Puzzlepieces – tag ‘map’

MapQuest Dev Blog – MapQuest Opens Up – in the UK - people’s eyes tend to gloss over when I explain that it won’t be that many years before most online maps and GPS devices use OpenStreetMap as their data source. And although use of OSM has been spreading, this is a very big deal… MapQuest is not only using OSM data on a demo site, but hiring people who have built parts of the open source map stack to improve their work and release it openly, AND contributing $1 million to the open mapping cause in the US. Good job AOL.

It occurs to me that I’ve hardly mentioned OpenStreetMap on this blog, despite that it’s often an obsession of mine, as people who’ve met me in person would quickly confirm. As the Wikipedia of maps (no other explanation works nearly as well), it is open, easy to contribute to, and I believe, will eventually be the source used for most general mapping applications. Even today it gets quite a bit of use, and growing.

Anyhow, Mikel Maron posts on the Map Kibera blog (Some notes on Map Kibera mapping) about some of the amazing work he organized mapping Kibera, Nairobi, one of the largest slums in the world. It’s interesting how a project that began as a counter to the high-priced Ordinance Survey maps in London has become (among many other things), among the best in maps of the developing world, and and an important resource in humanitarian efforts such as Haiti.

I myself have contributed to the project wherever I am living (or have lived), with lots of contributions around Bellevue, WA, a bit in several places in Toronto, and last week a ton of very detailed and localized mapping in a small section of Florida.

Last week Google replaced thier base maps in the US, no longer using data from TeleAtlas. The new data isn’t from OpenStreetMap either. I think we are finally starting to figure out where it all came from: MapDotNet : Blog : Google voice recognition software used in street data collection process?

geoupdater - does something very similar to what I was working on.

I’ve got my location set in FireEagle, which I update via the site and Dopplr. I also found an app that turns FireEagle into geoRSS which allows me to include the updates in friendfeed and plot my location easily on a map, which I will shortly be adding to my personal homepage.

This tool (via Ogle Earth) will read from FireEagle and post updates to services like Facebook, and via an RSS feed that includes past locations, allows you to pull in updates to friendfeed, etc. Not bad.

Brain Off » Open Source Geo Stack :: Mikel Maron :: Building Digital Technology for Our Planet - since I emailed Mikel asking for a list like this about a year and a half ago, I can take credit for it, right?

Anyhow this is a great list that includes everything except the actual sources of data. The best one for that is often OpenStreetMap, but it really depends where and what you’re mapping.

Virtual Earth / Live Maps: The New Release of Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D is now Live! - when I was studying for exams this past week, Live Maps, the team I worked with and will be returning to in August, released a major upgrade. Here is what is cool to me, although there is a lot more.

• labels on “birds-eye” (oblique) imagery - this is actually very complex to do, from a technical standpoint, but it makes the imagery much more useful
• MapCruncher integration. I have played with MapCruncher a lot, it is an amazingly useful tool for putting raster/PDF maps onto modern web maps, and I have shown it off to a lot of people
• better viewing (and RSS feeds!) for user-added items everywhere
• improved display of KML files, which is especially important, as KML 2.2 is now an OGC standard geographic data format
• walking directions - people who know me in person know that driving directions aren’t very useful to me. Unfortunately, walking directions isn’t on Live Maps now, but it has been added to the API. So far it only uses a subset of the road network, no foot paths, parks, etc., so hopefully that will be improved upon

Okay, so I am cheating a bit here. Rather than writing a new post, I’m linking to a page on my wiki where I have been collecting links for several years already: mfagan wiki / waterloo geo stuff.

Back when I started UWhub (now largely defunct) it was first going to be a mapping site for the area around campus. Then I decided it would be easier to make just regular web search first, then add a search with a geographic component (e.g. housing search), at which point I would add the map. Apparently a search engine can be a lot of work so I never got past that. But since the beginning there I have been collecting links for tools and resources for mapping the University of Waterloo, the city itself, etc. At some point it moved from a text file to a spot on my wiki, and I cleaned up and edited a lot of it recently. I have also dumped some other things on the page that don’t have much to do with mapping.

So that was a long prelude to me pointing out that that page is an extremely useful and comprehensive resource. While it is very unlikely I will actually put all the data into a single map site, the collection of links by itself is great. It includes lots of maps, at various scales (one classroom within the school, the entire world…), and tons of other data sources that can be mapped in some way, such as businesses, transit, housing, news, jobs, etc. It includes a lot of resources most people didn’t know existed, from health inspection records for all food outlets in the region, maps of crimes in the area by week and crime type, interactive maps with high resolution aerial imagery from multiple different years, geological data, historical and future maps, detailed maps of the all the floors of all the UW libraries, etc. And I keep finding new things to add, let me know if you see things I’m missing. I will definitely reference some of these links on a later post about the city.

The Map Room: Toronto’s Language Quilt - really neat map by the Toronto Star.

Official Google Maps API Blog: Microformats in Google Maps - they could do a lot more, but it’s a good start.

MapCruncher turns static images into tiles suitable for use with Microsoft Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local), and presumably other tile-based mapping applications too. Very neat and useful, the existing hacks I’d seen to handle this on Google’s map API were relatively poor. Via VE blog.