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Google and Murakami

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ?

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

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

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

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

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 !

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 :

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

The OpenStreetMap Mug and the tag concept

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 !

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 :-)

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.

Aragon and 360° photos

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 !