After the facebook map or the world, it is now possible to visulise your LiknkedIn network.
Here is an example based on my profile. Each colour shows contact from specific companies or university I have worked for or studied at.
Give it a go on : http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com.
I am a big believer that geospatial technology can be applied to virtually anything. Here is another great example, the “football supporter Map of London”, as initially reported by big think.
Football Supporter Map of London
Tribal community may not be so more obvious in our western society, but one can wonder. London is a fast city in continuous change, however this illustration clearly demonstrate the attachment that each areas in London have to a specific football club.
This map was initially reported on this forum, and it has clearly generated further debates on which area one leaves and its attachment to a specific football club.
As reported by the BBC, here is a new initiative of using the Wiki Map OpenStreetMap.
Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, widely known as Africa’s largest slum, remains a blank spot on the map. Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of Kibera it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents. This November, young Kiberans create the first public digital map of their own community.
More Info can be found on their web site: http://mapkibera.org/.
GetMapping has just released a new service to request the OS MasterMap data through a WFS (Web feature Service).
The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service Interface Standard (WFS) provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as the “source code” behind a map, whereas the WMS interface or online mapping portals like Google Maps return only an image, which end-users cannot edit or spatially analyze. The XML-based GML furnishes the default payload-encoding for transporting the geographic features, but other formats like shapefiles can also serve for transport. In early 2006, the OGC members approved the OpenGIS GML Simple Features Profile. This profile is designed to both increase interoperability between WFS servers and to improve the ease of implementation of the WFS standard.
Ordnance Survey was already delivering MasterMap through a WMS (Web Mapping Service). This was delivered through their professional service OS On demand. WFS is very useful for gaining access to the features and intelligence built into highly detailed vector mapping such as OS MasterMap.
This will certainly remove a major headache for many orgnaisation who until then had to internally manage thsi large and complex dataset. Full details of the new is available on the GetMapping site
The GeoServer community has announced the release of 2.1-beta3, which is now available for download. GeoServer is an open source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards.
The big feature for this release is support for WMS 1.3. Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, has been a major driver with provision of OpenGeo. With WMS 1.3 mandated by the INSPIRE Initiative, the Ordnance Survey now meets the INSPIRE requirements. This means that rather than implementing a solution on their own, they opted to fund the GeoServer project so that other organizations in the UK and the rest of Europe and the world could all benefit. Also funded by Ordnance Survey is a community module to implement the WMS extensions for INSPIRE View Service compliance—namely the language parameter and several extended capabilities fields.
With the UK being once more in the grip of a sever frost, there is never been a better time to review our heat loss from badly insulated buildings.
As reported by geoconexion, an aircraft fitted with specially developed survey equipment is taking to the skies over Britain’s cities at night. Using a new super-sensitive thermal sensor Leicestershire based aerial mapping company Bluesky is capturing highly accurate measurements of heat loss from buildings. The results of these night-time thermal surveys will provide Local Authorities, energy providers and even householders with intelligence to tackle energy inefficiency and fuel poverty across Britain’s towns and cities.
From one place to another one, here is another great example of applying geospatial technology to the thermal industry. Check the heat loss map from Haringey council.
The recent release of IE9, HTML5 will now be available through the main internet browsers. But the GIS industry is still shy to use the HTML5 technology, there are only a few examples using this technology but none are from main vendors. This article presents few examples of what can be achieved with HTML5 in the GIS industry.
Tile5 is an opensource HTML5 mapping JavaScript library that provides developers the ability to integrate existing mapping platforms to provide a rich HTML5 experience. This library is release under the MIT license. Tile5 makes use of the HTML5 new canvas tag. It currently supports a number of map provider; including OpenStreet Map and Bing. The API remains fairly limited but you can overlay pin, add route.
Cartagen; (http://cartagen.org) is a vector-based, client-side framework for rendering maps in native HTML 5. Written in JavaScript, it uses the new Canvas element to load mapping data from various sources, including OpenStreetMap. One of the advantages of this solution is the concept of geocss. Maps are styled with Geographic Style Sheets (GSS), a cascading stylesheet specification for geospatial information – a decision which leverages literacy in CSS to make map styling more accessible.
There is also some interesting attempt to integrate the like of OpenLayer with HTML55. The following post from mobilegeo is nice in depth example. Here is a quick video streamed from their site.
Looking around on Google, here are few arguments why one should start using HTML5. All considered it then seems that using HTML5 should be considered within the GIS industry particularly with the Geolocation API now fully integrated in the HTML5 spec.
Improved Code; HTML 5 will enable web designers to use cleaner, neater code, we can remove most div tags and replace them with semantic HTML 5 elements.
Greater Consistency; As websites adopt the new HTML 5 elements we will see far greater consistency in terms of the HTML used to code a web page on one site compared to another. This will make it far easier for web designers and web developers to immediately grasp how a web page is structured even if they are brand new to it.
Improved Semantics; As the elements used to code a web page are standardised, using the new HTML 5 elements, the semantic value of every web page will increase. As it will be easy to see which parts of the page are headers, nav, footers, aside, etc. and most importantly know what their meaning and purpose is in a machine readable format.
Improved Accessibility; With HTML 5 it should be possible for assistive technologies to expand on the features they can offer their users as they can immediately build up a more detailed understanding of the structure of a page by looking at the HTML 5 elements it contains. Could this spell the end for skip links?
Improved portability; HTML5 brings a lot of advantage over flash, notably in term of portability on the apple platform with the IPad. As reminded by factoidz Flash was created in the 1990s to run internet applications. It was mainly used on desktop PCs. And of course, it was eventually ported to Mac OSX. Now flash is used on laptops and desktops alike, but it has been causing some issues with Mac laptops and mobile devices. Flash doesn’t work well with Mac OSX, causing the CPU to work much harder than it needs to when running flash applications. And of course when the CPU is working harder, it uses more power, and drains the battery faster. That is only one of the reasons why flash isn’t good for laptops or mobile devices.
Geolocation; The new HTML5 geolocation APIs make location, whether generated via GPS or other methods, directly available to any HTML5-compatible browser-based application. See one a recent article on the matter: http://blog.geo-tag.info/2010/01/07/html-5-geolocation-api/.
Client-side database; HTML5 provides a new SQL-based database API that can be used for storing data locally, that is client side. You get fully defined and structured database storage. This allows a developer to save structured data client-side using a real SQL database. It is not a permanent database, but enables you to store structured data, temporarily. The data can be accessed to support the web application and it can even be accessed when the client is disconnected for a short period of time. This database can be used to store e-mails or shopping cart items for an online shopping site
Yesterday at a conference on Digital Britain Gordon, Brown prime Minister has announced freeing of OS data by April 1St, as the Guardian reports.
“I can confirm that from 1st April, we will be making a substantial package of information held by ordnance survey freely available to the public, without restrictions on re-use. Further details on the package and government’s response to the consultation will be published by the end of March.”
This is a big win for the guardian’s Free Our Data campaign; as are all the other non-personal datasets being released. It’s a huge, huge win for the campaign.
Full transcript of Gordon Browns’ speech is available on the number 10 website: http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page22897
ESRI has just published a new released, the the 2010 Maspup Challenge is now openned. The closing date is March 5th, 2010.
To get started:
Cash Prizes
1st Place: $10,000
2nd Place: $5,000
3rd Place: $2,500
4th Place: $2,500
Good Luck!
With the release of Quantum GIS 1.4, it seems that this continuoouly evolving product could be playing a big role against the like of ArcView and certainly MapInfo.
Quantum GIS (QGIS) is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS), licensed under the GNU General Public License, that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. QGIS is Open Source software and its free of cost. It supports vector, raster, and database formats (including the most common ESRI ShapeFile and geotiff). QGIS supports a wide variety of plugins to do things like display tracks from your GPS, and much more. They can be easily managed through the Plugin Manager.
Q GIS is linked with the like of the OGR and the GDAL libary allowing to load a large number of GIS format. At a high level the Supported formats include:
The User interface has many tools availabl, making it very close to the GIS desktop product MapInfo:
It can also publish your map on the internet using the export to Mapfile capability (requires a webserver with UMN MapServer installed)
But, would you use this product in a commercial environment, Is there any support? the answer is yes. The QGIS project provides an alphabetical list of support contractors with their home page.
With a very active community, this is definitely a product to keep an eye on. You can doanload the product here.
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