Thank you Richard.)
James Fee wrote about the Sept 13 Microsoft announcement that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has licensed Microsoft Virtual Earth (for one year, with possible extension to two) for “mission critical” applications. According to an article in Federal Computer Week (FCW), the partnership between Microsoft and ESRI contributed to the selection, as the EPA can leverage its existing ESRI GIS resources.
Why not Google Earth? According to a Bloomberg interview with EPA’s Pat Garvey, the fact that GE requires that the user download an application, whereas VE is all browser based was a key factor.
An alternative path to putting “real GIS” on the web with MS Virtual Earth (and ESRI’s geodatabase ArcSDE) is using ISC’s MapDotNet Server. This product competes with ArcGIS Server, and according to the ISC blog they were “kicked out” of the ESRI partner program last spring.
An exhibitor at EUC 2007 in Stockholm was HNIT Baltic from Lithuania, makers of Cellular Expert, an ArcGIS extension for wireless telecommunications networks planning, optimisation and data management. A technical article in an ESRI’s Telecom Connections Winter ‘07 (see page 4) publication describes research done by Ball State University, using Cellular Expert together with ArcGIS and various extensions.
Discovered two resources which will help a lot: 1) Mapki . A wiki (knowledge base) on Google maps API, and 2) Google Maps Tutorial by Mike Williams. Gonna read that one cover-to-cover. Best I’ve seen so far.
Shape files (.shp) are the standard ESRI format for geographic data. Converting these to Google-readable KML files is key to adding custom data generated by GIS software to Google Earth / Maps. It seems that this is still not as easy as pie, so we are investigating the possibilities starting here with this post.
A great series of articles provides background from earlier this year on the Free Geography Tools blog. Great place to start. The articles mention several tools which still seem to be prevalent:
1) Arc2Earth – by Brian Flood, which allows entire MXD files (the basic ESRI ArcGIS project file) to be converted, or at least a substantial portion. This software can be purchased in several different versions for prices from $199 - $2500. (Price seems up since FGT’s blog.) Requires that you have ArcGIS 9.
2) KMLer by Russian developer Valery Hronusov - converts single shape files from ArcGIS to KML.
3) Shape2KML does not require ArcGIS ownership. Described as “fast, easy to use, and produces good results”, and is also cheap (free).
4) Shape2Earth sounds like the best solution, not free, but cheap, no need to own ArcGIS, and described by FGT as superior to all the others.
5) ArcGIS Extension “KML Home Companion 3.2.0, converts shape files to KLM, but does not keep attributes.
6) Google Earth Pro reads shape files… unclear yet how it handles attribute data. More experimenting to do.
Now the fun begins (for me), testing all these options, and looking for other solutions, too.
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