Ho John Lee’s Weblog

During the initial planning and survey phase of the Kuppam project a few years ago, I discovered it was nearly impossible to obtain high resolution topographic maps (or any other sort) for rural India. The government-operated Survey of India has high quality data, but it hasn’t generally made its way into the equivalent of US Geological Survey 15-minute quadrangles on paper or the DTM / DEM data sets. The best I was able to come up with was some old Soviet military maps from the 1950s.

Hadn’t thought about it for a while, but I see someone else has found out about these:

Paul sez, “Soviets mapped the entire world at various scales between 1940 and 1990.In some areas the Russian maps are still the best available maps. Amazingly, none of the maps are copyright.

BoingBoing, Soviet Military Maps of Britain

Just when I’d started getting a little bored with Google-based pincushion maps du jour, I come across something surprising built on the new Yahoo Maps API:
from Justin’s Rich Media Blog:

With the power of Flash 8, you can customize the Yahoo! Maps on your site to actually blend with the surrounding design of the site or application. Forget about a rectangular maps and default colors of the map tiles. Use ActionScript, or the IDE to add runtime filters to the map tiles themselves.

The radar “scan” is animated to rotate around, while the pirate map telescope also serves as the zoom level slider.

I’ve seen so many Google Maps applications in the past few months that the sheer novelty and utility value of new ways to access data and maps has started to wear off. These demos made me stop to take a look simply because they look so much better than what we’ve gotten used to lately, and are likely to precipitate a wave of interesting new ideas.

Map My Run is a new Google Maps-based application for plotting and measuring your runs. I just tried plotting one of my usual loops around the Stanford campus and it’s pretty close to what I get with my GPS running watch.

You can plot routes by clicking points on the map, or upload a GPS tracklog (didn’t try this, though). These sorts of applications are great for estimating your mileage when you don’t actually have a GPS or some way to measure the course. Unfortunately, Google’s map coverage is still somewhat limited outside the US, so it works great for plotting runs around London’s Hyde Park but not so good for loops around the Vidhana Soudha or Cubbon Park in Bangalore, although if you know your way around you can use the satellite view to make a rough guesstimate.

Yahoo has a major update to Yahoo Maps this evening, bringing it back on par with Google Maps, and with a full set of web APIs for building mapping applications.

From the Yahoo Maps API overview:

Building Block Components

Several Yahoo! APIs help you create a powerful and useful Yahoo! Maps mashups. Use these together with the Yahoo! Maps APIs to enhance the user experience.

• Geocoding API - Pass in location data by address and receive geocoded (encoded with latitude-longitude) responses.
• Map Image API - Stitch map images together to build your own maps for usage in custom applications, including mobile and offline use.
• Traffic APIs - Build applications that take dynamic traffic report data to help you plan optimal routes and keep on top of your commute using either our REST API or Dynamic RSS Feed.
• Local Search APIs - Query against the Yahoo! Local service, which now returns longitude-latitude with every search result for easy plotting on a map. Also new is the inclusion of ratings from Yahoo! users for each establishment to give added context.

I’ve never been to New Orleans, but this interactive map shows the area flooded by Katrina on New Orleans or the metro Boston area, which may be more familiar to some readers here.

Map at Boston.com (via Brad Feld)

The topography is obviously different in Boston, so this isn’t the pattern of flooding that could actually occur. The scale is 1:1 though, and the region is huge.

A first version of Amazon A9’s photo mapping project is open for business at maps.a9.com.

The block-by-block view is available for selected US metro areas, and provides a street-level view of storefronts, houses, parks, and whatever else happened to be in view when they drove by.

Here are a few sample locations to try:

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to bookmark a location yet, so saving a particular location requires a bit of trial and error on the street address once you come across an interesting view.

via Batelle’s Searchblog

Also, at Search Engine Watch Gary Price comments on the early coverage of Fargo, North Dakota:

So, why Fargo? A couple of weeks ago A9’s CEO, Udi Manber, told Danny:

Here’s how to make a movie from Google Earth, using a DirectX capture utility. (via LifeHacker)

Starting with the free version of Google Earth, I installed FRAPS, a program that saves the video from programs that use DirectX (mostly games) directly to the hard drive in an uncommpressed avi format. Works real nice, makes good quality movies, but with a very large file size. FRAPS uses a codec that can not be read by anything else. So, using VirtualDub (installed on the same PC as FRAPS), I converted the avi to a much smaller Divx Avi. From there I could edit/play the video on anything, like my Mac!

The tool chain used here is pretty obscure for a normal person, but is probably usable by an interesting fraction of the early adopters that have jumped on the new interfaces for Google Maps / Google Earth.

The Gmaps Pedometer is a great hack combining two of my current interests, running and map hacking.

I just tried entering a couple of routes that I run on regularly to compare the results from the Gmaps Pedometer with my logs from my Timex Bodylink GPS, and they’re pretty close. This seems like a relatively painless way to get approximate course distance without having to actually measure the course, assuming you remember where you ran.

update 2005-07-07 20:46 - looks like they may have exceeded the Google API 50k request limit, it’s complaining about the “Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site”.

The Voltaic Backpack is a little pricey (US$229), but would be just the thing for putting together a field survey kit for building rural wireless networks, disaster assessment (e.g. post-tsunami or earthquake), or other off-grid surveying applications. It provides a small set of solar panels mounted onto a backpack, which can generate power while you’re wearing it. The panels have a peak output of 4 watts, and charge a 2200mAh battery, which isn’t enough to run a notebook computer, but is enough to keep a GPS and cell phone, PDA, or camera running from the panel, and is probably enough to run a carefully chosen wireless access point as well.

There are several different backpack sizes available from Voltaic, as well as a messenger bag, but the solar panels and battery charging systems are identical for all models.

I’m semi-offline, travelling in India this week, but had a little time to check out Google Earth, which just launched. This is basically the Keyhole software, integrated with Google. It provides a 3-d interface to satellite imagery and GIS data for the whole earth, including terrain, 3-d building models in a few metro areas (such as San Francisco) and is free for personal use.

The main downside is that it’s a fat client (10MB to download), and requires an internet connection to log in on the image server. It’s great fun to play with though, and I can see a new round of interesting applications similar to the Google Maps hacks that have been emerging over the past few months.

Google Maps has added a limited outline view and wide area satellite imagery of the world outside North America. A summary of changes is posted here. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more detailed coverage before too long. Google is apparently already working with Map24 in Europe. (via Slashdot)

Another interesting service strapped onto Google Maps, building on transportation tracking services built at the University of Washington Intelligent Transportation Systems Research Program .

BusMonster builds on the ITS services which in turn rely on various sensors and system monitors which already exist in Seattle, so this isn’t something that can easily be rolled out for an existing, uninstrumented transportation system, but it shows some of what is possible.

via Jeff Nolan

Continuing on the topic of converged GPS/camera/phone devices, here’s a post from Wade Roush (writer for Technology Review) calling for the cellular operators to open up location information for 3rd party applications, and detailing some of the business and cultural reasons why this is taking a while.

There are a lot of interesting technical hacks being strung together to cobble together location-aware and geotagged services, but the wireless phone carriers already have a lot of the infrastructure for this, and a near-total absence of applications.

This is the first camera phone I’ve seen so far that looks plausible for general photography. The Samsung SPH-V7800 has a 5 megapixel sensor, 3x optical zoom and a built-in flash, along with other standard point-and-shoot features. (via Engadget)

This phone is probably too large for me personally to carry around. But it would also be nice to see a built in flash with the more common fixed focus camera phones, to turn them into digital equivalents of the disposable film cameras. A 1 megapixel camera is perfectly adequate for snapshots, but without a flash they’re nearly useless indoors and in the evening.

A good introductory article and list of current open source GPS/geotagging/mapping tools by Tyler Mitchell on the O’Reilly site.

An interesting thread on Google Answers, regarding what services are available to track the current location of a cell phone. (via del.icio.us).

For about $200.00 ICU, Inc. offers to locate a cellular telephone by
pinging the phone – a kind of triangulation process similar to the one
I mentioned earlier. Ms. Landers explained that the cell phone appears
as a ‘blip” on a screen. They provide the service 24 hours a day, 7
days a week in order to help locate missing persons, fugitives,
cheating spouses, etc. They regularly serve bondsmen, authorities,
investigators and many others. You will receive the results within 7
to 10 minutes of a successfully completed ping that will indicate
within approximately 50 feet, where the phone was located at the time
of the ping.

I.C.U. Inc.
http://www.tracerservices.com/cpl.htm
http://www.tracerservices.com/cplfaqs.htm

Well, this is not exactly unexpected. Google appears to have shut down the Gmerge satellite-tile-assembling service I wrote about yesterday, as the assembled imagery is apparently outside the uses allowed by their terms of service.

I had a quick look at the Google Maps TOS yesterday, as the thought had occured to me that they might have some restrictions. It looks like making “copies” is out of bounds, although for an individual end user, the browser obviously needs to do at least a little copying. This is similar to a potential image licensing issue we encountered with the OpenPix image server a few years ago, which was also tile based.

This turned up on del.icio.us today:

gMerge is a python script that merges Google Maps satellite “tiles” in order to produce a wallpaper (or even a poster!). Feel free to send us suggestions and comments.

The resulting image is returned as a single JPEG image.

More fun with Google Maps, Google RideFinder displays the location of GPS-enabled taxis for a few locations in the US. This is just a concept demo, since there aren’t a lot of GPS-enabled taxi services at the moment, but interesting to play with.

More fun with Google Maps and TiVo.