To my English readers – if any(?). Some post will now be in Norwegian without translation. English posts will be in the English category if you would like to filter only them.

Mats Taraldsvik, a student at Geomatics NTNU volunteered to program several demo systems for different ideas.  This resulted in some excellent prototypes. Essentially the ideas developed differed a bit from the main idea of map interface. On this project the core idea was to integrate maps rather than use a map as the primary interface.

1. First test of communicating the bus route in a map.

The goal was to have the user provide the “to and from” address/bus stop then query the route answer engine (BussTUC) as well as display a map containing the bus route. The result can be found here:

http://geomatikk.eksplisitt.net/taraldsv/

2. Walking directions from arbitrary address to the nearest bus stop

Using Google Maps walking directions combined with the local database over bus stops the system is able to display the shortest walking path to and from the bus stop. Demo here: http://geomatikk.eksplisitt.net/taraldsv-gangkart/

3. Combining and refining bus route display

The bus route calculations done in 1. was to inaccurate using Google Maps driving directions, in addition it didn’t include the walking directions very well. This demo illustrates the possibilities of including an accurate bus route as well as (simple) walking directions. Demo here: http://geomatikk.eksplisitt.net/taraldsv-bussrute/

All of the above prototypes are intended as prototypes only – and all have large potential for improvement and further integration. However, I find the idea of integrating maps in this way very handy, especially for non bus-spotters (i.e. tourists, non-frequent bus’ers etc) which probably is (or should be) the target group for a bus route query system.

Of course I still think the idea of using  a map as the primary interface is a good idea which should be further explored. Mainly the problem relies on the data holders/owners of the bus route and stops. If this data is made freely available the step from prototype to “beta” could be made. (hint hint data owners…)

For more ideas and thoughts on the map/bus integration take a look at this wiki page: http://folk.ntnu.no/alexanno/projects/index.php/BussMap

For the sake of data sharing you can find a dump of the current bus stops and their coordinates on: http://geomatikk.eksplisitt.net/bussMap/data/ The data is formatted in CSV with the first line being header text. Coordinates are in WKT and EPSG:4326 (WGS84:lat/lon) accuracy or availability is never guaranteed.

On this years TED conference he was at it again – and – astonishing everyone again with an augmented reality “intelligent” map application. It is amazing what his team manage to develop!

The obvious competitor is Google Maps which probably has a better grip at the market. However, Google does not compete at all with the technology presented at TED – although they do have more users – and maybe an easier solution fitting more users?

Anyway – watch the talks if you haven’t yet.

I have observed this phenomenon for many services. If you remember in 1999-2000 the web search market was like this – a lot of actors fighting for the market, more recently the social networking scene was also like this, Facebook won (although others exist very well also). However, what is happening more and more is that the users (us) are avoiding to choose one service, we believe we are capable of updating all services at the same time and also keep track of everything at the same time. Both of these notions are in fact possible through feed-readers and meta-social systems where you can post to several systems at once or get the newest update from several systems at one place.

However, I’ve also noticed, and experienced, the extreme redundancy of this. Say, if user A is posting something to her blog, which is fed out on her feed, simultaneously she posts to Twitter and Facebook something in the lines of “posted new blogpost at http://trata.ter.te”. Say that user B is interested in A and follows her on Facebook, Twitter and the blog feed. Well, user B is ending up with the same information 3 times – at least. Expand this to the average distinct friend rate on users have on all their social systems – it is becoming a lot of redundancy.

So what is the problem with this? I think users are more and more eager to get only the relevant information – and they want it as it happens – this is what triggers us to join all services – we do not want to miss out. However this is somewhat of a paradox, we are pursuing more information but we only want a small subset of it. So how do you manage this? Are you a deliberate redundance-oholic? Are you manually aggregating and filtering the information?

More importantly – is there a service or system that actually tries to manage this information pool through aggregation and filtering – which works?

I certainly does not possess the answers to this – but I do predict that this kind of service will be the “new trend”, we have enough ways of putting the information into the pool – now we need a way to get it back, filtered and smooth. I think location is one important asset in doing this – although not alone, but in conjunction with very clever algorithms. So who will take the challenge?

You find the new photoblog at http://alexanno.net.

I plan to schedule the posts with about 3 photos a week frequency.

I hope you visit the photoblog and subscribe to the feed!

Please give comments on what you think of the new site!

The tutorial (crash course) is available here: http://folk.ntnu.no/alexanno/projects/index.php/OpenLayers_Crash_Course

To celebrate the release of the WMS’s I’ve also made a specific map viewer service which use NMA’s map services. This means easy embedding of high-quality maps. For instance:

There will be two main services, one full WMS service and one cached version of, probably, the most popular WMS-requests. Limits are 300 requests pr. user pr. 24 hour for the WMS and 10000 request pr. user pr. 24 hour for the cached version. It is not explicitly defined whether this constraint will reside on the client side or for the system – however I reckon they will put the constraint on the system and not the client – and probably increase the WMS constraint a bit, or provide cheap “WMS request plans”. [update] According to @paalkr the constraint is on client side.

The data released covers most of the general applicable data in full detail!

In sum this is great! Finally the mapping authority is part of the modernized mapping game!

More on this (Norwegian mostly)

• Newsflash: http://www.statkart.no/Gratis+karttjenester.d25-SwJfY1-.ips
• General information: http://www.statkart.no/nor/Land/Kart_og_produkter/visningstjenester/
• Technical overview: http://www.statkart.no/?module=Articles;action=Article.publicShow;ID=14087
• NRKBeta: http://nrkbeta.no/2009/11/12/kartverket-frigir-kartene-sine/
• VG.no (“Mapping authority shares the crown jewels”): http://www.vg.no/teknologi/artikkel.php?artid=592216

So, the system isn’t very revolutionary – it probably isn’t going to be the “new youtube”. However what is interesting is why Google made this. Why is Google interested in providing you with this information? For one several users may just use it to turn off or delete information in a far easier way – which is not of Googles interest. So why take this risk? Well, I think it’s because Google users are becoming more suspicious about what Google stores. In their lack of knowledge on this the users turn over to competitors which may provide them with less quality services. The quality of the product is thus less important than the insight into how the product is provided, for instance which information is stored about you. I think this is the reason why information transparency is essential in modern, complex enterprises – where the lack of insight into how the enterprise works is a crucial parameter for the customers to choose the enterprise. One enterprise I believe could benefit from this easy information transparency is hospitals. Complex, almost magical, enterprises where the “customers” often lack trust and insight in what is actually happening.

What do you think?

Map data is an essential part of my work. Often I find myself looking for raw map data, for instance of the counties of Norway in vector format, typically shape/kml or any other geo-data format. The Norwegian Mapping Authority has of course a lot of high-quality data available, additionally several (or all) governmental institutions in Norway can join a “community” of data creators and share the data among themselves. NTNU, the university I’m at, are fortunate enough to be part of this consortium although we do not contribute to the data.

This all seems to put the necessary foundation for finding fairly standard geodata – it should be easy to find, download and use fairly freely. However, that is not the situation. The system created for accessing the data has so good security that is is in practice inaccessible. When I finally find the right person who has credentials to log in – the system for finding the correct data is packed with forms which do not have any meaningful labels or content in them – at least they are not describing what you’re actually downloading. In my quest for finding the county data for Norway I summed it up in a tweet:

Putting Norway on the map seems to be inhibited by costly licensing and non-existing accessibility (yes, you http://geonorge.no)

As you may imagine, I did not get the data I was looking for. I got some data – namely the municipality data in nice vector format, even with textual names and everything – however not the county they belong to or any other geographic meaningful information.

I admittedly gave up for a day or two. Then I started searching for alternative data – and after a while I found that the US government is far beyond the Norwegian (at least in geodata:). They have released a data set termed vmap0 which is vector data covering the whole world. The data is unfortunately in a bit inaccessible form which I didn’t care to figure out. (not that difficult it seemed, just some converting here and there). I found someone already had converted it to shape format, and nicely split up in continents. So I downloaded the data from the (seemingly) nice folks at GIS-lab.

I only needed the data covering Norway I extracted it and converted to svg (not geo), png+pngw, wgs84+utm32N and wgs84+latlon. The data is not perfect, it has a line across Norway – probably relating to the curvature of the earth – however it is “cutting” some counties and I haven’t figured out how to delete it nicely, however the data is good enough – and far better than nothing!

My frustration has finally ended – through the public domain with gratitudes to the US government! As this resolved some of my issues – I thought I’d try to resolve someone else’s by sharing alike:) You can find the vector data of Norwegian counties (fylker) in different formats and projections in the file here:

http://folk.ntnu.no/alexanno/geodata/NorgeFylker.rar

I hope you enjoy the data – remember to acknowledge GIS-Lab and the US Government if you care for it – my contributions are not necessary to acknowledge :)