In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

First, happy 2012 to everyone! :-)

Slashdot is running a discussion named Judge Doesn't Care About Supreme Court GPS Case.

Their summary: "The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether or not law enforcement needs a warrant before they put a GPS tracker on a person's car. A judge in St. Louis doesn't seem to care about that, though. He ruled last week (PDF) that the FBI didn't need a warrant to track the car of a state employee they suspected was collecting a paycheck without actually going to work. (Their suspicions were confirmed.) While in favor of corrupt government employees being caught, it's a bit disturbing that a federal judge would decide a warrant wasn't needed while the Supreme Court has said the issue is unclear."

Not the first time this type of activity is mentioned here, and Slashdot discusses it in this story named Malls Track Shoppers' Cell Phones On Black Friday.

Their summary: "The management company of both malls, Forest City Commercial Management, says personal data is not being tracked. 'We won't be looking at singular shoppers,' said Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for Forest City. 'The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, like migrating birds, where people are going to.' Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hanging small signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out by turning off their phones."

Streamline Postal And Courier Services With Global Postal Codes

November 15, 2011, Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. announced the release of NAC Sorter - a software module for mail sorting systems to sort all mail automatically from world level to final household mail boxes, thanks to the power of the Universal Address (also called the Global Postal Code).

Though it has been a long time effort of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) to standardize mailing addresses for international mail, it has little success as traditional addresses evolved from history have deep roots in languages and cultures and are difficult to be translated into standard addresses in the UPU suggested formats, not to mention that 60% of the world population do not have addresses yet.These lead to limited automation in mail sorting and no postal and courier services to many households.

This situation now can be changed with the introduction of the Universal Address that can be used to globalize all addresses. The Universal Address is a highly efficient and human-friendly code mathematically equivalent to longitude/latitude coordinates and available at every location in the world, including locations of all houses, buildings and even temporary camps, and can be instantly obtained with a GPS device such as a smartphone or an online high resolution satellite image map such as NAC Locator. Here are some examples of the Universal Addresses:

NAC: JZ9G P9TP (Acropolis, Greece)
NAC: H5SX R497 (Arch of Triumph, Paris, France)
NAC: 9F3J L1PL (Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico)
NAC: GZM7 RKH3 (Buckingham Palace, UK)
NAC: 57WF NSBR (CACTUS Site, USA)
NAC: 8CHZ Q86C (CN Tower, Toronto, Canada)
NAC: J16W PZFH (Colosseum, Rome, Italy)
NAC: H5Q2 R48Q (Eiffel Tower, Paris, France)
NAC: SNZ PMK (Forbidden City, Beijing, China)
NAC: J3 RQ (Berlin, Germany)

Here NAC stands for Natural Area Code, a four character NAC represents a 30x24 square kilometer area like a city, a six character NAC represents roughly a square kilometer like a street block, an eight character one a 35x25 square meter area like a house and a ten character one is one square meter like a door anywhere on the earth. Since an eight or ten character NAC is able to uniquely specify a house or building anywhere in the world, it is also called a Universal Address.

Sorting mail based on the Universal Address is just a simple mathematical problem: finding the area containing the location of the Universal Address from a series of areas defined by the company according to its own transportation and delivery structure, which is independent from languages, cultures and the definition of the postal zones.

For countries with traditional addresses, the suggested globalized address is the traditional address embedded with the Universal Address, for example,

〒106-0031
日本国東京都港区西麻布3-16-30
NAC: VM9F NX8Q

Thus, it avoids the difficult translation of the address so that people used to the tranditional address can still use it as usual, while machines, tourists and people unfamiliar with the language and the traditional address can use the language-independent digital Universal Address as it has a distinct format and can be easily recognized no matter where it is embedded in the address block.

For countries without traditional addresses, the globalized address can be the Universal Address only or the place names plus the Universal Address such as:

سفارة كاليفورنيا
ربع الدبلوماسية
الرياض، المملكة العربية السعودية
NAC: LVK1 M3D7

Then, all homes in the world have their own globalized addresses. With the globalized addresses on mail and parcels,

1. all houdeholds, cottages and even temporary camps in the world can get postal and courier services delivered to their doors no matter whether they have traditional addresses or not as they can be uniquely specified by Universal Addresses.
2. all international mail and parcels can be automatically sorted as the Universal Addresses are worldwide valid.
3. all courier companies can sort and transport parcels according to their own needs without concerns in changes of postal codes due to the changes of postal services, thanks to the independency of the Universal Addresses from postal services.
4. mail and parcels in all countries, especially those without postal code systems or without address systems can be sorted automatically, thanks to the pure mathematic sorting algorithm of the Universal Addresses independent from languages and cultures.
5. postal and courier companies can extend the automation in mail sorting all the way to final mail boxes of individual houses, thanks to the unique Universal Addresses available to all households in the world.

"The release of NAC Sorter represents another milestone in the digital and globalization revolution, " said Dr. Xinhang Shen, president of NAC Geographic Products Inc., "Postal and courier companies now can automatically sort all mail and parcels at all levels with the same algorithm based on the same kind of codes no matter where they are and no matter where the mail and parcels are sent to, eliminating barriers from hundreds of different languages, traditions, postal code systems of the addresses."

Actually, Universal Addresses can be used for all location related applications (postal and couriers services, taxi services, emergency services, maps, navigation, local search, travel guides, geographic information systems, cadastre, land planning, management of roadside objects, etc) with significantly improved efficiency, interoperability and reliability. For example, if you use the Universal Address instead of the traditional address to specify the destination on a navigation system, you can save 80% of key input, avoid difficulty in inputting foreign characters if it is a foreign address, eliminate errors from the outdated, duplicated or missing address and extend the navigation to locations without traditional addresses.

Currently, NAC Sorter is delivered as an ActiveX control for Microsoft Windows based mail sorting software and has been released to two major manufacturers for the integration with their mail sorting systems. We also welcome other manufacturers of mail sorting systems to do the integration to speed up the revolution of the postal and courier services in the world. The software module can be downloaded here. For more information about NAC Sorter, please check http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsorter.asp.

About NAC Geographic Products Inc.
Incorporated in 1995 in Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. is a world's leading company in geographic technologies and geo-services, developing GIS/GPS software products and providing APIs for real-time geo-services (geocoding addresses, reverse-geocoding, mapping, routing, etc.) for web applications and wireless location based services, etc.

CONTACT
Lixin Zhou
PR Manager
Tel: +1 416 496 6110
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.nacgeo.com

Keywords
Mail Sorting, Postal Code, Postcode, Globap Postal Code, Universal Address, Natural Area Code, NAC, NAC Locator, Google Maps, Satellite Image Maps, Local Search, Navigation, Search Engine, Mapping, Street Address, Geocode, Geocoding, LBS, GPS, Location Based Service, Locating, Tracking, Searching, Wireless, Cellphone, Map Grid, Geography, Geographic Technology, Geographic Coordinates, Longitude, Latitude, Property Identifier, Emergency Service, 911

Discussed this afternoon over Slashdot, Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found On SUV.

Their summary: "As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in a case Tuesday that could determine if authorities can track U.S. citizens with GPS vehicle trackers without a warrant, a young man in California has come forward to Wired to reveal that he found not one but two different devices on his vehicle recently. The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car. Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man."

Discussed a few days ago over Slashdot, Iranian Police Tracking Dissidents Using Tech From Western Companies.

Their summary: "A recent article at Bloomberg discusses Western companies supplying monitoring equipment to Iran. There are few regulations restricting the sale of intelligence monitoring systems to the Iranian government, and large corporations like Ericsson and Nokia have supplied the equipment used to identify dissidents and suppress anti-government protests. '[One such system from Creativity Software] can record a person’s location every 15 seconds — eight times more frequently than a similar system the company sold in Yemen, according to company documents. A tool called "geofences" triggers an alarm when two targets come in close proximity to each other. The system also stores the data and can generate reports of a person's movements. A former Creativity Software manager said the Iran system was far more sophisticated than any other systems the company had sold in the Middle East.'"

Here's the geospatial-related geonews discussed over Slashdot during the last two weeks, in batch mode:

• Here's an "Holographic" Desk Allowing Interaction With Virtual Objects
• A Throwable 36-Camera Ball Takes Spherical Panoramas
• A discussion on the Time Zone Database Has New Home After Lawsuit
• The Origo prototype, 3D Printer For Your Kids
• There's a interactive population map attached to this Earth Officially Home To 7 Billion Humans story
• Google Releases Geothermal Potential Map of the US
• And another Google story named How Google's Autonomous Vehicles Work
• In order to reduce the costs of satellites, DARPA Proposes Ripping Up Dead Satellites To Make New Ones
• A recurring theme, Senator Introduces Bill To Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking
• Sensor Enables 3D Mapping of Rainforests

Slashdot discusses a story named Australian Malls To Track Shoppers By Their Phones. That's not the first time we hear about such efforts.

Their summary: "Australian shopping centers will monitor customers' mobile phones to track how often they visit, which stores they like and how long they stay. One unnamed Queensland shopping center is next month due to become the first in the nation to install receivers that detect unique mobile phone radio frequency codes to pinpoint location within two meters."

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.

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

On the open source front:

• Wonder where GeoTools is? Here's the Status of GeoTools presentation from FOSS4G 2011
• Here's about Metatools, a metadata management plugin for QGIS, now at version 0.2
• Here's the GeoServer Aggregating DataStore, enabling the republication from several data sources, including remote ones
• The slides and videos of OpenStreetMap's State of the Map 2011 conference are now available
• Sean Gillis' at it again, he started a new project called Fiona, an OGR API which wants to be "a clear alternative to the complex layers and cursors and fussy geometry objects of OGR and ArcPy"
• Ok, not directly geospatial, but Gource is the nicest tool to visualize source code changes I've seen yet (works with Git, SVN and others), and here it is showing the changes in QGIS from version 1.6 to 1.7

On the Esri front:

• ArcGIS Explorer Build 1750 is now available
• Mandown summarizes what’s new on ArcGIS Online for September 2011
• There's also an ArcGIS API for iOS 2.01 update for those developing with iOS 5 and another one for ArcGIS API For JavaScript 2.5
• Here's the Best Practices For Using Custom State Highway Shields In ArcGIS

In the everything-else category:

• Here's another entry on the New KML features in Google Earth 6.1
• Iran is releasing Basir, a Google Earth competitor, to counter Google's cultural aggression 
• Microsoft has an entry on the recent updates to Bing Maps: REST API, AJAX Control v7, and Account Center
• We mentioned a few times vertical datums, via Kurt, now NOAA is releasing VDatum, "designed to vertically transform geospatial data among a variety of tidal, orthometric and ellipsoidal vertical datums"
• That's how far sensors can go, millions of geolocated seismic sensors wirelessly connected for oil and gas exploration by Shell and HP
• V1 mentions a comprehensive guide on 3D spatial relationships
• Here's a Maperitive tutorial for Generating OSM Map For Adobe Illustrator
• In the neverending series of cellphone tracking, Slashdot discusses a story named Surveillance Case May Reveal FBI Cellphone Tracking Techniques
• And regarding car tracking Slashdot offers another story named Canberra Police Want Drones To Track Cars
• In the trivia category, Slashdot discusses a story named Swedish Daycare Tracks Kids With GPS Devices

In the maps category:

• O'Reilly mentions the Global Adaptation Index map, which "rates a given country's vulnerability to environmental shifts precipitated by climate change, its readiness to adapt to such changes, and its ability to utilize investment capital that would address the state of those vulnerabilities"
• V1 shares a map of the gas infrastructures in Europe

Slashdot discusses another GPS tracking privacy story, this one called GPS Tracking of State Worker Raises Privacy Issues.

With this summary: "How far can state government go in keeping tabs on its employees? That's the question a mid-level appeals court will consider in the wake of a lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union against the state Labor Department, in the case of a fired state worker who was tracked with a GPS device that investigators secretly attached to his personal car. ... State officials tracked Cunningham's whereabouts by secretly attaching a GPS device to his BMW. The electronic tailing went beyond what would normally be termed Cunningham's work hours, since the device was on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They even tracked him on a multi-day family vacation."