gps
Introduction to Neogeography
Have you ever been reading my blog and wondered what it is that I'm talking about, or why I'm so interested in everything geospatial (the vast majority of links I add to my del.icio.us bookmark collection use the term geo) and opensource software (especially in relation to the Drupal platform, which I got involved with through work)?
If you have, you may just find the Introduction to Neogeography by Andrew Turner a good primer. It's a great introduction (for those who already have a technological leaning) to the 'new geography', talking about concepts, common data formats, examples you can implement yourself and that sort of thing. It's a 54 page e-book and downloadable from the O'Reilly site.
The description reads
Neogeography combines the complex techniques of cartography and GIS and places them within reach of users and developers.
This Short Cut introduces you to the growing number of tools, frameworks,
and resources available that make it easy to create maps and share the
locations of your interests and history.Learn what existing and emerging standards such as GeoRSS, KML, and Microformats mean; how to add dynamic maps and locations to your web site; how to pinpoint the locations of your online visitors; how to create genealogical maps and Google Earth
animations of your family's ancestry; or how to geotag and share your travel photographs.
I am glad that Andrew pointed out Drupal as a potential player in the GeoStack he talks about. As he puts it, "[t]he GeoStack encompasses the entire life cycle of geospatial data, from capture to consume using a variety of tools, formats, and applications." It's basically a suite of applications and services that can all speak geography to each other, sharing information with ease using standard formats. As an example, imagine going out with a GPS, uploading that information about your journey to somewhere, that site being able to share its information with sites that are designed to aggregate similar information and then have that available on demand, filtered as desired, to other services that can consume the information.
Drupal can actually play a part in each of these layers of the stack*, from allowing users to enter location information, serve it out, aggregate it from other sites and also be a consumer of that data.
* or will be able to again with a little work to get the newly updated location module and GeoRSS module talking properly with one another again
Finding my first geocache
I went hunting for my first ever geocache today and found it without too much effort. There were a couple of little goodies in there along with the visitors log. I didn't take anything, but signed my name and left an OpenStreetMap badge to try and spread the word of open mapping to people around Stuttgart who have GPS devices.
My finding the cache brought on a long spell of very heavy rain - not a good thing when at the top of a hill in just a t-shirt! I did manage to walk 12km today though, most of it whilst drenched.
Despite only having the clues for the first cache, I went looking for a few more that were nearby. I got to the location of the first but after a little searching I spotted what looked like a syringe sticking out of the ground and gave up the search. Looking at the clues online later, it seems that the waypoint I'd downloaded to my GPS was just a starting point for finding the cache, so I was looking in the wrong place anyway. On my way home I stopped to find another and was within 50 metres or so of it, but the GPS wasn't working so well under tree cover and kept changing its mind.
Next time I go out geocaching, I think I need to take more of the clues along with me.
Smokers turn to geography
It's interesting to see at the moment that cigarette companies seem to be turning to geography to help market their products in Germany.
Camel is using advertising it's brand on Bus stops (see left, ignore reflections) using a tactic reminiscent of Multimap's advertising in the UK a few years back which made street patterns in London into shopping trolleys, computer mice, etc. In this case Camel have made a camel shape out of the streets and pen annotations on the map.
Meanwhile, Marlboro are advertising the chance of winning some cool looking new GPS navigation devices. Shame I don't smoke, it'd be nice to have one of those things.
I wonder what the sudden attraction to geography is for the tobacco companies? Is it things like Google Earth that have made their customers more aware and more receptive to maps and location?
Geo bits at CeBIT
A few days have passed since returning from my weekend visit to Hannover and CeBIT, and I'm nearing recovery from the night-travel induced sleep deprivation over the two days. It was a good trip, if only to learn how not to spend the day at large fairs - and that a day probably isn't long enough.
I was visiting the fair with a colleague, who, like me, was hoping to see all the new gadgets that had been hyped in the run up the event. What we didn't realise is that visiting a fair requires some planning before the event to make sure you can fit in the things you want to see as well as a good selection of the other stands. We missed out on a big chunk of the stuff we wanted to see having lingered for too long in the other sections. Seeing everything on display is not an easy task in an area that's almost half a million square metres in size, and it's unbelievably easy to get sucked in to the stands as you go along.
Personally, I was amazed at the amount of geo-related goods and services that were being exhibited - from data providers such as Navteq and Teleatlas, through handheld GPS, mobile phone integrated GPS navigation systems, in-car navigation systems like TomTom (this was probably the biggest share of goods, including many models from China hoping to take a chunk of the market) and a variety of other things. There was also a lot of information from government entities, from both regional and national mapping authorities in Germany and from other European countries. At some point I will attempt to wade through the German literature and find out what's going on in the geospatial world here in Germany.
Perhaps I'll write more about some of the exhibits as and when I get a chance, but for now, check out some of the CeBIT photos from PocketGPSWorld.com.
Mapping the Isle of Man on Openstreetmap
Back at the end of last year I bought myself a relatively cheap GPS unit - the Garmin eTrex personal navigator. I had wanted one for a few years and frankly it felt strange having gone through two related degrees, being interested in the area, and yet still not owning one of my own. For a long time I had felt left out, not being able to take part in things like Geocaching, easily geotagging my photos or helping expand open source mapping databases.
For the first few weeks that I had the device, I spent some time working out what situations it would work under - from being in the open, to keeping it in my pocket, to being surrounded by trees, buildings and even inside trains - and what sort of accuracy it could achieve. Whilst doing that I was also building up my database of waypoints around Stuttgart.
Christmas time came, and it was time to head home for a short break. It was interesting holding the GPS up to the window on the plane, seeing the acceleration as we accelerated down the runway. This was all experimentation though, in the lead up to my main plan of action for when I got back to the Isle of Man.
I wanted to drive as many of the island's roads as possible, taking tracklogs as I went, to allow me to add them to Openstreetmap, the open source database of streets around the world. It has taken me quite some time in the weeks since, but I've finally mapped just about all of the roads I drove (or at least the ones where the GPS was tracking). You can see the result by zooming in to the Isle of Man on the site.
The mapping of the Island is nowhere near complete (it's mostly the southern end that I concentrated on), and now that I'm back in Stuttgart, I want to see if I can find people located in the Isle of Man with a similar interest in opening up this sort of level of mapping to the public. Anyone with a GPS (and computer connection) can help out by driving some of the remaining roads, or even fixing areas of the map that I've inevitably not mapped as correctly as I would have liked to have done.
