Making a Mountain out of a Hill

Saturday September 20th 2008
Filed Under Current Events, Features, GPS 

It’s a case of life imitating the reverse of art.  In 1995, Hugh Grant played a cartographer who tried to turn a Welsh mountain into a hill by remeasuring.  The film “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain” was set in 1917 in a small Welsh town.  Fast forward to 2008 where three walkers remeasured a local peak in Wales in order to reclassify it from a hill to a mountain.

Two thousand feet of height is what is required to be named as a mountain according to the Ordnance Survey.  For over two hundred years, that’s exactly what the classification of Mynydd Graig Goch in Snowdonia, Wales which until recently, had an official measured height of 1,998ft which put it two feet shy of being ranked as a mountain.   John Barnard, Myrddyn Phillips, and Graham Jackson launched an intensive survey of Mynydd Graig Goch to remeasure the height.  The team borrowed equipment from Leica Geosystems to take 7,000 GPS readings over two hours.  These measurements, which revealed the mountain to be 2,000.5 feet in height, convinced the Ordnance Survey to reclassify Mynydd Graig Goch as a mountain.  The revised digital data will be available online in the next few weeks and will be published in the OS Explorer and OS Landranger sometime in 2009-2010.

Read more: Hikers make a mountain out of an old Welsh hill – Associated Press

         

Heidelberg-3D – Interactive 3D City Mapping Based on OGC Standards

Wednesday September 10th 2008
Filed Under Features, Internet Mapping, Open Source 

Recently a first version of the interactive 3D city information system Heidelberg-3D.de was made available online. It can be used freely by anybody. The core of the system is one of the first implementations of the OpenGIS Web 3D Service (OGC W3DS) discussion paper. The system comes with a free 3D-Client called <XNavigator>. This client is a Java WebStart-Application and will be installed automatically if you follow the respective URL and if Java 6 is already installed on the computer. XNavigator allows the user to explore and analyse the 3D city and landscape models which are streamed by the W3DS server. A range of applications have been integrated in order to let the user work with the 3D model. In contrast to conventional proprietary 3D GIS, the whole system is totally based on standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

The main goal of the project is to build and evaluate a whole 3D spatial data infrastructure (3D-SDI) based on OGC services, not only to develop a further visualization component. Read more

         

GIS Used to Help Find Lost Hiker

Thursday September 04th 2008
Filed Under Features, GIS News 

Government Technology has an story about how GIS was used in the effort to find Dean Christy, a retired educator, who became disoriented due to fog while hiking in the San Bernardino Mountains, California.  The search and rescue effort benefited from San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s (SBSD) Mobile Mapping Unit which helped prepare maps pinpointing areas to search for the lost hiker.  The effort used a combination of GPS to capture location of clues, viewshed analysis to narrow down the location of the 911 calls, and other mapping to help focus the searching.  The article delves into the wide range of spatial techniques used to try and rescue Dean Christy.  Sadly, the rescuers weren’t not able to located him in time and his body was found only 1.5 miles from his home.

Read more: GIS Aids in Search for Lost Hiker – Government Technology

         

Online Mapping is Not the Death Knell for Maps

Saturday August 30th 2008
Filed Under Cartography, Current Events, Features 

Mary Spence, the President of the British Cartographic Society, recently sent the geoblog world atwitter with her pronouncement that Internet mapping is responsible for removing broad strokes of history and local geography through the practice of what she referred to as ‘corporate blankwash‘:

“Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history – not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography – at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day. We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique; giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there.”

This type of hyperbole is reminiscent of the handwringing and grand predictions that accompanied the arrival of the eBook which some pundits proclaimed would doom the printed book.   Read more

         

Welcome to the Age of Intelligent Maps

Monday August 25th 2008
Filed Under Cartography, Features 

The Adobe Think Tank has an interesting article by Karzys Varnelis and Leah Meisterlin entitled “The invisible city: Design in the age of intelligent maps”.  Citing the rise of GPS, online mapping and other digital formats for cartography, Varnelis and Meisterlin discuss the implications on design as they herald, ” Welcome to the age of intelligent maps.”

“Today’s intelligent maps don’t just represent spatial relationships, they reveal conditions in the city that were previously hidden in spreadsheets and databases. And it’s not just a new representation of the city that emerges out of this data; its a new hybrid city, part physical texture and part data-driven map.”

Read more

         

As Dynamic as Paper Maps Get

Friday August 22nd 2008
Filed Under Features, Maps 

Urban Mapping, a small company based out of San Francisco has created the Panamap.  The map is created using layered plastic sheets that, together, offer three different map views on the same page.  Depending on the angle the map is viewed from, the user can see either a street map, subway map, or neighborhoods and landmarks.  Interestingly, while the company is based in San Francisco, only maps New York and Chicago are currently being offered.  The maps retail for $20. Read more

         

Personalizing Tourist Maps

Tuesday August 19th 2008
Filed Under Cartography, Features 

Floraine Grable presented her work on automating tourists maps at last week’s SIGGRAPH conference.  While street level imagery as Google’s Street View and Microsoft’s Pictometry data are popular, Grable found that providing too much information isn’t helpful for tourist maps, stating, “When the maps show every building, every street, it’s very difficult to find specific sites.“  Grable, who is based at UC Berkeley, worked with ETH Zurich to develop software that would automate which buildings to include on a map depending on the focus of the tourist map.  Read more

         

Georgia Online

Thursday August 14th 2008
Filed Under Features, Internet Mapping, Issues in GIS 

The recent conflict in the country of Georgia has led to the question of “where’s Georgia?” on Google Maps.  Some sources claimed that Google removed its data for Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia soon after the fighting began in South Ossetia.

Currently there are only outlines of the countries with no roads, city locations or any other data.

A screen shot of Google Maps showing the countries of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan with no roads, city locations or any other geographic data.

Currently there are only outlines of the countries with no roads, city locations or any other data.  Google counters this claim, stating: “Google has not made any recent change to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in Google Maps,” the company said in a statement. “We do not have local data for those countries and that is why local details such as landmarks and cities do not appear.”  Google further clarified:

The most obvious question is, why doesn’t Google Maps show any cities or roads for Georgia, or its neighbors Armenia and Azerbaijan? The answer is we never launched coverage in those countries because we simply weren’t satisfied with the map data we had available.

What’s interesting is that some Georgian data is available in Google Earth as noted in the Google post:

In the meantime, much of this data, including cities in Georgia and other surrounding countries, can be found in Google Earth.

SearchEngineWatch compares the data availability of Georgia with screenshots of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps, and Google Maps and determined that Virtual Earth offered the best geographic data.  A more comprehensive source of information on Georgia is the CIA Factbook.

         

Getting the Most out of the ESRI User Conference

Thursday July 31st 2008
Filed Under Community, ESRI, Features 

Whether it’s your first time or tenth time attending ESRI’s Annual User Conference in San Diego, this annual get together is always a fantastic opportunity for users and developers of ESRI software to enhance their skills and to network with other GIS professionals from around the world. Starting August 4th this year’s event marks the 28th year of the ESRI International User Conference. Read more

         

Collaborative mapping for disasters

Tuesday July 08th 2008
Filed Under Community Geography, Features 

BusinessWeek takes a very superficial look at the use of community driven mapping efforts during emergencies.  While the article doesn’t go much in depth on the different types of mapping efforts that kick in during emergencies, it does look at two sides of the collaborative mapping issue. Read more

         

GIS for Kids

Sunday June 29th 2008
Filed Under Features, K-12 

Summer’s here! School will be out and the time abounds when many kids take on new learning experiences. Have you ever wanted your child to understand what it is you do all day long? It’s difficult enough to elucidate to an adult layperson what Geographic Information Systems are; knowing where to start explaining GIS to kids is even harder. Listed here are a few resources both online and on the ground to point you in the right direction to teaching your kids about GIS and mapping. Read more

         

Making Sense

Sunday June 22nd 2008
Filed Under Features, Location Based Services 

The NY Times (registration required) has a profile on Sense Networks, a company that mines millions of location data points using a tool called Macrosense.  This tool mines data using complex statistical algorithms in order to predict human movement.  The article quotes Tony Jebara, one of the co-founds of Sense who says:  “We can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who’s coming in from particular neighborhoods.”   The company uses data from a range of sources including data culled from taxi companies and weather data but it also uses data that it won’t disclose.  The company also gathers data by offering parallel services.  The company launched Citysense, a service offered to users of Blackberries and iPhones that learns their movements in order to recommend new places to go based on where other people with similar patterns frequent. 

         

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