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This month
floatingsheep: Mapping Wikipedia
The following maps are the first of a series that will be made in order to map out the distinct geographies of Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia articles (about half a million) are either about a place or an event that occurred within a place, and most of these geographic articles handily contain a set of coordinates that can be imported into mapping software.
October 2009
Between the Poles: FOSS4G: Open Source GeoREST Project Announced
GeoREST is a framework for accessing, distributing, and editing raw geospatial data over the web. Because it is based on REST, it supports searching using standard Web search engines such as Google and Bing.
Ctrl-N/ journal » Blog Archive » Psychosociologie de la vie quotidienne : fonctions de la rue
L'unité lexicale du paysage urbain européen est la rue avec son nom, source d'orientation. Nous écrivons sur des lignes horizontales nos textes. Les mots s'appuie sur un parcours linéaire. En revanche, au Japon, l'unité lexicale est le bloc avec un système centré sur ce qui est entre les rues et non pas les rues. La rue n'existe pas, elle n'est pas nommée. Les textes s'écrivent mot par mot (kanji) au coeur de carrés. À l'intérieur des lignes.a rue est un “texte social” qui mêle signaux (simples, systèmes binaires), signes (complexes, systèmes ouverts) et symboles (stables et porteurs de sens inépuisables) en des proportions équilibrées et dans des combinaisons infiniment variées, créant richesse, banalité ou ennui.
Sponsorised links
September 2009
Urban Screens | Serial Consign
What I've outlined thus far leads in to some of the questions that I'm considering with my research:
* What are the implications of an increasingly geospatial web for cartography and our experience of the city?
Geographic library
GeographicLib is a small set of C classes for performing conversions between geographic, UTM, UPS, MGRS, geocentric, and local cartesian coordinates and for solving geodesic problems. The emphasis is on returning accurate results with errors close to round-off (about 5–15 nm). In addition, various properties of the Transverse Mercator Projection are described and an accurate algorithm for Geodesics on the Ellipsoid is given.
Projections and Coordinate Systems : GIS Lounge - Geographic Information Systems
Tutorials to help you understand the various projection and coordinate systems. Also find conversion tools to convert datasets from one system to another.
Open Sourcing The Big Board | Hieroglyphics
The Big Board is a real-time collaborative environment for mapping. Users open “conference rooms” on a shared map, and join conversations in these conference rooms, much like in a regular teleconferencing application. However, instead of sharing faces and powerpoints and speech over the wire, users draw on and add content to a shared map or very large image.
python-geohash - Project Hosting on Google Code
Geohash is a string representation of two dimensional geometric coordinates. This technique is well described at Wikipedia Geohash.
Grid Square Code (JIS X 0410) is also a string representation of geometric coordinates. That grid code is utilized by Japan's government. NTT DoCoMo use modified version of that grid code.
A new (and different) geo platform - (BlockChalk Blog)
These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services.
You can read the full API documentation here: BlockChalk API v0.6
So what does this mean? It means that BlockChalk is now more than just a nifty GPS app for your iPhone. It’s an open platform for storing and accessing user-generated content within a geographic context.
What makes the BlockChalk platform unique?
* It’s dead simple. There are no badges, medals, points, unicorns, pirates, or other viral gaming craziness. BlockChalk is about locations and the messages people leave there, that’s it.
August 2009
7.5th Floor » Blog Archive » "Not So" Volunteered Geographic Information
Michael Goodchild’s notion of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) on the emergence of geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals, to discuss the greater presence of unvoluntarily generated geographic data. In the talk “Not So Volunteered Geographic Information“, I present my method to analysis these new kinds of citizen generated data, and use my work to discuss the induced opportunities, limitations and concerns.
Ogle Earth: Altinum revealed... and in Google Earth
Altinum was a prosperous Roman city on the coastal lowlands of northern Italy. It was sacked by Attila the Hun in the 5th century AD, and conquered by the Lombards a century later. Historians now speculate that these events prompted inhabitants from Altinum and other towns in the vicinity to resettle on more easily defended islands in a nearby lagoon... thus founding Venice. (Wikipedia has a good concise history of the town.)
July 2009
Install Django, GeoDjango, PostgreSQL & PostGIS on OSX Leopard
At this point, I recommend following along from step 2 of the official geoDjango guide.
GeoBase - Home
All distributed data should be accessed and used relatively to the GeoBase Unrestricted Use Licence Agreement. With this licence, users are granted a non-exclusive, fully paid, royalty-free right and licence to exercise all intellectual property rights in the data. This includes the right to use, incorporate, sublicense (with further right of sublicensing), modify, improve, further develop, and distribute the data; and to manufacture and/or distribute Derivative Products. The Licensee shall identify GeoBase as a data source.
linkedgeodata.org : About
LinkedGeoData is an effort to add a spatial dimension to the Web of Data / Semantic Web. LinkedGeoData uses the information collected by the OpenStreetMap project and makes it available as an RDF knowledge base according to the Linked Data principles. It interlinks this data with other knowledge bases in the Linking Open Data initiative.
Geospatial Revolution Project | A Public Service Media Project
The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat has established the Standard on Geospatial Data for the Government of Canada. The Standard on Geospatial Data supports the Policy on Information Management and the Policy on the Management of Information Technology of the Government of Canada. The Standard will facilitate interoperability across institutions and increase their ability to identify, understand, use, and share geospatial data. This standard also allows institutions to maximize the reuse of existing mapping and related products.
June 2009
John Mann Photography
Folded in Place furthers the abstraction once offered by landscape photography by removing the place itself and replacing it with a mapped construction. This method leads the viewer to re-imagine the spectacle of the foreign lands and explore the abstraction of place offered by photography. The combination of still-life constructions and the maps’ reference to large and distant lands examines the paradox of known and unknown geographies offered by the photographic image. In this manner, Folded in Place turns the abstract representation of the map back into a physical landscape using photography to look at the map as a geography of its own.
WhereCamp / Proximity and Relative Location
A session talking about what people can/are doing with proximity sensing (and how/why in many cases, locative services aren't about absolute (geo) location, but relative location. Covering implementation and code of Bluetooth in particular, including information on the setup I used at Where 2.0 and WhereCamp 2008. (The morning session already covered lots of concerns about privacy that are applicable here, so this session will focus on cool stuff you can do and how to get out there and do it)
geochat - Google Code
Geochat emerged from a simple concept - can I send an SMS message and see it on a map?
May 2009
TrailRunner 2.0 - openStreetMap Routing and Community Route Exchange
pdate for TrailRunner, the outdoor oriented route-planning and journaling software for Mac OS X. This major milestone release now adds a routing feature based on openStreetMap,
Geolocating web sites with Yahoo! Placemaker (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)
Yahoo Placemaker is a new web service from the Yahoo Geo team. It is a location extractor service that returns all the known geographical locations from text, RSS feed, or an HTML document.
