Going green is taking businesses and consumers by storm. Yet, what is the role of GIS and GPS in renewable energy development? When GIS and GPS partner, they are ‘uniquely positioned to analyze and monitor earth system processes to make certain that renewable power generation sites are optimally sited and that the power that is generated is delivered efficiently.’ Through the development and expansion of the renewable energy sector, GIS and GPS will be able to capture ‘maximal energy creation at the lowest cost for the widest and the most effective impact in a sustainable sense.’

ERDAS is offering geospatial tools to assist with response during the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season. The company helps organizations harness the information of the changing earth for greater advantage. The ERDAS TITAN GeoHubs will allow organizations to ‘rapidly share imagery and vector data to develop a real-time common operating picture by allowing emergency management planners and responders to dynamically publish and consume geospatial data in a permission-based, collaborative online network.’ ERDAS has even partnered with MCH GeoPoints for more capabilities with medical facilities during these emergencies.

The BBC shared their Olympics map that shows where the 2008 Games’s venues are located in Beijing, Qingdao and Hong Kong. The map was created using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API and MapCruncher. There are over 37 Chinese Olympic venues.

With the rise of GIS’s popularity, it’s no wonder that Radiohead decided to use the concept of the system as basis of their new video House of Cards. Released this past Monday, the band shared ‘data that they used to created the video so people could make their own clips to upload to Radiohead’s YouTube group.’ Google Earth and ArcScene are two of the platforms used to create the video.

After the long awaited iPhone 2.0 was released, reviews about the phone’s GPS feature came pouring in. Since the first version of the iPhone lacked this feature and the trends for location based services grew, Apple added Google Maps to the mix. Good idea or not?

Popularity: 15% [?]

Travel has put me a bit behind on getting up a post on the second day of “State of the Map”. However, having a few days to reflect on the conference it was really very impressive. Probably the single biggest differentiator between this and most every other conference I’ve been to is that every speaker had an element of passion about what they do. Whether it was mapping a country or applying OSM data to a new project, the speakers were very invested in what they were doing and it had little or nothing to do with money.

One of the most anticipated talks was Ed Parson of Google talk on their new product MapMaker. There has been quite a bit of consternation in the GeoWeb community over MapMaper, especially within OSM. Other folks have covered the highlights of the talk in more detail, so I will not regurgitate it here.

What the talk did make me think is that OSM has become the Fight Club of the GeoWeb. A quick recap on Fight Club, “The plot is based on an unnamed protagonist who struggles with his growing discomfort with consumerism… In an attempt to overcome this, he creates an underground fighting club as a radical form of psychotherapy.”

If we take this in turn, Steve gets frustrated with commercial and government control of street data (Ordinance Survey, TeleAtlas, NAVTEQ) and that it cost him 50,000 quid to put some bicycle theft data on a web based map. So, he starts up an underground group of similarly frustrated guys and starts having “mapping parties”. These “mapping parties” become increasingly popular across London. Steve starts traveling to other cities and throwing “mapping parties” and new chapters of OSM spring up in the these cities. Steve soon has a small army of 47,000 mappers.

Now we have “State of the Map” conference, which is awfully similar to “Project Mayhem”. You have presentation like “OpenStreetMap vs. the World” and all the the stuff you can do in Google Maps we’ll provide as free open data to the community. Direct attacks on consumerism. Then there is the physical proof. Several OSM mappers dressed in official “space monkeyuniform of all black:

”

Second bit of evidence after the BBQ on Saturday the hotel staff asked the OSMers to leave the nightclub because they were afraid of altercation breaking out with the locals. Finally I was challenged to at least six arm wrestling matched by OSMers - all orchestrated by Steve…. Who will also be leaving Ireland to fly to Scotland, then fly to Denver, then Seattle, then San Diego (sounds awfully familiar).

Never wanting to miss out on a good thing we thought we’d add our bit to the cause as good diligent space monkeys. Nestoria and others brought up how tough it was to get selected data out of OSM. In Nestoria’s case they specifically wanted train stations in Germany, so we thought we’d help out a bit. Bill took the massive shapefile the Germans have created then sliced it and diced it to get out some of the specifics like:

German Subways
German Beer Gardens (beirgarten)
German trains stations

If you want to find other OSM data in GeoCommons just check out the OSM tag.

Popularity: 15% [?]

With the MLB All-Star Game winding up I decided to write about the annual midsummer classic and other All-Star games from other sports organizations. All-Star games are a chance for the world to see the best compete against the best. Since All-Star games represent the best of the best, I decided to map the locations of all the hometowns of every 2008 All-Star in every major sports organization. By doing this I was trying to locate an “athletic hotspot” that all major sports had in common. The four sports organizations I chose were the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), National Football League (NFL), and the National Hockey League (NHL).

• NBA All-Star Hometowns
• NFL Pro-Bowl Hometowns
• MLB All-Star Hometowns
• NHL All-Star Hometowns

After viewing all the datasets mapped a few conclusions can be made. The first is that there is not really one central location where all-stars from these four major sports organizations grow up. Instead, hotspots are usually more sport specific. For example, Several MLB All-Stars are from the Dominican Republic. There happen to be ten from the Dominican Republic but not a single All-Star from any other sport is from the Dominican Republic. So it is safe to say the Dominican Republic is a hot spot for baseball, but only baseball.

A few trends can be made when looking at All-Stars who grew up in the USA. I have also decided to leave out the NHL in this study due to the fact that only three NHL All-Stars are from the USA. When looking at where NFL, NHL, and NBA All-Stars grew up in the USA, you can see that there are arguably a few hot spots. The state of California is one. Roughly 13% of All-Stars come from the state in the three sports. You can also see that when looking at strongest regions in the country the South is clearly the strongest. When you look at the amount of All-Stars who grew up in a southern state (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, TX, VA) you see that roughly 41% of all All-Stars come from one of these southern states. This is interesting when these states only make up 24% of all the states in the USA. One last conclusion is the lack of All-Stars from certain regions in the USA. Weak spots include; New England States, Midwest, Mountain States.

The reasons for All-Stars coming out of certain areas are hard to find. It is possible that the nice year round weather of the Southern USA and California allow athletes to train outdoors for longer periods of time. It could also be that an active sports culture is much more prominent in certain regions. Or perhaps the reason is simply that there is just something in the water.

Popularity: 10% [?]

After a bit of airline nightmare (do any US flights arrive on time anymore?) I made it to Limerick Ireland for OpenStreetMap’s (OSM) conference “State of the Map“. The talks have really highlighted how popular OSM has become. Roughly I break them into two buckets 1) the state of mapping a country 2) doing something cool with OSM data. The number of country presentations providing updates on OSM mapping progress is really impressive.

The usual suspects including Germany, Netherlands, France, our host Ireland and some surprising new places like Japan and Bolivia. The universal quality of each country presentation was how much had been mapped in the last year. The before and after pictures are quite dramatic. This was only reinforced by the massive posters on the wall of the conference venue showing six month incremental growth of mapped streets in the UK and Germany.

Equally impressive was the number of projects that are using OSM data for an innovative application. My personal favorite was OpenRouteService which allows users to geocode and route against OSM data. The project is being run at the University of Bonn and there are plans to open source the code, which would be great for providing open global geocoding services. Something we’ve struggled with finding. ITO also had a clever OSM implementation that allows you to query and filter through OSM data as separate map layers, both by feature type and edits (including temporal).

Wikitravel and Nestoria both had interesting examples of commercial services being built on top of OSM data. Wikitravel has a particularly cool approach where all the data they and the community has built up is free under Creative Commons, but they charge for on demand publishing of travel books you can take with you on a trip. Have to see if their geographic listings of travel amenities is something we can add to GeoCommons.

One of the most illuminating talks was “OpenStreetMap v the World” by Dair Grant, which provided a quantitative comparison of the accuracy of OSM vs. TeleAtals via Google Maps. Dair first did an analysis of Heath Scotland (roughly 10 km2) and found 89 errors in the TeleAtlas data. He then moved to Edinborough and did an analysis for a 10 km2 of OSM data and found 192 errors. Conclusion that none of the map providers are 100% accurate and OSM is not far off. A bit of detail on the OSM errors:

- 50% of the errors happened in 1km2
- 50% of the errors were missing roads (completeness is a common OSM challenge)
- 20% of the errors were missing names
- 15% of the errors were wrong names
- Only one error was from an incorrect junction

The big advantage of OSM when it comes to inaccurate data has been the ability to change the data easily. The big guys have caught on to this and just about all of them have developed technology to copy the concept:

- TomTom MapShare
- AND Map 2.0
- Google MapMaker
- TeleAtlas MapInsight

Dair pointed out that with all these services that there is no feedback loop to indicate your change was accepted and/or has been implemented. I believe this may not be true with Google MapMaker where the moderator provides feedback. Dair also provided a suggestion for OpenStreetBug to provide an easier mechanism to point out errors on the map. With all the discussion around crowdsourcing and accuracy this was a very enlightening talk. More to come from day two tomorrow.

Popularity: 16% [?]

ArcGIS 9.3 JavaScript API is now available. The two extensions that were also released at the same time were ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for the Google Maps API and the ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for the Virtual Earth. For more information on this free API, visit the ArcGIS 9.3 Resource Center.

Do you prefer GIS or Surveying? Apparently, a retracted article – due to legal jurisdictions – on GIS versus Surveying for Professional Surveyor Magazine caused quite a buzz. The article revealed continued tension and misperceptions between both GIS and Surveying communities. David G. Smith, a GIS practitioner, states, “One basic thing that we all need to come into reckoning with is that Surveying and GIS overlap, but that neither is wholly contained within the other, and that each has areas which may additionally be mutually exclusive from the other.”

Google is on the move. Now pedestrians can view their walking directions on Google Maps. Presently, the company’s existing maps are only good for driving directions. Use of this tool will be popular for major cities, especially those with one-way streets.

Known as a library for mapping APIs, Mapstraction allows the development and construction of mashups supported by major mapping providers such as Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. The tool offers many features such as building a map where the user has an option to see the end result on either of the supported mapping providers, tile layer support and demos.

Have you heard of a Twitter conversation map? Well Walter Rafelsberger from MODUL/University Vienna/Department of New Media created just that. With the use of GeoNames, he was able to reveal the location of Twitter users and generate weather information for the ‘Twitter Weather Map.’

Popularity: 12% [?]