The AnyGeo blog shows a cool new visualization technique from the London Profiler. Using the Google Map Creator, the application visualizes neighborhood profiles using different area classifications through the Google Map interface.

If you want to create your own markers for Google Map mashup fun, check out the MapIconFactory 1.0.

James Fee reports on the Army’s most recent hire, its first geospatial information officer.

Moving beyond the aerial view, Google Maps now offers a street view with customizable visualization.

Popularity: 14% [?]

On the Google Lat-Long blog I came across a post about Penguin Publishing using Google Maps to help tell the stories of novels they publish. While this a cool concept in general (although not well embraced by all) it got me thinking about how people tell stories with maps.

This is a topic we’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about lately, especially as we’ve done user testing. The advent of the slippy web map, and mashups with it, has introduced a fundamentally new way to tell stories with maps. Historically maps have been set within stories to help illustrate them as with this map of poverty from Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier’s Atlas on Poverty in America.

This construct has fundamentally changed with map mashups where the story is told inside of the map through clickable pushpins instead of around the map. For instance with the Penguin Publishing example they are literally telling the story of Charlie Cumming’s novel The 21 Steps inside of the map.

While the ability to click on a push pin to get more multimedia information about an object on the map has been a wonderful innovation, is it always the best way to convey information to a user? You could go in an entire Tufte tangent at this point, but I’ll try to keep this succinct. When we did user testing we found that especially with non-technical folks they needed external explanation of what the map meant in order to interpret it.

Classically cartographers have placed the story as an inset on the map and then added a bit of flair with pictures (here be dragons) charts and/or tables. I received a cool book on the history of maps called Cartographia for Christmas, and was amazed how constant the story element was to even the most ancient maps up to current times. Check out this map from the Ottoman Empire circa 1560 or so:

No dragons, but plenty of text to tell the story behind the map and pictures to illustrate it. I believe the common theme, whether it is ancient Ottoman maps or a Flickr map mashup, is map tell stories.

I think Peter Turchi summed it up best in his book Maps of Imagination “To ask for a map is to say, tell me a story.” The question is are we telling stories effectively with maps? Is jamming all your map content into a push pin pop up balloon the best way to do it?

Popularity: 15% [?]

I thought it would be fun to take a different angle on the virtual globe competition and look at the content and data made available by two of the players - Google and ESRI. From a technical perspective I think most would agree that ArcGIS explorer is pale emulation of Google Earth especially when it comes to user experience. I’ll put aside my gripes around difficulty in set up and version updates with Explorer and focus on content. The ESRI supporters have made the argument that ArcGIS Explorer is about access to GIS content and has a different mission than Google Earth. Actually, I would say the missions (exposing geographic data to larger audiences) are the same but the approaches are much different.

I’ll assume that some day ESRI will nail the technical side of Explorer, and look a little further down the road - to the content available for Google and ESRI’s thick client applications and how easy it is to access. As the GeoWeb evolves and we’ve rendered ever more amazing three dimensional worlds I think an increasing premium is going to be on the scope of data and content that can be delivered to these applications.

So where do the two ends of the GeoWeb spectrum sit on the topic? From my observations pretty far apart. For practical purposes I’ll break the comparison into four topics 1) data formats 2) data sources 3) data search and 4) data packaging

Data Formats

This is one category where ArcGIS Explorer ups Google Earth cleanly. Explorer allows you to load ArcGIS Explorer files (.nmf why they felt the need to create another proprietary file format that works with nothing else is beyond me), servers (WMS, IMS, file server), geodatabases, shapefile, raster, and KML. This is an impressive list, although a little bit less impressive when you consider that half are open standards KML, WMS and raster and the others are really ESRI proprietary formats at the end of the day. On the upside the raster support is quite extensive (30 or so different formats), although they require a spatial reference file.

On the Google side you have KML and KMZ (once proprietary now turned over to the OGC - jury is still out on how open it will be) for the free version of Google Earth, and within the free Google Earth 3-D warehouse support for SketchUp “.skp” and COLLADA “.dae”. In Google Earth Pro and Enterprise versions there is vector support for ESRI shapefile and MapInfo .tab, and for imagery support for TIFF (.tif), including GeoTiff, National Imagery Transmission Format (.ntf), Erdas Imagine Images (.img), Atlantis MFF Raster (.hdr), PCIDSK Database File (.pix), Portable Pixmap Format (.pnm), Device Independent Bitmap (.bmp). While this is an extensive list you have to pay to get the file support, in ArcGIS Explorer the support is currently free, so ESRI does have a distinct edge in the category.

Data Sources

In addition to supporting different file formats there is also baked in content for both applications. For Explorer you can access ArcGIS Online directly through the file server option, which allows you to access a file directory of cotnent. A second option is you can access the “Resource Center” website through the help tab, where you can download content in the .nmf file format. The “Resource Center” is definitely the more user friendly of the two with a nice user interface categorizing content into useful categories like, “imagery, street, physical features”.

On the downside the content is very limited - twenty four layers supplied by ESRI and four contributed by the community. ArcGIS Online has more content, but was a pain in the ass to access. You have to get a user name and password from ESRI, read through the incorrect direction to access it, then you get a list of UNIX style titles with abbreviations and underscores, like UNEP_WCMC_WDPA2006_2D. Not exactly user friendly, but you do get close to fifty additional layers of data once you jump through the hoops.

In Google Earth there are two sources of baked in data from the application, “Layers” including (terrain, geoweb, roads, traffic, 3-building, borders and labels, gallery, global awareness, and places of interest) and the ability to search for businesses. You can also click the “help” tab and be taken to the Google Earth Community web page. On the Google Earth Community page site alone there are 638,213 KML or KMZ files.

While finding this content (they are all file attachments to bulletin board posts) is pretty clunky and often frustrating, it is a LOT of content. Especially when you compare it to the four user generated files on the ESRI equivalent. The quality and source of this content/data varies wildly, and it is difficult to tell what is good and what is bad, but the potential is there. Actually the metadata support for both is pretty sparse. This is ESRI’s metadata for a .nmf imagery layer from the “Resource Center”:

“Displays satellite and aerial imagery at a 15m minimum resolution worldwide, and 1m resolution for the U.S. World boundaries, place names, and transportation layers are also included. Use this map to view man-made and natural features, or as a base map for overlaying associated data layers.”

For an ArcGIS Online layer this:

Layer Name: Imagery
Layer Source: ArcGIS Globe Service Layer
Layer Type: Draped
URL: http://services.arcgisonline.com/v92
Service: I3_Imagery_Prime_World
Sub Service: Imagery
LOD Tile Fetch: True
Hidden: False

Neither super useful.

Data Search

Neither application directly supports data search, but both have communities or services built around them that do. On the ESRI side there is a huge number of geospatial data repositories that have shapefiles in them and the search capabilities of them vary widely. Probably the largest is the Geospatial One-Stop that has a connection to most Federal geospatial data. Although in reality it is more often access to the metadata than the data itself. Still a large amount of content that could be conceivably viewed in ArcGIS Explorer, although largely disconnected in a large number of different repositories.

Google Earth has not only a good number of community aggregators like the official GE Community site above and unofficial like Mapufacture, GE Library and GLayers, but also the ability to search all KML files indexed on the web. I’ve heard numbers north of 10 million KML files indexed by this approach, but have nothing official. One way to search this content base is to type filetype:kml

Popularity: 32% [?]

Very Spatial shows us that we’re heading in the right direction with the ability to tell stories using mapping technologies. Location and digital narratives are combined with the Digital Storytelling series from the College of Education at the University of Houston.

A recent article in the San Antonio Express News brings the issue of privacy in Google Maps front and center again, as reported by The Map Room. Although Google Maps offers an option to remove images, many people are still uncomfortable with the idea that they are being “watched”.

Kids are getting involved in GIS technologies, with the KidsGIS portal. This uses a simple, web-based mapping and GIS program that allows kids to interact and learn about a variety of issues (the first being environmental) in a fun new way.

Moxie is relieved that the “Geoweb is finally complete and born”, at least according to what was heard at the ESRI Developer Summit this week. Google Map mashups are able to go above and beyond using Geoprocessing and GIS technologies.

Mapperz provides details on the Google Chart API, which lets you dynamically generate charts and thematic maps.

Check this out, a new booklet called “Digital Geography - Geographic Visualisation for Urban Environments” gives insights and tutorials on Virtual Earth, Google Earth, Google Maps, Panoramas and Second Life.

Popularity: 12% [?]

It seems like it is a daily dose of semantic web on the tech blogs of late. Today it was Textwise’s Million Dollar Semantic Hacker Challenge and a few days ago it was Yahoo opening their search platform to support a wide variety of semantic web standards. This has lead to a good bit of proselytizing, mostly in the comments, that this heralds the arrival of the Semantic Web, or Web 3.0 or the Next Generation Web. All of which sounds like the circling of the marketing band wagons.

Unfortunately when the wagons circle everything starts picking up the label - in this case semantic. This is especially dangerous when you have a word like “semantics” that can be defined, so many different ways. Just look at the definition tree created by Wikipedia:

*Semantics is the study of meaning in communication.
*In computer science semantics reflects the meaning of programs or functions.
*The Semantic Web refers to the extension of the World Wide Web through the embedding of additional semantic metadata

More often I see folks labeling things semantic that are really syntax. “Syntax” being the rules to construct and define something like a sentence or line of code and “semantics” the meaning of those rules or definitions. Syntax is fairly easy and semantics are fairly hard, as most folks in artificial intelligence would argue. Even going so far as saying all programming languages other than LISP are syntax and not semantic.

This is a bit more clear with an example. Lets take the Textwise announcement - a technology that will parse plain text on a website or elsewhere and categorizes it to predefined topics. One example in the Techcrunch comments was the following:

input text:
Call us crazy, but we think there are some brilliant minds out there that can find some really amazing uses for this incredibly powerful and scalable technology. Think you’re up to the Challenge? We think you are!

categories (ranked from 0 (worst) to 100 (best)):
Shopping/Health/Alternative/Hypnotherapy/Audio_and_Video 43 Business/Telecommunications/Services/Wireless/Software 33 Arts/Music/Bands_and_Artists/311/Tablature 28
Computers/Internet/Consultants/Research 26 Shopping/Health/Alternative/Meditation/Audio_and_Video 25

The output is really not telling me anything about the meaning of the text just setting up rules to provide categorization. So I would definitely put this in the syntax and not semantic category. I would also say what Yahoo! is doing is really more syntax than semantics although there is the possibility of building truly semantic technologies on top of what they are enabling. They’ve created a set of rules based on rich standards to allow applications to be built. Remains to be seen what will come of it, but in rush of market buzz I think it is easy to miss that building truly semantic technologies is quite hard. Some folks in AI (the Chinese room) would argue machines are not even capable of semantic meaning or understanding.

From this perspective I think we’ll see a lot of people building applications based on syntax that reorganize and categorize content by giving the “page web” a bit of structure. Oddly its like we’ve gone full circle back to DMOZ. While these technologies may be clever and useful I do not think they will fundamentally change the Web. In the other category I think we’ll see a few companies pushing towards something more sophisticated (call it a semantic, implicit, computational web) where new data and services are mixed with existing web content to provide answers to users questions.

Popularity: 19% [?]