A thoughtful New York Times article by Alison Arieff describes a University of California, Berkeley project lead by Nicholas de Monchaux, an assistant professor of architecture and urban design. The project, Local Code, uses GIS to measure unused public land in major cities, such as abandoned lots and remnants of parcels on the edge of transportation networks, and proposes economically viable solutions for converting these spaces to green and environmentally sustainable public areas.
WPA2 : Local Code / Real Estates from Nicholas de Monchaux on Vimeo.Archive for the 'Tools' Category
Just found this fantastic route-planning website for bikers and hikers. I found a nice map of Maastricht which will give me some ammunition for touring around with visiting friends. Judging by the content, it has been around for a while (since 2005), but appears to be gaining momentum. It seems like a very nice interface, and the company also re-sells the web-components so people can customize routing on their own websites. They also do hard-core GIS processing, creating route-networks for GPS systems. RouteYou is a Belgian company, and they seem to be just expanding into global markets. So far they show over 80,000 public routes in Europe, but only a few hundred in the States, and a handful in Australia. This business may be fun to watch.
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.
They beat me to it! Mapchannels created this very neat customizable mashup of Google Street View with Microsoft Bird’s Eye, with all the elements I was muttering about, to myself. As a matter of fact, Mapchannels has several other nice tools which you can customize and put on your website. So who are they? Apparently, a very low profile organization, no name or location to be discovered, a mystery. So in case you read this, Mapchannels, THANK YOU! The application is embedded in my page “Amsterdam Map“, with a starting point near the Dam. You can type in any other location in the world where Street View exists, and enjoy the slick results.
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.)
This doesn’t have much to do with maps (yet), but what a nice presentation and website design tool! Viewbook is the creation of a Dutch design company (Resourc Studio), and hit my radar because of their online portfolio for TodaysArt coming up in Den Haag. Then, searching for reviews of Viewbook resulted in another discovery, Listio.com, an handy (maybe new?) online directory of Web 2.0 applications and services. Another great resource.
And finally, something map-related… searching Listio, found this application, ParkLet, for renting out unused parking spaces in the UK. Seems like a great idea, though not really appropriate on car-free Sunday in Amsterdam.
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.
Now this is really, really cool. MERL (Mitsubshi Electric Research Labs) showed a tabletop ”touch-and-gesture-activated” screen, hooked up to an ordinary laptop and ordinary projector (suspended above). It is billed (in the online fact sheet) as “the world’s first multi-user touch technology”. Maybe gaming will be the killer app for this product, but disaster response is the GIS-related application which brought MERL to EUC2007. Continue reading ‘EUC2007: Diamond Touch’
At ESRI EU conference in Stockholm, 3DConnection, a division of Logitech, demo-ed SpaceNavigator for use with ESRI’s ArcGlobe (but of course, it works with Google Earth, too). Its a 3D mouse priced for consumers (59€ or $59, so guess where I’ll buy it.) This has been available for a year, launched in Australia, so maybe I’m the last to know about it. Beautifully constructed and intuitive, there are various more expensive models with more features . This works with SketchUp and other 3D design applications.
So easy to put Picasaweb photos on a google map now… should compare this with Flikr’s map feature. For a start, google maps are certainly better than Yahoo. The Picassa map feature allows you to zoom into a google map, click on a photo, then click on the map for accurate pin-pointing. This could be very interesting… released last month, it seems. Flickr allows you to search everyone’s geo-tagged albums and places all photos on the map. But wait a minute, looks like 22.9 MILLION photos worldwide. In my neighborhood, there are 4200. Who are these people?
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