Web & Geography

Google and Murakami

2011-06-21T15:54:00.002+02:00

I love Google Doodles and I love Takashi Murakami, so I could not let today's illustration of Google logo unoticed :

Let's celebrate the summer solstice i.e. longest day of the year 2011 !

HTML5 drag & drop with GoogleEarth API

2011-05-11T22:13:00.000+02:00

Sean Maday from Google just posted this video demonstration of how the HTML5 drag & drop and file APIs can be used with the Google Earth API to dynamically parse KML and geocode a CSV.

It is so cool and simple. I love it !

Check up his code here : http://sigacts.com/html5/

More about Google Earth Builder

2011-04-26T11:37:00.004+02:00

Here are some interesting links about Google Earth Builder :

About the product :

Description of the product on Google Website : http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/builder.html
Announcement on the Google Enterprise Blog : http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/04/bringing-100-web-to-world-of-google.html
Google Earth Builder Overview on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcX54Z6Zuy0
InformationWeek has also some information about Google Earth Builder (http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/229401896) in particular Dylan Lorimer mentioning that FISMA certification is likely to be pursued in late 2011 or 2012.

About NGA using Google Earth Builder :

There is even a post about NGA being a beta user of GoogleEarth Builder : http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/04/google-earth-builder-supports-nga.html

About Ergon using Google Earth Builder :

And apart from the military world, the private sector is also testing GoogleEarth Builder : http://www.zdnet.com.au/ergon-bets-on-google-s-earth-builder-339313670.htm
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/government/google-to-help-ergon-slash-millions/story-fn4htb9o-1226042629715

GoogleEarth Builder announced during the Where 2.0 Conference

2011-04-22T21:08:00.021+02:00

During Where 2.0 Conference, Dylan Lorimer (GoogleEarth Enterprise Product Manager) has announced the coming release of a new version of GoogleEarth for Enterprise : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07FasJ-NWc&p=0B2FEB8AACD826BE. It is called GoogleEarth Builder and could be described as Google Mapping Platform in the Cloud available to enterprise users. It will be available in Q3 2011.

More presentations from the Where 2.0 conference are available online : http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0B2FEB8AACD826BE ...why fly to Santa Clara, California, when you can view everything online from your desk ? ;-)

>>> More information about Google Earth Builder

SPOTCatalog GWT code source available

2011-04-20T15:30:00.003+02:00

Today, the source code for a GWT version of the catalog of SPOT satellite images has been made available. Check it up on SPOTLabs : http://labs.spotimage.com/2011/04/20/source-code-for-gwt-spot-catalog-is-available/

Budha and Shiva

2011-04-05T15:10:00.001+02:00

During my last trip to India, I wanted to make sure that I could spend some time to check the big statue close to the sea that I had previously seen on GoogleEarth. When some polish girls that we met in Gokarna showed me pictures of the great Lord Shiva statue in Murudeshwar, I was pretty convinced that this was the statue I was looking for ! And it was really impressive : with a height of 37 meters, it was built only 10 years ago on a holy place in front of the sea.

But when I cam back home and searched for it in GoogleEarth, the statue and even the 3D model where nowhere to be found ! I had to realize that I was either in time warp (having seen before
what I would only visit later) or that I confused Lord Shiva with a statue of Budha in China : http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/05/3d_model_of_tian_tan.html

So I guess that I need to create the 3D model of Lord Shiva statue ! Welcome Google SketchUp !

The Standby Task Force

2011-03-18T09:24:00.001+01:00

While the Nuclear crisis following the Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami is still capturing everyone attention, I wanted to recall the Libya and Ivory Coast conflits and praise the effort of the civil community to try to help by creating free and open-source maps of these areas.

The Standby Task Force is an Online Volunteer Community for Live Mapping. This initiative is linked to Crisis Mappers (http://www.crisismappers.net/) who usually setup Ushaidi Maps (http://blog.ushahidi.com/) for major humanitarian crisis. If you would like to participate in the effort to help, you should consider visiting the blog of the StandBy Task Force (http://blog.standbytaskforce.com/) as well as the one from HOT, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (http://hot.openstreetmap.org/weblog/).

Here are the starting points to help creating useful and open-source maps :

Japan :
http://www.sinsai.info/ushahidi/ (in Japanese)
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2011_Sendai_earthquake_and_tsunami

Libya :
http://libyacrisismap.net/
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Libya

Ivory Coast :
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Ivory_Coast

Sustainable Development

2011-03-02T21:46:00.003+01:00

I have recently found this diagram on the Internet to explain the nature of sustainable development. It is really a nice presentation as it shows that every thing is interwoven and that the society, the economy and the environement should be considered as a whole :

HOT activation after floods in Brazil

2011-01-28T20:51:00.004+01:00

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has created an activation for the floods in the North of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil : http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2011_Rio_de_Janeiro_Flooding

YouMapps has published two imagesover the area to enable support remote OSM mappers to contribute to the disaster recovery effort: http://www.youmapps.org/news/brazil-floods-new-spot-imagery-available

Wherever you are, you can join HOT and participate in the recovery effort by mapping on these images with OpenStreetMap tools !

600 Satellite Images to Explore and Share

2011-01-22T09:29:00.006+01:00

The website http://www.satellite-images.org presents some amazing satellite images of the Earth taken from the SPOT5 satellite.

It has been developed using Drupal, a very powerful, flexible and Open-Source CMS (Content Management System) and contributed modules. More than 600 images are provided at 1000 x 1000 pixels resolution and are dynamically resized thanks to the ImageCache module. The Taxonomy module enables a interactive exploration through categories, tags and countries links. The FiveStar module enables users to vote for their favorite image in order to promote it to the front page. And finaly the SexyBookmarks module enables sharing of the images with friends over a selection of social networks.

Explore and Share !

AOL and Bing going Open-Source ?

2011-01-12T21:27:00.000+01:00

I found quite interesting that the two main keynote speakers at the coming Navigation Strategies USA Conference in San Jose are Steve Coast, Principal Architect at Bing Mobile and Randy Meech, Head of Engineering, Local & Mapping, AOL.

Steve Coast is the founder of OpenStreetMap and CloudMade. He has recently left CloudMade to join Microsoft Bing Mobile and made Bing Aerial Imagery available to OSM mappers.

Randy Meech has been talking at the last OpenStreetMap Conference in Girona, Spain. He announced that MapQuest was testing OSM in its new portals across Europe and that AOL will spend the equivalent of 1 million $ to enhance the OSM mapping and routing of the USA.

A clear indication that OpenSource mapping is not only for geeks and open-source activists but is really breaking its way into the industry ! It is obvious that Open-Source is not woven into the fabrik of AOL and Microsoft. So it will be interesting to see what is coming up and how Open-Source (or rather Open-Data) and the commercial web industry can find mutually beneficial agreements.

Ivory Coast Mapping : New Satellite Imagery

2011-01-07T15:16:00.007+01:00

Since several weeks, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has been focusing on enhancing the map of Ivory Coast in fear that the situation might get worse with the current political tension in the country. In particular, the map of Abidjan has been greatly improved in the past weeks. Most of the tracing has been done with Bing aerial imagery since Microsoft recently made it available for OSM tracing, but the problem is that it does not cover the whole area of Abidjan.

To answer this need of data sources other than Bing imagery, Astrium-GEO has also offered SPOT satellite imagery over the region of Abidjan to OpenStreetMap. The accuracy is 5 meters, and a little ground mist is visible. However, linear features like roads can be easily identified. This will be especially useful to map out the North and West of Abidjan.

The source tag to use is "2005 Cnes / Spot Image", and this imagery is allowed in JOSM and Merkaartor but not Potlatch. The license agreement is here : http://www.youmapps.org/licenses/EULA-OSM-en.html

The Wikiproject Ivory Coast, with more details, is here : http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/En:WikiProject_Ivory_Coast as well as the post on the HOT blog : http://hot.openstreetmap.org/weblog/2010/12/ivory-coast-post-electoral-crisis/

OpenStreetMap, MapQuest and BingMaps

2010-12-18T21:37:00.059+01:00

During the State of the Map 2010 in Girona, MapQuest announced that they will start supporting OpenStreetMap as well as using the open-source map in their portals. The recent opening of the US portal (http://open.mapquest.com/) completes the previous European versions (http://open.mapquest.fr/ for example).

The interesting point is thatMapQuest also provides an API to integrate some OpenStreetMap magic in your applications as well as a new version of the OpenStreetMap Potlach editor :

http://open.mapquestapi.com/

The latest big news came from Microsoft which has allowed access to its BingMaps aerial imagery in OpenStreetMap editors (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing). This will allow to create new open-source content over places that needs mapping but where fewer mappers are active.

This interesting application provides information about the date of each image at various zoom level of the BingMaps content : http://mvexel.dev.openstreetmap.org/bing/

The final point about all this is the integration of BingMaps (including IGN and DigitalGlobe imagery) in a new version of Potlatch edited by MapQuest enabling volunteers to update the OpenStreetMap data : http://open.mapquestapi.com/dataedit/index_flash.html?lat=43.5532223109707&lon=1.48675752408545

Pretty cool and showing an interesting convergence between commercial companies and the open source community :-)

The Story of Electronics

2010-12-08T00:11:00.001+01:00

The Story of Electronics, released on November 9th, 2010 takes on the electronics industry’s “design for the dump” mentality and champions product take back to spur companies to make less toxic, more easily recyclable and longer lasting products.

View it here : http://storyofstuff.org/electronics/

FOSS4G 2010 in Barcelona

2010-10-10T09:34:00.000+02:00

I was at the last FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) Conference in Barcelona. It was a fantastic conference with more than 800 participants from all over the world and 3 days of technical talks and trainings (http://2010.foss4g.org/program_print.php). It was great to meet major figures of the Open Source for Geospatial like Paul Ramsey (founder of PostGIS - see http://blog.opengeo.org/2010/09/08/foss4g-day-2/) or Frank Warmerdam (founder of GDAL). CampToCamp (http://www.camptocamp.com/) and 52north (http://www.52north.org) were very well represented in the talks and there was interesting new projects like GeoNodes (http://geonode.org/) founder by OpenGeo (http://opengeo.org/), ZOO Project and MapProxy from OmniScale.

Speeches during the plenary sessions were more about the spirit of Open Source and the sense of Community. As a contrast to the ESRI User Conference, the focus was not on technical stuff as most of the audience were tech-sawy but more on the philosophy of Open Source. Ivan Sanchez made an interesting comparison with the game theory showing that in software development the only winning move was to share. The conclusion was that happiness rather than money helps people create better products because it helps them to take better decisions (see the “prisoner dilemna”). His conclusion was that : Happiness leads to better software and maps :-)

During the closing session, Helena Mitasova received the OsGeo 2010 prize for her implication in Open Source and GRASS. She presented how GRASS has been used over the past 20 years to develop the geospatial research and education. It was inspiring how she spoke greatly about the community and about the energy that it gives her.

Crowdmap from Ushaidi !

2010-09-26T22:28:00.003+02:00

The guys at Ushaidi have been busy working on a new concept : a platform to automatically instanciate the Ushaidi software for a specific deployment. Just create our account, select a deployment name and your own Ushaidi server will be instantly online !

Great ! You are now ready to :

Collect information from cell phones, news and the web.
Aggregate that information into a single platform.
Visualize it on a map and timeline.

The OpenStreetMap Mug and the tag concept

2010-09-20T21:52:00.000+02:00

Last week, I have received my OpenStreetMap Mug !

The mug serves as a reference for the most important and most popular tag/value combinations used on ways and nodes within the OpenStreetMap project. While it cannot explain the fiddly details it serves as a reminder and a quick help while mapping. Here is a complete flat view :

The tag concept and the fact that it is completely free and easy to expand is a key concept for OpenStreetMap. It enables the OpenStreetMap community to map anything they encounter anywhere in the World ! For example, among all the very popular tags displayed on this mug, a new one has been added : "amenity=mug, access=private".

You can buy the mug from Kernel Concept and a donation will be made to the OpenStreetMap Fundation ! For more information on OpenStreetMap tags, visit the Wiki !

FOSS4G in Barcelona !

2010-09-12T22:13:00.001+02:00

I was at the last FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) Conference in Barcelona. It was a fantastic conference with more than 800 participants from all over the world and 3 days of technical talks and trainings. It was great to meet major figures of the Open Source for Geospatial like Paul Ramsey (founder of PostGIS - see http://blog.opengeo.org/) or Frank Warmerdam (founder of GDAL).

Speeches during the plenary sessions were all about the spirit of Open Source and the sense of Community. Ivan Sanchez made an interesting comparison with the game theory showing that in software development the only winning move was to share. The conclusion was that happiness rather than money helps people create better products because it helps them to take better decisions :-)

Aragon and 360° photos

2010-08-15T22:02:00.001+02:00

Back from a fantastic one week-holiday in the Aragon region of the Spanish Pyreneas, I had the time to stitch some pictures together to create four 360° panoramas : http://www.faudi.net/category/tags/aragon Enjoy !

Motivation Posters

2010-04-30T16:34:00.003+02:00

I love this one !
Discovered through Allez, fais pas ton geek and Village of Joy

Compare GoogleMaps and OpenStreetMap

2010-03-23T10:13:00.006+01:00

If you like map comparison websites, you will love this one !

GeoFabrik's Map Compare allows you to view several OpenStreetMap layers side by side with different Google Maps map types. The two maps are synchronised so zooming or panning one map will zoom or pan the comparison map. Geofabrik is the work of two active German OpenStreetMap contributors, and the Map Compare tool was developed to allow Geofabrik to compare OpenStreetMap map offerings to Google Maps maps and aerial imagery.

From GoogleMapsMania

Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information

2010-03-17T22:20:00.003+01:00

An interesting platform that I have discovered recently, after the Haiti and Chile events. It is good thing that such an open source initiative exists :

http://www.ushahidi.com/

The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

The World Biggest Image

2010-03-12T21:38:00.007+01:00

How many pixels does your camera got ? 8 megapixels ? Think the images are big on your hard drive ? Well, look at this 26,000 megapixels image of Paris: http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/

Provided by the company that release the stiching software that I use : http://www.autopano.net/en/

Is Social Media a Fad ?

2010-03-01T14:06:00.007+01:00

This video circulated several months ago but I feel I wanted to share it here. It is very nicely done and is a very good tool to use in a presentation for example. And for the non english native speakers : fad = fashion !

Starship in the Pyrennees

2010-02-15T10:40:00.003+01:00

Last week I spent one night at the Pic du Midi Observatory. You need to take two cable cars to reach the observatory which is at 2877 m. The view from there is breathtaking. We had a lot of luck as the night was clear and chilly (-17° !) and we have seen many wonders of the sky. The Observatory is now more a Museum and a touristic place although a dozen professionals and amateur astronoms still work there. The association called "The Star Farm" that organize event there call the place the "Star Ship".

I took this photo with my iphone :

The cool thing with ihpone is that they integrate a GPS and if you know how to do it, you can export the photo with the latitude and longitude in the EXIF parameters of the JPEG file. If you download this picture, it should locate itself here.

Spot Image Labs at CartoCube

2009-11-17T09:52:00.006+01:00

The Spot Image Labs just participated in a CartoCube organized by "La Cantine" in Paris. The main subject was mind maps and geographical maps. On Friday, I presented Spot Image and Spot Image Labs during a event called CartoPro : http://lacantine.ubicast.eu/videos/free/54/

On Saturday, we were around forty persons for the CartoCamp (a BarCamp about Cartography). We gathered in small groups of 10 people or so to discuss about various subjects : crowd sourcing, 3D, satellites images, mapping of web contributors, historical maps, etc...

Some links to useful ressources (in French) :

Le site du carto3 : http://cartocube.fr
Carto3 sur Twitter : http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23carto3
Le site de la Cantine : http://lacantine.org/
Fédération Internet Nouvelle Génération : http://fing.org/
Serialmapper : http://www.serialmapper.com/archive/2009/11/15/cartocube.html
Fabernovel (conseil en innovation) : http://www.fabernovel.com/fr
Présentation du Géoportail : http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb643d_geoportail-presentation-pour-cartoc_tech

Artic and Antartica archives now available in shapefile format

2009-01-06T21:05:00.003+01:00

Following requests from some users, we have made available two new archive coverages in shapefile format on our online catalog : Antartica and the Arctic region. As a contribution to the International Polar Year (http://www.ipy.org/), Spot Image has been collecting a lot of data over these two areas, so I hope that these two shapefiles will be of great interest for many scientists.

Access to the download page : http://sirius.spotimage.fr/PageDownload.aspx
More information on about Spot Image and the IPY : http://www.spotimage.fr/web/en/1587-international-polar-year.php

New features in Spot Image Gallery

2008-12-02T08:02:00.001+01:00

The updated version of the SPOT Gallery proposing posters of wonderful pictures of Earth taken by SPOT satellites propose two new features :

A interactive photo album : http://gallery.spotimage.com/gallery.html

and an interactive map : http://gallery.spotimage.com/kml/gmap.htm

The later is obtained by requesting GoogleMaps to display a KML file that presents all the pictures as a GoogleEarth layer. The KML file is available here : http://gallery.spotimage.com/kml/gallery.kml It is very similar to the GoogleEarth version that you can still find here : http://gallery.spotimage.com/kml/googleearth_english.kml Nevertheless, there are some small real-estate differences between GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth that forced us to slightly rewrite the KML content. In particular, it is not possible to have big bubbles in GoogleMaps so we had to use smaller bubbles.

Download SPOT archives in shapefile

2008-11-13T07:54:00.002+01:00

Since several weeks the SPOT archive is available for download in shapefile from our online catalog : SIRIUS Online. Several files have been created to cover the various continents : Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, Middle East, North America and South America. They can be find in the "My searches" menu or directly here : http://catalog.spotimage.fr/PageDownload.aspx

Here are the parameters that are exported in the shapefile :

A21 : A21 code
SC_NUM : Scene number
SEG_NUM : Segment number
SATEL : Satellite number (2, 4, 5)
ANG_INC : Incidence angle
ANG_ACQ : Acquisition angle
DATE_ACQ : Acquisition date (DD/MM/YYYY)
MONTH_ACQ : Month number (01,02,…)
TIME_ACQ : Time of acquisition (HH:MI:SS)
CLOUD_QUOT : Cloud quotation
CLOUD_PER : Percentage of clouds on the image
SNOW_QUOT : Snow quotation
LAT_CEN : Latitude of center
LON_CEN : Latitude of center
LAT_UP_L : Latitude of upper left corner
LON_UP_L : Longitude of upper left corner
LAT_UP_R : Latitude of upper right corner
LON_UP_R : Longitude of upper right corner
LAT_LO_L : Latitude of lower left corner
LON_LO_L : Longitude of lower left corner
LAT_LO_R : Latitude of lower right corner
LON_LO_R : Longitude of lower right corner
RESOL : Resolution of product (2.5, 5, 10, 20)
MODE : BW or COLOR
TYPE : Alphanumeric code for the type (P,X,M,I,A,B,J,THR,HMX,THX)
URL_QL : URL to access to the quicklook of the scene

The files are bundled by year since 2002 which is the launch of SPOT5. They are refreshed every month and the shape file for the current year is refreshed every week.

They can be used on any GIS software like ArcView, GlobalMapper (shareware), ArcExplorer (free) or MapWindow (free).

Display a satellite image in your web pages

2008-10-20T13:50:00.011+02:00

Using GoogleMaps Static API, you can easily display a satellite image in your web pages. For exemple, here is a SPOT5 view of the city of Auch in France :

Here is the corresponding HTML code :

<img width="320" height="320" src="http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=43.643902,0.590429&zoom=14&size=320x320&maptype=satellite&key=API_KEY" />

GoogleEarth dans une page web

2008-06-01T09:20:00.000+02:00

La semaine dernière, Google a annoncé la sortie d'un plugin permettant d'afficher des vues 3D de type GoogleEarth dans une page web. Il ne s'agit pas de l'application GoogleEarth mais uniquement des fonctionnalités les plus populaires qui ont étés ré-écrites pour être intégrées dans un plug-in. Actuellement le plug-in ne fonctionne que sur Windows et est considéré comme beta par Google.

Par ailleurs, Google a aussi mis à la disposition des développeurs une API permettant de contrôler le plug-in par JavaScript. Cela va permettre de développer de superbes applications : la flexibilité de GoogleMaps avec le rendu 3D de GoogleEarth !

Les informations sont disponibles ici :

http://code.google.com/apis/earth/
http://code.google.com/apis/earth/documentation/
http://code.google.com/apis/earth/documentation/examples.html

SPOT images in Wikipedia

2008-04-20T14:19:00.000+02:00

Spot Image has published several hundreds SPOT images in Wikipedia Commons.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SPOT_satellite_images

These images are available under Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 license. You can create derived products like this fantastic Animoto animation :

http://animoto.com/play/77ca2e0abbcc628505e3292b01c72ee7

SPOTGallery Gadget

2008-04-12T12:34:00.001+02:00

Now that a new version of SPOTGallery is available, I would like to remind you of a Google Gadget that is available. It displays the wonderful images of the gallery right on your iGoogle home page or on your personal website.

The gadget can be find on Google's Gadget Library : http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&q=SPOTGallery and http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&num=24&url=http://gallery.spotimage.com/gadgets/earth.xml&output=html

GoogleEarth in SecondLife

2007-03-29T16:45:00.001+02:00

While exploring the new virtual globe that has just been created in Second Life, I have discovered Envirolink (http://www.envirolink.org/) and their Common Wealth Island

"Commonwealth Island is about building a community in Second Life focused around organizations working for social equity and environmental sustainability. Commonwealth will provide a starting place for organizations who wish to try out spreading their mission/message in Second Life without making a big financial and time commitment."

Cool ! The virtual world do care about the real world too....

http://envirolink.blogspot.com/2007/03/google-earth-in-second-life.html

SPOT5 imagery now available in GoogleEarth

2007-03-05T22:00:00.000+01:00

Since the beginning of the year 2007, SPOT5 satellite imagery is available inside GoogleEarth. From January 22th, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Luxembourg benefits from 2,50 meters resolution over all their countries including islands such as Corsica and Baleares.

The press release available from Spot Image Web Site

Before that it was only some places that would get Digital Globe or aerial imagery at a higher resolution. The rest of the country was covered with LandSat imagery at 15 m. resolution. That means that where was 1 LandSat pixel, we now have 36 SPOT5 pixels.

The city of Reims in LandSat imagery

More on how these images are created by Spot Image