In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the Esri front:

• An interesting entry on Designing the next generation of online Topographic Maps
• There's an ArcGIS Online World Topographic Map New Design which includes High-resolution imagery for South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Afghanistan
• The 2012/2017 Esri U.S. Demographic Data Release

On the web maps front:

• We mentioned it before, and here's more details on JS.geo 2013: A Meeting of Javascript Mappers in Denver
• There's a new site to give you Instant Google Street View (direct link)... worth trying, it's really fast
• Also Google-related, the GEB talks about GPS4Sport that combines GPS with Video and Google Earth
• On Apple Maps
  • Rumors of OS X 10.9 to Include Siri and Maps Integration
  • A lot of geoblogs mentioned that Apple axed the head of its mapping team, Richard Williamson (more here)
• Microsoft added New Imagery Added to Windows 8 Maps App & Bing Maps
• The MapBox iOS SDK hits version 0.5.0
• Two weeks ago, TomTom launched its SDK for LBS Apps, including maps, geocoding, routing, traffic

In the miscellaneous category:

• Launched less than 10 days ago, MarineRegions.org, "towards a global standard of georeferenced marine names" (via Kurt)
• A slashdot story named French Company Building a Mobile Internet Just For Things
• While 3D printing have most of its applications outside of geospatial, I found interesting that it's really going mainstream as demonstrated by Staples To Offer 3D Printing Services, an O'Reilly story named Printing ourselves, the state of 3D Printing Patent Suits (via OR), and yes, you can 3D-print your own drone
• More news about drones:
  • The Make magazine offers a gift guide for aerial drones (via OR)
  • But beware, High Levels of Burnout in US Drone Pilots (via OR)
• VerySpatial offers an entry on Forensic GIS and the Role of Geospatial Technologies for Investigating Crime and Providing Evidence
• Apparently, there's Nokia offline maps available in Firefox OS (alpha)
• If you're excited by OGC standards
  • There's the development of an international standard for 4D archaeological data
  • And soon, Augmented Reality Standard ARML 2.0 in its Final Stage
• If you're in the U.S., you'll be interested by the GAO Report on Federal Geospatial Data Coordination
• You wonder about earth observation satellites from Russia? Here's news about the Resurs-P with 3-m hyperspectral capabilities and other Russian satellites
• As part of Autodesk University, you'll find the Autodesk CEO saying “I do believe that everything is moving to the cloud.” and an entry indicating that Autodesk's future is in the cloud

In the maps category:

• Interesting maps, U.S. Geography of Personality: The United States of Mind

Michael W. Dobson (Ph.D)  runs the TeleMapics organization.  TeleMapics provides independent advice on mapping, geospatial technology and solutions for applications that use geographic information. In this interview GPS Bites spoke to him about his views on the Apple partnership with TomTom, TeleAtlas, and his predictions for GPS and mapping over the next two years.  You can read the interview in full on the GPS Bites website on the link below:

www.gpsbites.com/mike-dobson-telemapics-interview

24 hours ago Apple announced  the new 'Maps' app for iOS 6, which includes turn-by-turn navigation, real-time traffic and 3D maps: "Designed by Apple from the ground up, Maps gives you turn-by-turn spoken directions, interactive 3D views, and the stunning Flyover feature. All of which may just make this app the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever."

Here's the reactions on the geoblogs and other sources:

• Let's start with MacRumors which were amongst the first to let us know about it
• Spatially Adjusted links to the Apple attribution page for the Maps app, and it's TomTom data for navigation amongst other sources, and not surprisingly, there's still OpenStreetMap data in there like for the latest Photo app

• Spatially Adjusted also shares an interesting entry named Will Apple Maps Impact Web Mapping? "Thus in the short term, it becomes one more API we must learn if we are deploying to Apple devices. [...] Second, it might not be useful for GIS applications. [...] Third, if you are already using Google or Mapbox, do you really need to switch?"
• Peter Batty also shares an interesting reaction: "Another interesting development is that a good number of major car manufacturers have committed to adding a button on their steering wheel within the next 12 months that will activate Siri on your iOS device, which will make iOS devices even more attractive as in car devices. [...] The most obvious thing missing from Apple Maps that Google Maps has is Street View. They also didn't mention anything about an offline mode, which Google announced last week. [...]  Another thing missing, which I use a lot on Google Maps on my iPhone, is routing using public transit."
• Adena at APB is collecting 'facts' about Apple's new Maps app

• The Map Room links to Cult of Mac's 4-minutes hands-on demonstration of the Apple Maps app
• You can read more on The Verge, Gizmodo, and several other generic sources 
• If you want to see the 10-minutes video announcement and demo of the Maps app, fast forward to about 98 minutes into the talk

I expect more Apple Maps information and analysis in the coming weeks, and by the time it becomes available as part of iOS 6 "next Fall".

In what looks like "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win", Slashdot discusses TomTom's fight against OpenStreetMap and open source maps.

The Slashdot summary: "TomTom Navigation has a recently launched article on what they call the 'negative aspects' of open data projects such as OpenStreetMap. As there are no hard facts and details to the studies they refer, the OSM community identified this release as classical 'Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt'."

That second link on FUD is pretty informative. Related, last January we mentioned an article comparing TomTom and OpenStreetMap data in Germany.

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source front:

• Here's a DM summary entry on FOSS4G-NA 2012 that I haven't shared yet, and it's pretty informative
• There's a new video showing us uDig features
• Here's examples of using QGIS in local government, related to QGIS, here's an entry on What's New in QGIS Plugins
• A technical entry on dynamic WMS styling with GeoServer with SLD
• Here's an interesting web browser memory usage experiment for OpenLayers

From the Google front:

• Google announce new StreetView imagery for Israel in an entry named Exploring Jerusalem’s Old City streets with Street View
• There's also an update to the Google Maps API deprecation policy and Terms of Service
• The GEB reminds us the options we have for Sharing your favorite locations in Google Earth

On the Microsoft front:

• You can now Find Venue Maps, Businesses and Buildings Faster on Bing Maps
• Bing Maps is Reducing the Complexity of Rendering Shapes

Discussed over Slashdot:

• A "Big Brother Chip", the Broadcom 4752, that acts as a ubiquitous location chip using everything available: "global navigation satellites, cell phone towers, and Wi-Fi hot spots, coupled with input from gyroscopes, accelerometers, step counters, and altimeters"
• A GPS system that will speed up tsunami warnings
• The Physical Travelling Salesman Challenge
• Using satellite imagery to counting Emperor Penguins from space

Directions Mag articles of note:

• The Top 10 Things You Should Know about GIS Certification, including "In 2012, more than 5,000 people are active GISPs." and "Eight states have recognized and endorsed the GISP"
• A Q&A entry about Is Intergraph’s New GeoMedia Smart Client for You?

In the everything else category:

• The ESA mentions Envisat's mapping of ice shelf disintegration in Antarctic and update on the investigation of Envisat woes, being offline since early April
• @Thierry_G links to interesting impressions on the Where 2012 conference titled From Where 2.0 To Just Where; With Meh 2.0 Somewhere In The Middle, asking where is the geospatial excitement today?
• Via Paul I found this extreme video example of augmented reality
• APB has an entry on TomTom’s New Global Geocoder Targets Power Users
• SS shares a perspective named Have the geospatial technology frontiers changed much in three years?
• SS also shares an interesting summary of a session on capacity building and the expansion of the global geospatial marketplace to a billion plus people

In the maps category:

• O'Reilly shares two visualizations, one on The history of shipping routes and the other on Mapping the Titanic's passengers

With the help of TomTom's professional traffic analysis tools, Blom – a European provider of GIS services – can now enable governments in Europe to identify and solve the bottlenecks in their road network quickly and at reduced costs. TomTom and Blom already cooperate in creating the largest 3D city model database and are now expanding their partnership to support Blom in selling TomTom's advanced traffic products.

With TomTom's unique traffic products, Blom can support municipalities, regions, provinces and national government authorities across Europe with bottleneck analysis, evaluation studies and investment proposals in order to help their customers improve travel times for the entire European road network. TomTom's historical traffic database includes more than five trillion anonymous data points and continues to grow with over six billion data points collected per day.

"The expansion of our partnership with Blom is proof of the growing demand for advanced traffic analysis to help reduce traffic congestion and save costs," said Nuno Campos, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for TomTom Licensing. "With the addition of TomTom's accurate historical traffic analyses, Blom can help speed up policy and decision-making within governments."

"Blom are always looking to bring innovative solutions to the marketplace and we believe that TomTom's historic traffic analysis technology is one such example. Therefore, expanding on what is already a successful partnership with TomTom was the next logical step for Blom to take," said Jan Skybak, Vice President of Sales & Marketing of Blom.

The granularity of TomTom's historical traffic database is reflected in products like Custom Travel Times and Custom Area Analysis which enable analysis to be made for any individual road segment or a larger geographical area. The analyses are quickly and easily available through TomTom's online professional web portal: http://trafficstats.tomtom.com. A leading European Data Protection Authority has confirmed the data delivered by TomTom to be compliant with strict privacy regulations.

We mentioned this type of possibility a few times in the past, and it's getting more and more real ; Slashdot it discussing a story named TomTom Satnavs To Set Insurance Prices.

Their summary: "TomTom has signed a deal with an insurance firm that will see its satnavs used to monitor drivers. Fair Pay Insurance, part of Motaquote, will use monitoring systems built into the TomTom PRO 3100 to watch for sharp braking and badly managed turns, rewarding 'good' drivers with lower premiums and warning less skilled motorists when they aren't driving as they should. 'We've dispensed with generalization's and said to our customers, if you believe you're a good driver, we'll believe you and we'll even give you the benefit up front,' said Nigel Lombard of Fair Pay Insurance."

Okay, there is much more geonews that were waiting for me than I expected. Please give me some time to catch up everything. Anything worthy, I'll aggregate and share with our users.

There has been several interesting articles and entries posted in the past two weeks about OpenStreetMap. Here they are!

• Ogle Earth shares an interesting article on what's happening in Syria with Google Map Maker and OpenStreetMap relying on crowdsourcing for their maps, in the context of the 2011-2012 Syrian uprising
• Cédric highlights an article on TomTom data vs OpenStreetMap data, specifically for Germany
• Cédric also enumerates 13 reasons why OpenStreetMap fails to replace official or proprietary base maps in a sustainable way - this list identify several interesting 'challenges' for OpenStreetMap
• Meanwhile, James Fee was one of many that reacted to Wired's article named Open Source Maps Gain Ground as Google Paywall Looms
• Related and worth reading, Nestoria explains why it dumped Google Maps in favor of OpenStreetMap, served by MapQuest
• James also linked to an article about OpenStreetMap data and what makes spatial data 'authoritative'
• Mapperz mentions the nice OpenStreetMap Terrain layer for the U.S.
• The OSM summary links to the video of OpenStreetMap edits for 2011, but don't expect to see details in this video
• The State of the Map 2012 conference will take place in Tokyo, September 6-8th
• Sadly, I still haven't found an appropriate iOS app to contribute to OpenStreetMap, anyone has?

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode. Some of those news seem important enough to deserve their own entries, but I dare share them in a single one. Yes, that's another unusually long post. Normal posting frequency should resume next February!

From the open source / open data front:

• SS shares an entry named MIT Releases Smartphone Data Tracking Tools as Open Source Software, it's called Funf
• There's now an OpenStreetMap Inspector, a quality evaluation service to help improve OSM data
• Here's a short entry on using OpenStreetMap data, tidbit: the entire database is 250GB
• Here's an entry on generating contours using GDAL (via shell or QGIS)
• Paul explains Indexed Nearest Neighbour Search in PostGIS
• Here's the FOSS4G 2011 WMS Performance Shootout 2011 slides, and I haven't shared this yet, James Fee's Guide to what was important at FOSS4G 2011

From the Esri front:

• Mandown reports that Esri updated their deprecation plans for ArcGIS 10 and 10.1
• SS indicates Esri Releases a Map Story on Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions

From the Google front:

• Finally, single-language labels made their way to Google Maps, that's making it much less confusing
• Here's in simple words why Google offers Google Maps / Earth
• Ogle Earth shares an entry on using Google Earth to hunt illegal mining in Goa, India

From the Microsoft front:

• Bing Maps added detailed airport maps, 42 U.S. airports so far 

In the miscellaneous category:

• SS reports that TomTom Launched a Geospatial Platform with Oracle: "The service will offer geocoding, vehicle routing and mapping information, all hosted on Oracle’s 11g database."
• V1 writes about INTERGEO, the German geospatial conference that attracted 17,000 attendees, making it one of the largest geoconferences in the world (the largest?)
• James Fee linked to the U.S. and Canadian top 10 largest cities GIS web maps
• We mentioned it before, but here's another article on the completion of the ERS satellite missions after 20 years
• O'Reilly shares an entry named Why indoor navigation is so hard and another entry on the state and future of local news
• If you have interest in the GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification), here's data model diagrams
• MapQuest launched a Mobile Flash Maps API
• VerySpatial mentioned the National Geographic Challenge game for the PS3, XBox360 and Wii
• On a more serious topic, VS shares an entry on The Geography of the Death Penalty

Slashdot discussed a few geospatial-related stories:

• Don't you wish you were a student again, Put On Your 3D Glasses — Class Is About To Start
• Not the first time we hear such news (from any OS phone), HTC Android Backdoor Leaks Private User Data, including GPS locations
• US Military Seeks Non-Cooperative Biometric Tracking Technology
• A story named California Governor Vetoes Ban On Warrantless Phone Searches, including GPS logs
• An on the same theme, a Senator Goes After 'Brazen' OnStar Privacy Shift
• With a search, you'll find plenty of similar stories, German Researchers Crack Mifare RFID Encryption, in other words, RFID can be of great use, but can't be considered secure 
• There's also a story about using stereo-vision mapping to visualize the oldest submerged city

In the maps category:

• TMR shares a few map books for Fall 2011
• Here's the first global map of ocean salinity
• Here's the Japanese tsunami mapped in detail for the first time

In the coming days, I'll be at Géomatique 2011, the major geospatial event in the province of Québec. Slashgeo is a media partner of the event.

Slashdot discusses a story named GPS Maker TomTom Submits Your Speed Data To Police. Their summary: ""The GPS systems in TomTom's Live range all feature built-in 3G data cards, which feed location and route information back to a central server. According to CNET, this data, along with users' speed information, is being made available to local governments and the police." From the article: "Knowing the cops can see where you're driving and how fast you're going is eye-opening stuff, but TomTom says the data is anonymous and can never be traced back to an individual user or device. [...]""

The same geonews was mentioned by The Map Room and links to TomTom's CEO Official Statement on TomTom’s Customer Data Usage Policy: "We are now aware that the police have used traffic information that you have helped to create to place speed cameras at dangerous locations where the average speed is higher than the legally allowed speed limit. We are aware a lot of our customers do not like the idea and we will look at if we should allow this type of usage."