2005 June « FANTOM PLANET

APIs, APIs, APIs, And The Open Geodata Community

Google Map API. Yahoo Maps API. Microsoft loves user created content. Everyone loves users and developers. They big corps seem to surface realize the utility of what geohackers have been discussing and building, and are ready to role it out masively. That’s cool, right.

The point of geocoded RSS is to leverage the architecture of creation and aggregation tools out there. By encoding annotations in RSS, widespread ease of use leads to an emergent layer of open geo data that is searchable by location and text, taggable, ready for repurpose.

Yahoo Maps API accept the geocoded RSS “substandard” (help please OGC) for building maps, and that deserves an exclamation mark! It’s a good start, addresses a certain segment of usage, and spurns geodata creation on the network. Now Yahoo needs to start aggregating these feeds, and build a search interface to user created data in Local. Apparently I still work for Yahoo (w/o the benefits ;), if you guys want to do something, let me know. Or how about map links in the My Yahoo RSS modules? That My Yahoo Maps module is looking a little crufty.

Criticisms: the map is still kinda pokey and RSS feed errors are not well reported, please give some feedback. Not thrilled with the “ymaps” namespace .. “Address”, “CityState”, “Zip”, “Country” all have general utility beyond Yahoo, and this should be pursued in open standards. “Groups” can be handles by <category> or <dc:subject>, there’s no need for new fields here.

Google Maps API is aimed at developers. There’s no portable annotation format specified, it’s all through Javascript calls. That’s fine, leaves it open to apps build on the platform. And leaves the creation of community open to other apps. An excellent Google Maps Hack would be a geocoded RSS parser/translator to Google API calls.

Virtual Earth has professed user&developer-love, but it’s yet to be seen how easy it will be to get information in and out of their system. And it’s very much about community .. will users feel that the system is somehow their own? flickr lessons.

Now that the tools and formats are widely available, the next challenge is to make it easier for users to geotag, aggregate and search.

–From Mikel Maron’s Brain Off

Posted in Uncategorized

Google Maps API Released!

Jun 30
Comments

Boing Boing reader Ben Metcalfe says,

Google have just launched their API to the fantastic Google Maps. There’s some excellent thing people produced by hacking with pre-API Google Maps code. Let’s hope the launch of the API opens the flood gates…

Jeffrey Warren adds, “Following the release of the Google Maps API, we spent an hour or so and put together this map depicting Star Wars Imperial ATAT attack on Palo Alto. Yay for remixing.”

Posted in Uncategorized

Definition: “Slippy Map”

Jun 23
Comments

I was talking to John Frank, founder of MetaCarta, the other day about the future of Google-like map services, and he defined what he calls the “slippy map”:

“A “slippy map” is type of web-browser based map client that allows you to dynamically pan the map simply by grabbing and sliding the map image in any direction. Modern web browsers allow dynamic loading of map tiles in response to user action _without_ requiring a page reload. This dynamic effect makes map viewing more intuitive.”

BBBRRRILLLIANT!

Posted in Uncategorized

Even Google Maps Need Cartographers

Jun 22
Comments

The recent post by Ed Parsons, chief technical officer for the UK’s Ordinance Survey, spotted an obvious error regarding Google Maps coverage over Europe. I wonder if this is a NavTeq or TeleAtlas mistake since it is noted in the U.S. coverage that they are the sources?

Spot the mistake?
Spot the deliberate mistake ?

I am a huge fan of google maps a well designed application and great user expereice, however can you spot the problem on this map of Europe.. Look closely and you will see a error in the text placement routine which means that..

Woops.. Belgium north of the Netherlands

Belgium has swapped places with the Netherlands !

Posted in Uncategorized

Securinig ArcGIS Web Services - Tech Doc

Jun 21
Comments

From “Spatially Adjusted“:

I‘ve seen a number of questions recently on securing web services hosted by ArcGIS Server. At 9.1 we’ve added an article to the EDN doc library that should help you get started. This isn’t a supplement for fully understanding web server and web services security but it’ll certainly help you get your head around the ArcGIS Server security infrastructure.

This article describes the types of web services that can use ArcGIS Server, considerations when implementing security, some methodologies for applying security to web services, and instructions for how to implement security methodologies.

While you’re there you might check out the ‘What’s new at 9.1 for ArcGIS Developers“.

Also, before someone else points it out i’ll direct you to a little spelling error in one of our interface names. If you browse to the type changes page you’ll notice that the first interface I3DAnalaystProtectNames looks a little fishy. For a while this drove Eleanor, our developer doc lead, crazy (she’s over it now). Unfortunately the type had been in the system and pretty well burned in when we caught it right before release. It was too late to make the necessary changes through the entire system -and- make our ship date. Looks like we need to start incorporating spell check into our MIDL / build process.

Have thoughs on improving the system? Send us some feedback either here on the blog or via the on-line feedback page.

Posted in Uncategorized

Adding yourself to GeoURL

Jun 20
Comments

These are the instruction on how to geolocate your blog from Mikel Maron’s “Brain Off”:

What are the coordinates I should use? If the page is about you (such as your home page), the coordinates should be for your location. If the page is about some physical place, the coordinates should reflect that location. The location of your server itself is probably not that interesting.
Find your location. I’ve constructed a list of resources to help you.

Coordinates are in the form of a latitude and longitude, separated by a comma, for example: 47.98481,-71.42124. Western hemisphere longitudes and Southern hemisphere latitudes are negative.

Remeber that minutes and seconds are in 60ths, so if something is X degrees, Y minutes, and Z seconds, the decimal equivalent is X + Y/60 + Z/3600.

Add the following meta tags to the section of your web page:

See our notes for help with adding these tags to a blog content management system such as Radio or Livejournal.

Note: If your site uses frames, you must add the meta tags to your top-level page which contains the — we will not check the contents of your frames.
We’ll also index Geo Tags-style “geo.position” meta tag as per their documentation.

Tell the GeoURL server your page needs to be indexed.

Use the ping form to tell us that your page has been updated.
In a few minutes we’ll index your page.
It’s OK to ping us several times.

Tell others.
GeoURL will become more useful as the database grows in size.
Tell others about GeoURL by linking to us.

GeoURL

–>

Posted in Uncategorized

DigitalGlobe Satellite Apparently Delayed

Jun 20
Comments

DigitalGlobe appears to be running a few months behind schedule for when it expects to have its next-generation spy satellite up and running.

The Longmont company has said it anticipated launching its WorldView satellite “no later than 2006.” A company spokesman said there isn’t any change in that timetable. Boulder-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies is building the satellite.

But the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency - which awarded DigitalGlobe a $500 million contract to build and operate the satellite - said the company has asked for a change in the timetable.

“DigitalGlobe has requested a schedule modification for the NextView program, and NGA is currently in negotiations with them for the changes,” NGA spokesman Dave Burpee said in an e-mailed statement. “NGA is confident that DigitalGlobe will be able to maintain a launch in 2006.”

Posted in Uncategorized

The World as a Blog

Jun 19
Comments

The World as a Blog

Mikel Maron’s “Brain Off” blog has a map that shows near real-time blog posts on a map. From what Mikel has written, there is a one to three minute delay from when a blogger posts to their blog until it is visualized on the map.

It’s friggin’ awesome!

Posted in Uncategorized

News from Open Source Geospatial ‘05

Jun 19
Comments

I’m wondering why I didn’t get work to send me to this thing? Anyway, besides the point, there’s a ton of news coming out of it. Mostly posted by bloggers who are presenting at the OSG Conference.

Scratch that.

Most of the news that I have been reading is coming from Direction Magazine’s All Points Blog.

Posted in Uncategorized

Flickr on the Planet

Jun 19
Comments

chatter-on
Originally uploaded by Fantom Planet.

Well folks, I did it. I set up Flickr to post to The Planet.

Hopefully, we’ll be rockin’ and a rollin’ soon.

Posted in Uncategorized