The first thing stuck in my head is the idea that Google is moving wholesale into the content business. They aren’t creating their own content, but they aggregate external content into a “walled garden” and encourage users to host content on Google properties, both actions ensuring that value remains solely exploitable by Google. For product and service folks this won’t matter much, but for people reliant on web content for their income the contraction of the web into mega-portals is definitely a business threat to be aware of. I personally worry that this business tactic may affect the vitality of the web in the long run. Case-in-point, with the recent launch of the real estate layer in Google Maps, realtors are incented to funnel their listings through Google Base rather than posting them openly on the web as GeoRSS or KML. This echoes the aggregation that is occurring in Google’s “Place Pages“, and is a worrisome trend.

The other thing stuck in my head is that stupid Sesame Street pinball counting song… actually I kinda dig it, which is probably why it’s staying stuck.

What I really want to do is to stop thinking about these things. I figured that maybe if I combine the two it will help me exorcise both demons, so:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 !!!!

-J

Apologies to the couple of people who were kind enough to report portable GIS bugs on the launchpad site, only to have their bugs totally ignored. I didn’t set things up properly, and wasn’t getting email notifications. I’ll deal with the issues and post a fix if I can, and now I am getting notifications, so if anyone else finds any issues do let me know. I also don’t know how I managed to lose my contact form, but it’s back now. Must have been pixies…

If you’re anything like me, you probably use the password reset function on websites more often than the login function. This is a huge problem, both for security and for user experience.

The City of Nanaimo recognized that as useful as the city’s web applications are, requiring citizens to remember yet another password is not reasonable. Early this year the city did an initial analysis of OpenID, and Jeff Jacob–one of my colleagues–took on the task of developing the infrastructure to support OpenID and one of the first applications to take advantage of it. You can read the everyman’s description of Nanaimo’s OpenID initiative along with links to the OpenID-enabled services.

While the majority of users probably have an OpenID account already, it would not be responsible to require citizens to sign up for an external login service. A mix of forms-based and OpenID login capabilities may have been easier, but it just made more sense for Jeff to implement a city-specific OpenID provider using the DotNetOpenID open source library. This allows Nanaimo’s application login class to be more streamlined while presenting a consistent user experience, but more importantly it allows the city to act as a provider for third party / COTS web applications as these start supporting OpenID. Eventually Nanaimo citizens will be able to log into all city services using a single ID of their choice.

It is gratifying to see that during the City’s implementation phase many other organisations, such as the US Federal Government, have been embracing OpenID. Allowing citizens to access services using their own credentials is a key part of Nanaimo’s longstanding policy of providing easy access to the information residents and businesses need to live and do business here.

If you work for a local government and are interested in sharing information and/or code, please get in touch with Nanaimo’s IT department!

-J

P.S. As always, I am writing from a personal perspective. Opinions here are my own, and are not necessarily shared by my employer.

To keynote or not to keynote… I chose not, so missed out on the triumvirate of ESRI, Ordnance Survey and Pitney Bowes and instead watched a series of talks ostensibly on “the GeoWeb” instead. By the time Andy Allen from Cloudmade finished his talk I felt like I’d been run over by an unstoppable OpenStreetMap juggernaut (in a nice way, you understand). I had a bit of an epiphany about their flexible data paradigm, after all, how could you tag a road in the West Bank as one-way if you’re Palestinian and two-way if you’re Israeli without it? More “Open” from John McKerrell from mapme.at, talking about the OSM alternative to Google StreetView, imaginatively entitled “OpenStreetView“. It’s at an early stage but promises a lot, and they are addressing privacy concerns quite nicely.

Martin Daly of CadCorp won the award for the most interesting title (Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria), and of course gets points for showing the actual clip from Ghostbusters where that quote comes from. The main thing I took away from his talk about neo and palaeo was that it’s all still geography regardless of what label you put on it, and that it should be about what’s good, not what’s new.

Brian Norman from Earthware did a great talk about creating applications for Real Estate and Travel, hampered only by the fact that he had to do a live silverlight plugin installation. I hadn’t really thought explicitly about the way Estate Agents would want to censor mapping data (showing you the nice park nearby, but not the nightclub). I also hadn’t considered their need for more detailed, up to date imagery to ensure that, as the visitor, you’re not put off by out of date pictures of half-built extensions, or the dreaded grey box telling you to zoom out.

Winner of the best presentation, as voted by the punters, was the BBC with their Story-telling on Maps. It’s amazing what you can do with the might of the BBC R and D department, and lots of help from the Ordnance Survey! To be fair, what they have produced is a very slick API for tying movement on the map to actions in a video, and it’s incredibly well presented. There was a collective gasp from the audience when they rotated a piece of raster mapping, and the text stayed at the correct rotation… (a gift from the OS and not something us mere mortals can do).

I thought it was a little unfair that the afternoon’s sessions from Ed Parsons and Peter ter Haar were changed on the hoof from simple back to back presentations to some sort of boxing match. Ed got to deliver the presentation he had prepared, whereas Peter had to ad lib responses whilst trying to give his own talk. Having said that, Ed’s demonstration of the idiocy of derived data was an absolute masterpiece and Peter didn’t stand much of a chance. This is a shame as he was trying to launch some fairly innovative (for the OS) new products including (finally) OS on Demand- a service based delivery system for data.

The concluding plenary put a lot of the previous presentations to shame. 15 and 17 year olds from Leeds Grammar School, along with two of their teachers, presented on the use of GIS within all aspects of their curriculum, not just geography. It really was great to see GIS being used so innovatively, and though there was some unease on the twitter back channel about the ESRI influence, that shouldn’t detract from their achievements.

On to the concluding remarks and prizes. Steven Feldman stepped down as conference chair, and seemed genuinely sorry to go. Everyone, in fact, seemed genuinely sorry to see the end of the conference. I think the organising team got the “community” aspect just right this time round, even more so than last year.

My own take on the trends from this year- OSM, all over the place, and in particular Walking Papers. The neo/palaeo debate, even amongst people who claimed not to care. Frustration about Ordnance Survey derived data and licensing. Twitter as a valid conference tool. All things beginning with geo. Roll on next year…

The AGI conference last week in Stratford-upon-Avon was well worth attending, with (I thought) a really good vibe and some great presentations. I thought the twitter feed, new for this year, was a real hit, as was the ability to see talks online via slideshare soon after they had been given. The twitter feed in particular gave you a chance to see what other people watching the same presentation were thinking, and occasionally caused some jealousy as people realised they’d picked the less interesting track!

Steven Feldman’s final introduction as chairman of the conference is probably a good place to start for a feel for how it went. Attendance was up from last year (600+), which was reassuring, given the financial circumstances, with a more international spread of attendees- great for a predominantly UK-based conference. He said it was no longer about “how” you did something, in other words using packages X and Y, but “why”.

The conference tagline was “Realising the Value of Place”, which is quite clever and multi-faceted. “Place” is not the same as “location”. It’s about asking why people feel happier in one place than another, and why life-expectancy differs between London Boroughs. “Value” can also be taken in a number of ways. There’s the value of a place, mentioned above, but also as an industry in a recession we need to learn how to get financial value from what we do, and controversially, how to get value from “free” (Steven’s term, not mine), as it’s not going to go away (Yay).

The two keynotes, from Peter Batty and Andrew Turner were also interesting. Peter described the current climate as a geospatial revolution, as the industry migrates from the more established mainstream technologies such as desktop GIS to more disruptive technology such as the web and crowd-sourcing. This was the first mention of OpenStreetmap, and in particular Walking Papers, but believe me it wasn’t the last…

Andrew Turner stirred the Neo/Palaeo pot (again not the last time this came up), but perhaps came closest to defining the difference between the two- as a shift from tool-centric to user-centric. Actually this ties in very well with Steven’s comments about moving from the “how” to the “why”, and also with Peter’s comments about disruptive technologies. I think the one thing that’s very clear is that it is a total mind-set shift, and people (or organisations) that don’t adapt or evolve will be become irrelevant. Someone asked the question “how do we make money from this?”, and again there is a total shift here. Massive license fees simply won’t work in a market where people know about crowd-sourcing, free data and micro-payments a la iPhone apps.

Surprisingly, the best paper I saw in the two days, and a deserved winner of the committees best paper, and a runner up for the attendee’s best presentation, was Robert Barr’s talk on Core Reference Geographies (CRG). I didn’t even know such things existed till then, though logically they should. From the UK’s Location Strategy these are: “Commonly used geographic datasets that provide a framework for linking and integrating other geo-referenced information as well as providing key contextual information”.The establishment of CRG in the UK have been talked about for several years, but only ever talked about, yet they should be absolutely fundamental. There needs to be a cost/benefit study for creating these CRG and making them available, and also an analysis of what it costs not to do it. Robert made the comparison between the CRG and other Core Reference datasets such as DNS. The same sort of funding method (pay for inclusion but not for use) could potentially be used to fund the CRG. The one negative point I had was the lack of reference to the spatial data themes talked about in the INSPIRE directive, as it seems to make sense to ensure that these (if mandated) are all core datasets.

Another stand-out presentation on Day One was on the historical development of “place” by Martin Laker. He talked about how current boundaries in fact have a heritage going back to the Black Death, and even earlier. Clearly the geography of the UK has always been tangled up and complicated (cf with the difficulty in setting up the CRGs), so all government has to do now is blame it on the Plague…

James Cutler from emapsite presented on the Geoweb’s cultural heritage (sorry, can’t find the link), but I got frustrated when he basically dismissed the problem of data licensing by saying that it’s not really all that expensive. It became clear to me that archaeology, and perhaps other environmental disciplines, have a use-case that is totally under-represented in the great licensing debate.

Day One concluded with the GeoCommunity Soapbox, a new invention for this conference. Speakers were given 5 minutes and 15 equally spaced slides, to talk about anything “geo” that they wanted. When coupled with a live view of the twitter feed and free geobeer this was a recipe for carnage and I think it’s probably good that the wifi (and hence the twitter feed) collapsed under the strain early in the proceedings. The best soapbox rant was definitely Ian Painter’s, now a veritable internet sensation.

General trends- lots of Neo/Palaeo discussion, despite exhortations that “I’m not Neo/Palaeo (delete as appropriate) but…”. This mind-shift clearly worries a lot of people, and the industry is in a process of change as it tries to re-position itself. OpenStreetMap and allied projects are definitely on the up. The back-channels (twitter in particular) were just as important as the presentations and the face-to-face discussions.

Day Two to follow…

While these URLs are certainly interesting, on closer inspection you can see that they aren’t exactly following Google’s established best practices for publishing dynamic web content. They can be reached by any number of URLs, and Google does not use the Canonical meta tag:

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/nanaimo/wallace-st/455/-city-of-nanaimo-city-hall

http://maps.google.com/places/455/wallace-st/nanaimo/-nanaimo-city-hall

http://maps.google.com/places/nanaimo/-nanaimo-city-hall

Not only does this mess up indexing, but it means that there is no common URL for things like Google SideWiki to latch onto for aggregating the comments made on these pages. For instance, you can see a comment at this URL:

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/nanaimo/-city-hall (or here if you don’t have SideWiki)

But not at this one:

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/nanaimo/wallace-st/-city-of-nanaimo-city-hall

It appears that rather than treating each place or business to its own unique hierarchical identifier on the web, Google is instead just parsing the URL for search terms, turning slashes into commas and dashes into spaces (mostly – special case for business names).

This is unfortunate, because if this hierarchical system was in fact in place, then this series of URLs would be very cool and spatially related:

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo/wallace-st/-city-of-nanaimo-city-hall

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo/wallace-st

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc

http://maps.google.com/places/ca

(most of these but the last give you what you’d expect, so I was initially fooled into thinking this was more intelligent than it looked for a while).

While there is lots of potential for Google Place Pages to be cool, as it stands it’s just a slight advancement on using mod_rewrite to turn your URL into parameters. As @ajturner said, they’re using the web, but not part of the web.

-J

Just a quick note to say that I’ve been away on holiday for a fortnight, in gorgeous Orkney in the far north of Scotland. A fortnight of absolutely no computers (apart from downloading digital photos), wandering around beautiful islands with sandy beaches (OK, mostly in the driving wind or pouring rain), visiting Chambered Cairns, drinking whiskey and generally chilling out. I have to say that I very much enjoyed disengaging from technology, information streams and general online interaction very much, so obviously needed the break! I’d post a photo or two but haven’t got round to QA-ing them all yet!

I’m off to the AGI conference in Stratford this afternoon, and would welcome the opportunity to meet up with folk while I’m there- we’re intending some kind of informal OSGeo UK meetup on Thursday but I’ll be around for both days. I’ll blog about the conference while I’m there if I get the chance.

As someone else said recently, the advantage of catching up on several weeks of RSS posts all at once is that you see some trends and relationships that you’d probably miss otherwise. One that caught my eye was this, from Martin Daly, in response to a long and thought-provoking piece on open source by Ian Bicking. Without trying to second-guess either Ian or Martin, it’s clear that there are always going to be different motivations for adopting and working with open source. Via a tortuous chain of links I revisited this post of Paul Ramsey’s from last year, responding to a Jack Dangermond interview, in which open source is mentioned and summarily dismissed. Paul is uneasy with the political connotations of calling open source a “movement”, but for some people that’s clearly what it is.

I’m beginning to see open source as being a choice similar to choosing organic food, or going green. For some people, this is a political movement. For others, nothing else makes any logical sense. For others, it’s a purely market-driven decision, and I’m sure there are many more motivations. The different camps don’t always sit nicely together, and occasionally see each other as harming the general cause. But we should all take heart from the fact that going green used to be the province of the yoghurt-eating, hemp-wearing hippies, but we’re all recycling and changing our light-bulbs to energy savers (and even eating yoghurt and wearing hemp) now.

They have launched with what looks like a couple dozen datasets (including orthophotography and other GIS data), with a custom license agreement.

This is a great start, and I understand that the folks at Vancouver are working on pushing out more data sets as rapidly as possible. Make sure to take their survey if there is something in particular you are interested in.

-J

I’m writing a short paper on what the open source geospatial space is going to be like in 5 years time. I’ve got some ideas of my own, but it seems apt (and would be mighty helpful) to seek advice/views/opinion from the community on this point. I’m particularly interested in the emerging trends that people see, and the impact that they will have on the acceptance and use of open source geospatial software in the more general geospatial “industry”.

Comment below, or use the contact form. Anything that I use I’ll credit.

Over a year after releasing version 1 of Portable GIS, and over six months since I started planning a new version, I’m pleased to announce the release of version 2! I’ve set up a Launchpad site to track bugs and answer questions, and there’s also a google group. Click here to download it, and if the download server creaks under the strain, please try again later!

The new version comes with a self-contained installer, the most up to date stable versions of all the constituent packages, a control panel, and much improved documentation. It requires 1.3GB of space to install in.

I am also pleased to announce that this release comes with the option of enterprise-level support, customisation and deployment, via provided by OA Digital. Please see this link for further details of this exciting new service.

Thanks to the Linfiniti Geo Blog, we get what has to be the most unintentionally hilarious article ever, about Oracle Xe.

It’s an open source blogger’s dream post (all quotations are direct from the article). We get fear-mongering about open source “maintenance, support, and security headaches”. We get limitations built in, ostensibly to make it “easy to install”. We get accidental admissions that “if you can reduce your EE license costs by even a single CPU, you’ve made your effort worthwhile”, and the crazy notion that we should “reduce the load on enterprise hardware” by installing databases on desktops instead. We do, however, get “A New Type of Support: The Community”, but beware, because “you won’t be able to create a Technical Assistance Request (TAR) for XE issues regardless of the support contract you have”.

It’s worth checking out some other posts by the same author, in particular this comparison between Oracle 10, PostgreSQL and MySQL, where he admitted that he was “strongly biased towards Oracle and fully expected no real competition”, and then found that PostgreSQL came out tops in his tests. Oh well, props to him for publishing it, I guess!

OK, OK, these articles were written in 2006 and 2005 respectively, and while pointing out the unintentional absurdity of this mindset is fun, it’s not big and it’s not clever. There are serious points to take away here. This article unintentionally highlights all the reasons why you should avoid the proprietary software model, like the need to put limitations in the products you want to give away for free so you can justify selling the fully featured versions at a much higher price. At the same time that it implies all sorts of bad things will happen with open source, it talks about a community for support (though not for real technical support, because that’s one of the limitations of their free product). We (in the open source community) can see that this model is broken, and that we have better products, better support, better community. As has been said elsewhere, what happens when everyone else wises up to this?

Recently I watched a video by Seth Godin that talked about how things are broken, which, as well as being really funny, made me realise that so many things are indeed broken. Take the firefox extension update process for example. I appreciate it letting me know extensions are available automatically, but when it finishes it leaves you on a window with a single button saying “continue”. Why? If that’s the only option, then why not simply “continue” without my input? If you’re expecting me to make a choice at that point then I need more buttons…

Anyhow, in case anyone was in any doubt that licensing of proprietary software is broken, then this is a great example of the sheer absurdity of it all. For those who don’t want to click on the link- once you license the software in one country, you can only use it in that language, whether you want to or not. Yep, definitely broken.

I think we did OK, but I definitely need to spend a bit more time polishing both my presentation and the slides next time.

Check out other great FME UC Videos on Safe’s user conference website. There is a lot of valuable videos, with case studies and technical presentations which will show you how your business processes could be improved by using FME.

As an aside, I count myself fortunate to live within driving distance to two of the best geospatial conferences in the world. In these times of tight budgets, I am incredibly grateful to be able to attend both the FME User Conference and GeoWeb.

-J

There is a lot involved in making a web map perform, especially if you are not leveraging tile caching. One part of the story is hardware, and I’m lucky enough to share space on a dual quad-core machine with 4GB RAM and relatively fast disk. Another part is proper generalization of the vector data for display; no point in carrying sub-micron precision on a map that will generally be displayed at 1:500 or smaller. And of course, there’s MapGuide’s inherent speed when properly configured. This leaves out one of the most important parts though: raster data.

Raster data is big, brutish and hard to work with, and optimizing raster access is often one of the most important parts of delivering a successful web map. Users have come to expect “satellite” imagery on their web maps, and complain when it doesn’t perform as well as Google Maps. One of the best ways that I have found of flipping and folding raster data is Frank Warmerdam’s FWTools, which wraps GDAL and some other utilities in a single easy-to-use package.

My starting point consisted of:

• 79 TIFF + Worldfile images, 10cm resolution, about 1.1GB each
• 14 TIFF + Worldfile images, 30cm resolution, about 600MB each

So, I was working with about 100GB of images, none of which were optimized for web-based display, and which did not contain the spatial reference information that the FDO Raster Provider (also based on GDAL!) works best with.

The first thing I did was set up a batch process to optimize the individual images. This involved three steps:

1. Obtain a correct .prj file containing the WKT spatial reference information for my images. The easiest place for me to get this was SpatialReference.org, but you might just have one hanging around.

http://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/26910/

2. Reprocess the image into a Tiled GeoTIFF, with no compression and a relatively large internal block size, and specifying the projection file obtained above. The caret (^) is the DOS line continuation character:

gdal_translate ^
-co "TILED=YES" ^
-co "PROFILE=GEOTIFF" ^
-co "INTERLEAVE=BAND" ^
-co "BLOCKXSIZE=512" ^
-co "BLOCKYSIZE=512" ^
-a_srs utm83-10.prj ^
infile.tif ^
outfile.tif


You can obtain more information on gdal_translate and the GeoTIFF options on the GDAL website. Depending on your source data and intended use, other values could be more appropriate, and you really should experiment.

3. Create internal pyramids in each image so that the entire image does not need to be fetched when zoomed out. This is one of the easiest performance gains you can get if you can afford the extra disk space.

gdaladdo -r gauss output.tif 2 4 8 16 32 64 128


Once this was done, I had a really decent set of fast images to work with, but these would only be appropriate to load at large scales when only one or a very few of the images need to be opened on each map view. For smaller scales, I needed to reduce the size of the images being processed, and also reduce the number of files being accessed on each fetch. I decided to go with a simple two-tier approach: Load the individual images at scales larger than some fixed value, and load a single overview image at scales smaller than that value.

The only problem was that I did not have an appropriate overview image. I wanted something that was relatively small, highly optimized, and which had white fill in its nodata areas. Fortunately GDAL and the awesome folks in the #gdal channel at freenode came to the rescue again, this time with four steps.

1. The first thing I needed to do was build a list of all of the images I wanted to have as part of the overview and feed these into the gdalbuildvrt command to build a single virtual image. You could do this manually, but I have the awesome GnuWin32 utilities installed so used these instead; they’re almost enough to make me not miss the days when I spent most of my time in Unix:

find images/ -name "*.tif" | xargs gdalbuildvrt -resolution highest all_images.vrt


2. Because I wanted a white background on my overviews, I then edited the all_images.vrt, adding a <NoDataValue/> section at the top of each of the three <VRTRasterBand /> sections:

<VRTRasterBand dataType="Byte" band="1">
<NoDataValue>255</NoDataValue>


3. The gdalinfo command gave me the dimensions of the virtual image, each of which I then divided iteratively to give me reasonable overview dimensions which I could feed into gdal_translate.

gdal_translate ^
-outsize 53120 14000 ^
-co "TILED=YES" ^
-co "PROFILE=GEOTIFF" ^
-co "INTERLEAVE=BAND" ^
-co "BLOCKXSIZE=512" ^
-co "BLOCKYSIZE=512" ^
all_images.vrt ^
all_images.tif


When this completed, I deleted the all_images.tif.aux.xml file because I did not want to carry the additional metadata that GDAL maintains in that file.

Careful with sizes here. If you’re using an application that supports it, you can specify the -CO “BIGTIFF=YES” option to generate files larger than 4GB, but you’re likely better off generating an intermediate level of aggregated and resampled tiles instead.

4. The final step was to once again generate internal pyramids to allow for better performance at small scales:

gdaladdo -r gauss all_images.tif 2 4 8 16 32 64 128


Once these two data sets were processed, I simply used MapGuide Maestro to make two raster data connections. For the first data connection, I added all of the individual TIFF images to a composite raster type, and Maestro generated a configuration document which allows MapGuide to know which image to access for a given extent. For the second layer, I just pointed to the overview GeoTiff. I then created layers for these, experimented until I found the scale where the overview image started looking pixelated, and set the layers’ view scale properties accordingly. There are some notes on working with rasters in the Maestro documentation.

More performance could probably be gained by having an intermediate level where the coverage area was aggregated into larger tiles before being combined into one large overview image, but for the initial launch this was deemed to have high enough performance.

On my production server, I’m lucky enough to have a fast, high-spindle-count RAID shelf dedicated to storing these uncompressed TIFFs, and they scream off the disk. My test server is VMWare-based, and disk performance and space are both at a premium. In this case, I still used the TIFF overview map, but at large scales I access a set of tiled MrSID files instead. This seemed like a decent compromise given the constraints, but did seem to thrash the CPU a bit.

GDAL was one of the first open source geospatial applications I tried (not counting GRASS and MOSS) and is constantly coming in handy, whether I’m reprojecting, adding spatial reference information to images, or converting between formats.

Thanks to hobu (Howard Butler), FrankW (Frank Warmerdam) and EvenR (Even Rouault) from the #gdal IRC channel on freenode for helping me work my way to this solution. Amazing support!

-J

This got me to thinking about the amount of work that the MapGuide project is leveraging every time you see a map. MapGuide directly includes about a dozen open source libraries. Many of these (such as FDO, GDAL, GD and Fusion) have their own stack of libraries that they depend on. With a bit of digging, I quickly ended up over 30–I’m sure I could have gone further–and this doesn’t even count the open source utilities such as GCC, Ant and SWIG that are integral to turning all of this code into something you can use.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that no matter how cool your code is, you’re really just the tip of the iceberg. We’re not standing on the shoulders of giants, we’re standing on the shoulders of thousands of regular people who have dedicated their time to help build this ecosystem. We have to make sure that we in turn enhance other projects where possible, and provide a solid base for those who come to build on our work in the future.

-J

If you’ve got a few minutes to play with it, please join us here:

NanaimoMap Beta

It’s in beta because of the issues that will likely be shaken out by more widespread use, and because we have not yet built out the layers and search functionality required to match our current MapGuide 6.5 ActiveX-based mapping portal CityMap. This will be completed before the end of the year.

Thanks!

-J

P.S. This application was developed by DM Solutions Group. We’re running Fusion 1.1 with the latest test build (r4114) of MapGuide. We wouldn’t have been able to launch–even in beta–without some last minute fixes by Trevor Wekel of OTX Systems and Haris Kurtagic of SL King. From a personal perspective, these guys are both amazing to work with, moderately priced for the value they offer, and are great resources if you’re stuck with a problem in MapGuide core that you can’t fix on your own. As always, the opinions offered on this blog are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.

Crikey, that’s the first time I’ve left it nearly a month between posts! At the moment it feels a little like one of those games you play when you’re a kid, and someone shouts “red” so you go and hit the red post, then they shout “blue” and you dash to blue, then they shout “red” again, then “green” really quick before you’ can catch your breath, and before you know it you’re stuck in the middle unable to move. So what, this happens to everyone, I know, I’m not looking for sympathy.

Many exciting things have been happening though! I’ve kept quiet here about our technical consultancy, OA Digital (though if you’ve seen me speak over the last year you’ll have heard about it), but we’ve been helping to provide open source advocacy services to the Welsh Assembly Government, at the invitation of Environment Systems and One Bright Space, and we’re working on some interesting web-mapping projects involving Roman Kilns, based on PostgreSQL, FeatureServer and OpenLayers, and Planning Applications, using MapGuide Open Source.

That doesn’t leave much time for anything else, but I am also at the final stages of readying Portable GIS version 2 for general release. It has been ready for a while, but I sent it out to some testers, then what do you know, PostgreSQL 8.4 and PostGIS 1.4 came out, so I’ve got some updating to do. The new version has a much swankier interface and a proper installer (with a 500MB exe to download rather than a 1GB zip file- that’s progress).

Finally, for “fun” and in my “spare time”, I’m also working through the GeoBI offerings and Geoserver/PostGIS versioning. There are some good posts brewing on those just as soon as I can find the extra hours in the day…

The internet search experience is constantly evolving. In the early days it was normal to search for a single keyword, be redirected to an authoritative website, and then explore that site to find what you were really looking for. As the search engines became smarter and publishers learned to expose their database records as individual web pages, people have learned to search for more specific information. For instance, searching for the name of a book will take you to an Amazon or Wikipedia entry for that book. Searching for the name of a current release movie will get you local show times and the name of the theatre it’s playing at.

Unfortunately, government has largely failed to recognise this change, and an entrenched tendency to develop stateful applications and portals is making the problem worse. As an example, try searching for US patent number 6368227. You will likely find a few results from ad-driven private websites that were re-publishing the government data, and maybe a broken link to the official patent search. Why bother publishing your information online if you are going to do so in a way that holds it apart from the web?

The good news is that fixing this problem is not hard. The search engines already assign a lot of authority to government sites, so you’re already a step ahead of commercial sites facing the same problem. Just follow a few simple suggestions that the rest of the web has already figured out for us:

• Publish each well-formatted record to a consistent location on the web that will not change. This allows both people and search engines to come back to these records whenever they want.
   
• Ensure that search engine spiders have a way of following basic hyperlinks to find this information. This can be either a simple paged set of results, or a more complex hierarchical system if the data allows.
   
• Generate SiteMaps that link to all of your records as cheap insurance to make sure that the search engines can find all of your content. Be careful to pay attention to the maximum size, and break your data up into multiple sitemaps if necessary.
   
• Make use of clear and logical metadata such as Title, Description and Canonical tags to ensure that both search engines and your prospective searchers can make sense of the results. Nothing worse than publishing a record with an HTML title like “32432-43A”. Nobody is going to click on that!
   

Do we still need to build applications? Absolutely! Sometimes free text search across the entire web does not offer enough granularity. Do we still need to make data and services available to third parties? Definitely! There are lots of smart people out there who can use our data to help make the world a better place. However, these are secondary to the single most effective way we have of giving citizens access to the data we maintain on their behalf. Our highest level of service can be delivered by being of the web, not just on the web.

Oh, and since this is a geospatial blog: Just because your data is in a GIS, don’t think you can avoid doing something about this. Spatial search is still nowhere near as powerful as general web search, but it’s getting better all the time. Government geodata needs to be published as web pages too.

For some concrete examples of the benefits of becoming part of the web, check out a slide show that I recently published as “Moving Beyond the Desk“. Make sure to turn on the speaker notes. If you don’t feel like watching the slides, just try searching Google for Mark Bate Statue or 2323 Rosstown Rd and see if you can find the City of Nanaimo’s data in the results. For technical information on the systems behind these results, see my previous posts on the public art project and the MapGuide GeoREST extension the City is using to publish property information.

-J

P.S. This post was prompted by James’ mention of the Moving Beyond the Desk slide show. Thanks James!

You can visit the Nanaimo Public Art Inventory on the City’s website, or view the art directly in KML (Google Earth) or Google Maps.

One of the neat things about this is that if you’re running Google Earth 5, you can see the Microsoft Seadragon AJAX zoomable images inside the KML pop-up balloons. Jessica had to jump through some hoops to get this to work properly in multiple versions of Google Earth and in Google Maps but I think the result is worth it. For this, she borrowed heavily from some of the techniques used by Sean Askay of Google Earth Outreach in his Map The Fallen application.

Here are a couple examples of the art pieces included in the inventory:

A Thousand Fibres (View as KML)

Admiral of the Fleet (view as KML)

Way to go Jessica, and the City of Nanaimo Parks Recreation and Culture department. Full press release available here (pdf).

-J

There have been a couple of announcements recently about marrying Business Intelligence Suites with Mapping- which all sound really exciting, though I’m still a little hazy about exactly what these olap hypercubes are, with their snowflake schema and other such nonsense important sounding things. Immature comments aside, I’m yet to be convinced of the advantages over a standard relational approach. I am, however, keen to understand the Geo BI offerings, as I think they could be key in persuading people in management positions of the real value and power of online mapping. At the moment I find it hard to evaluate the different approaches, so I need to spend some time setting them both up (reports will follow).

Similarly, via the antiquist list and All Points Blog, we hear about a Linked Geodata Browser for Open Street Map. Go to the APB post for the details, as reading the documentation sent me down a wikipedia rabbit-hole, again revisiting olap and his hypercubes. In this case, it’s not so much the drilling down through the dimensions of the data that interests me, though that’s mighty cool, but the RESTful interface that they have added. My experience of REST so far is limited to chapter 1 of the O’Reilly Book and dabbling a bit with Featureserver, but I like what I see (and I’m impatient to see the MapGuide Open Source REST extension too). Call me simplistic if you want, but I like the inherent “linkiness” of it all and I’ll keep paddling in the shallow water until I can take my waterwings off…

GeoNames Homepage Mai 2009

Today I would like to ask you for your preference for a GeoNames logo. GeoNames did not have a real logo for many years, till Alexander Torrenegra and his team from LetMeGo finally stepped in and designed some cool logo ideas.

Are you more generative than consumptive in your particular field? … Create more than you consume?

In open source, I often rephrase this question as “Are you a source, or a sink?”

There are many people in the community who contribute more than they consume. Organizations, individuals, etc. There are also many sinks in the community — since entropy is every increasing, this seems a forgone conclusion — and one of the key things that causes an open source project to succeed or fail is the number of sources or sinks.

I personally try very hard to be a source in all that I do, rather than a sink. One way that I do this is that I try very hard to always followup any question I ask — for example, on a mailing list, on an IRC channel, or what have you — with at least two answers of my own. This means that, for example, when I hopped into #django to ask about best practices for packaging apps, I stuck around, and helped out two more people — one who was asking a question about PIL installation, and one about setting up foreign keys to different models.

Now, in the end, my answers were simple — no one with even a basic knowledge of Django would have had problems answering them. But by sticking around and answering them, I was able to make up to some extent for the time/energy that I consumed from someone more familiar with the project, by saving them from needing to answer as well.

It is often the case that users trying to get help will claim that once they get help, they will ‘contribute back’ to the community by, for example, writing documentation. This never happens. Though there are exceptions to every rule, it is almost always the case that users who ask a question, prefacing it with “I will document this for other users”, never follow through on the latter half. The exceptions to this — or rather, the alternate cases — are cases where a user has already invested significant research, and likely already started writing documentation. Unless the process is started before the problem is solved, it is almost universally true — in my experience — that the user will act as a sink, taking the information from the source and disappearing with it.

I work very hard on supporting a number of open source projects that I work on. Though my involvement lately has been more hands off — by doing things like writing documentation instead of answering questions, acting as a release manager instead of fixing bugs, and so on — I work very hard to keep the karmic balance of my work on the positive side. I believe that this pays off in the long run — I have somewhat of a reputation of being helpful, which is beneficial to me since it means I’m more likely to receive help when I need it. I also work to keep karmic balance high on the part of the organization I work for, since many of the other people in the organization are less able to keep karmic balance high.

These rules don’t apply solely to open source — I have the same karmic balance issues going on in my work inside of MetaCarta — but I maintain the same attitude there. Coming in with the idea that it is okay to be a sink can lead to a nasty precedent. In the end, I think that everyone loses. Sinks — both in open source and other karmic ventures — will eventually use up the karma they start with, and be left out to dry. It is the case for more than one person that they have extended their information seeking without contributing back beyond the point where I am willing to continue to support their information entropy.

I joke sometimes about giving out “crschmidt karma points”. Though I don’t have an actual system in this regard, I do quite clearly delineate between constant sinks, and regular sources, and grey areas in-between. I try to stay on the source side, and I encourage anyone else to do the same — even if it’s only by answering easy questions on the mailing list, or doing a bit more research on your own. Expecting other people to fix your problems, in open source or otherwise, is simply a false economy of help, since in the end, it simply doesn’t work.

Thanks to the author of that post! Also, thanks to Google, since without it, I’d never have found it.

PowerPoint is a way to make gibberish look important.

However, after a set of discussions yesterday, I sat down and had a bit of a discusion about it, and Frank said that MrSID building in GDAL had gotten much easier. I didn’t really believe him, but I had the DSDK handy for other reasons, and reading the build hints, it was supposed to be easy.

Thinking I was going to prove Frank wrong, I started building. I did ./configure –with-mrsid=~/Downloads/Geo_DSDK-7.0.0.2167; confirmed MrSID ‘yes’ in the output, then make.

3 minutes later, I had a gdalinfo and gdal_translate built on my Mac with MrSID support.

My historical problems with MrSID are completely irrelevant: the effort in the new SDK to support more platforms has clearly worked, and I can say that building MrSID support even on the Mac is trivial. A big thumbs up to the LizardTech folks for their effort in this regard — and to people like Frank and Michael for egging me on into learning this about the DSDK in the first place.

After this, we sat down with MrSID and GDAL/MapServer to figure out if there were performance problems there. One thing we found was that the MapServer code drawing one-band-at-a-time means that there is a significant performance hit. In addition, some other performance enhancement techniques are being looked into at the GDAL level by Frank, thanks to the help of LizardTech developers participating in the sprint. He’s currently looking at improving the way that GDAL reads from MrSID, and was already able to achieve a 25% speed increase by simply changing the size of the internal GDAL buffer size for reading from MrSID to GeoTIFF. More documentation and experimentation is still in order, but there are some possible optimizations to investigate there for users of the library.

We then had a great dinner at Jack Astor’s.

Thanks to our sponsors for today: Bart van den Eijnden from OSGIS.nl and Michael Gerlek from LizardTech — performance improvements in MapServer and GDAL access for label drawing and MrSID are potentially big wins for many users of MapServer.

• Setting up the new OSGeo Gallery, which is set to act as a repository for demos of OSGeo software users in the same way that the OpenLayers Gallery already does for OpenLayers. We’ve even added the first example.
• TMS Minidriver support for the GDAL WMS Driver: Sitting down and hacking out a way to access OSM tiles as a GDAL datasource, Schuyler and I built something which is reasonably simple/small — an 18k patch including examples and docs — but allows for a significant change in the ability to read tiles from existing tileset datasources on the web.

Other things happening at the sprint today were more WKT Raster discussions, liblas hacking, and single-pass MapServer discussions, as well as some profiling of MapServer performance with help from Paul and Shark. Thanks to the participation of the LizardTech folks, I think there will also be some performance testing done with MrSID rendering within MapServer, and there was — as always — more discussion of the “proj strings are expensive to look up!” discussion.

Other than that, it was a quiet day; lots of work getting done, but not much excitement in the ranks.

We then had a great dinner at Baton Rouge, and made it home.

This evening, I’ve been doing a bit more hacking, opening a GDAL Trac ticket for an issue Schuyler bumped into with the sqlite driver, and pondering the plan for OpenLayers tomorrow.

As before, a special thanks to the conference sponsors for today: Coordinate Solutions via David Lowther, and the lovely folks at SJ Geophysics Ltd.. Thanks for helping make this thing happen! I can guarantee that neither of those GDAL tickets would have happened without this time.

For those who might not know, a code sprint is an event designed to gather a number of people working on the same software together with the intention of working together to get a large amount of development work done quickly. In this case, the sprint is a meeting of the “C tribe”: Developers working on the C-based stack in OSGeo.

After some discussion yesterday, there ended up being approximately 3 groups at the sprint:

• People targeting MapServer development
• PostGIS developers
• liblas developers

(As usual, I’m a floater, but primarily concentrating on OpenLayers; Schuyler will be joining me in this pursuit, and I’ve got another hacker coming Monday and Tuesday to sprint with us.)

The MapServer group was the most lively discussion group (and is also the largest). It sounded like there were three significant development discussions that were taking place: XML Mapfiles, integration of pluggable rendering backends, and performance enhancements, as well as work on documentation.

After a long discussion on the benefits/merits of XML mapfiles, it came down to there being one main target use case for the XML mapfile is encouraging the creation and use of more editing clients. With a format that can be easily round-tripped between client and server, you might see more editors able to really speak the same language. In order to test this hypothesis, a standard XSLT transform will be created and documented, with a tool to do the conversion; this will allow MapServer to test out the development before integrating XML mapfile support into the library itself.

I didn’t listen as closely to the pluggable renderers discussion, but I am aware that there’s a desire to improve support and reduce code duplication of various sorts, and the primary author of the AGG rendering support is here and participating in the sprint. Recently, there has been a proposal to the list to add OpenGL based rendering support to MapServer, so this is a step in that direction.

The PostGIS group was excited to have so many people in the same place at the same time, and I think came close to skipping lunch in order to get more time working together. In the end, they did go, but it seemed to be a highly productive meeting. Among some of their discussions was a small amount of discusssion on the WKTRaster project which is currently ongoing, I believe.

After our first day of coding, we headed to a Toronto Marlies hockey game. This was, for many of us, the first professional hockey we’d ever seen. (The Marlies are the equivilant of AAA baseball; one step below the major leagues.) The Canadians in the audience, especially Jeff McKenna, who played professional hockey for a time, helped keep the rest of us informed. The Marlies lost 6-1, sadly, but as a non-Canadian, I had to root a bit for the Hershey team. (Two fights did break out; pictures forthcoming.)

We finished up with a great dinner at East Side Mario’s.

A special thanks to our two sponsors for the day, Rich Greenwood of Greenwood Map and Steve Lehr from QPUBLIC! Our sprint was in a great place, very productive, and had great events, thanks to the support of these great people.

Looking forward to another great day.

This kind of thing is just a damn shame. Taxpayers should insist that this data is made available at reasonable reproduction costs; the policies of GIS departments to make money off of these things is simply silly so long as they are collected with taxpayer dollars.

(If the GIS department does not receive state funding, then I suppose this type of cost recovery makes sense — in the same way that Sanborn or any other commercial entity would charge for it. However, I doubt that the primary client of such data isn’t the state itself, in which case it’s still taxpayer dollars covering the costs somewhere…)

However, the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API has never gotten much love. I think that a preference for flash has always existed in the Yahoo! world; iirc, their original API was Flash.

However, I realized today that this tendancy to leave the AJAX API in the dust has resulted in something that seriously affects me: The Yahoo! maps AJAX API uses a different set of tiles, which has two fewer zoom levels available in it:

AJAX Maps: most zoomed in	Flash Maps: Most zoomed in

For the new OpenStreetMap editor I’m working on, this is a *serious* difference: although the information actually available in these tiles isn’t *that* much higher, it allows the user to extract more information by getting in a bit more, and to be more precise in placement of objects when using Yahoo! as a basemap.

Although it would be relatively easy to rip the tiles out, and create an OpenLayers Layer class that loaded them directly, this violates the Yahoo! Terms of Use. This is understandable, but unfortunate, because it means I can’t solve the problem with my own code.

What I would really love to see is more providers creating a more friendly way of accessing their tiles. I understand the need for counting of accesses, and the need for copyright notifications. If an API were published, that allowed you to:

• Fetch a copyright notice for a given area, possibly also returning a temporary token to use
• Following that, fetch tiles to fill that area
• Require users to copyright notice in such a way as to make Yahoo! and their providers happy

This would allow for building a layer into OpenLayers which complied with this, without depending on Yahoo! to write a Javascript layer that did these things for me.

Now, it’s understandable that this doesn’t happen — having the client out of control of Yahoo! means that they can’t *enforce* that the copyright is displayed prominently, as they are able to (to some extent) with their API. However, I think that this type of API would allow more innovation, and possibly even a *more* prominent placement for Yahoo’s copyrights and notices. For example, in many mapping apps, the bottom inch of the map is not seen much by the users. If there was an API to get text to display, then an application could display the text in a more prominent location, rather than burying it under many markers or other pieces of text that might overlap it.

In the short term, all I really wish was that the AJAX API used the apparently-newer set of satellite tiles that the Flash API appears to have access to. I think the fact that this isn’t currently possible leads to an alternative access pattern for tiles, one which may make more sense in the long run, where tiles can be used by an application without necessarily running in the constrained Javascript API that these providers have the ability to write. And of course, if you want to provide your users with a ‘default’ API to use, you can always use OpenLayers, and extend it to include your own extensions…

In prep for the OpenStreetMap Mapping Party this Saturday and Sunday in Somerville, I was working on printing a big map to bring with me. A friend at the Media Lab was gracious enough to help me out.

Using Mapnik, it was trivial to produce a large — 29750 x 29750 pixel — PNG image. This was designed to fill up the 49.5″ by 49.5″ printer space at 600 dpi.

The printer prefers PDF, PS or TIFF. I was able to take that PNG and convert it to a TIFF — but the resulting tiff was DEFLATE compressed, and the printer help only mentioned LZW compression. I decided to fall back to trusty GDAL to try to fix this. I found that the imagemagick-converted TIFF had one giant block — and GDAL was not pleased with this at all. (Its internal un-blocking scheme doesn’t work with compressed tiffs.)

Thanks to a suggestion from Norman Vine, I was able to use the ossim image copy program (icp) to convert this giant tiff to a tiled tiff which gdal could easily read: icp tiff_tiled -w 256 image2.out.tiff image.icp.tiff. Once I had done this, I recompressed the tiff using LZW compression with GDAL: gdal_translate -co COMPRESS=LZW image.icp.tiff image.lzw.tiff, and was able to upload the 3GB image to the printer.

All in all, took a bit more than I was expecting, but I’ve got a 4ft by 4ft map to bring to the mapping party this weekend. In the process, I also got to wanting magnification in Mapnik… which is amusing since just 24 hours before, I’d read a thread on the MapServer list and couldn’t imagine for the life of me why such a thing mattered.

Looking forward to showing the map off to local OSMers at the mapping party!

A week ago we had to take down the subdomain ws.geonames.org that we use for the free web services. The server was flooded with requests from iMob an iPhone application that has gone viral and become one of the most popular iPhone applications. It is currently number one in the free games section. There were too many connections attempts that blocking the requests by their user agent did not help and we had to disable the domain completely to get the service to work on an alternate sub domain.

To avoid a complete knockout by a single application we have now defined a list of alternate subdomain, that we are not going to publish to make sure an offending application is not using all subdomains and bringing down all application using the free services.

Drop me an email if you want to get one subdomain name you could use for your application.

IPhone applications are particularly nasty as they are not coming from a single IP address, it takes some time to get a new release approved by Apple and moved into the App Store and last but not least it takes time for all users to upgrade to the newest release.

Edit 10. March, Remark: The subdomains are using the same physical hardware. For better response time and higher availability use the commercial services.

Walter Rafelsberger from MODUL/University Vienna/Department of New Media Technology is using GeoNames for some interesting and beautyful geo visualisation projects.

Twitter Conversations

The twitter conversation map shows where people talking to each other are located.

Twitter Weather Map

For the Twitter Weather Map the location and weather information twitter users are posting is parsed and visualised:

GeoNames cities over 1000/5mio

GeoNames cities over 1000

We have updated our database of geotagged Wikipedia articles and increased the total number of articles to 1.2 million up from 800′000. The most popular language is still English with 170′000 articles (up from 137′000) followed by Dutch with 107′000 (up from 67′000). Fifth is “Volapük” a language I have to admit I have never heard of before. It is a constructed language derived from English and German. Most articles in Volapük, which literally translates to ‘world speak’, are stubs created by wikipedia bots.

The number of entries for German would have decreased hadn’t it been for our merging the previous parse result with the newest parse. The decrease is mainly caused by wikipedians who develop bots to alter established templates into new templates. The new templates are used only for a minuscule fraction of articles. This trend seems to show that while the wikipedia approach works well for unstructured textual data it does not work so well for structured data.

Wikinear

An application quite popular in the Blogosphere these days is Wikinear. It is a very simple application for mobile phones that makes use of some interesting new technologies and web services : OAuth, Fire Eagle, GeoNames and the Google Static Maps API.

The GeoNames web service client for java has been released in version 1.0. The release includes the following changes and additions :

• implemented children and neighbours service
• throw exception if a field is accessed that has not been set due to insufficient style parameter
• add adminname1 and adminname2 to Toponym
• fixed a couple of minor bugs
• added and improved documentation
• support for username and token for authentication
• client failover to alternative server if the main server is not accessible. The failover server will be used for some minutes before the client will automatically try to switch back to the main server. This is a simple and efficient approach to achieve high availability for an application.

The Semantic Web, the web of data, is coming of age and making it recently into main stream news coverage. GeoNames was among the first to offer a geographical ontology and RDF web services and GeoNames is also part of the Linked Data project. The Linked Data project brings together data from public sources and builds a web of open and free data where data sets are interlinked with each other. Geographic concepts are referred to using the GeoNames URI with the unique GeoNames Identifier the geoNameId.

[Image : Projects involved in the Linked Data project (Feb 2008, Richard Cyganiak)]

Tim Berners-Lee has written an interesting blog posting about how a misquote from the Times interview spread over the web and could not be stopped. (He also mentions GeoNames.)

GeoTree is a new hierarchical toponym browser for GeoNames. It allows to drill down the continents and the administrative divisions of a country in an explorer like fashion. To the right of the tree view a map shows the toponym selected. An outstanding component of GeoTree are the flags and coat of arms displayed with most administrative features. The coat of arms are from the wikipedia Blasons (heraldry) project. Moving the mouse over the name of an administrative division will not only focus the map, it will also display a larger version of the coat of arms.

The GeoNames balloons are linking to the respective GeoTree representation of the toponym. GeoTree is using the GeoNames hierarchical webservices.

GeoTree is developed by Christophe, GeoNames Ambassador to France. Jan and Bernard are helping with the svg representation of the coat of arms. Check it out.

We have added two new country codes to our database : Saint Martin and Saint Barthélemy both of which are French overseas collectivities in the Caribbean and have previously been part of the French overseas department Guadeloupe. In 2007 they seceded from Guadeloupe and have received the ISO country codes MF and BL (ISO Newsletter PDF).

Saint Martin : MF, MAF, 663 (FIPS : RN)

Saint Barthélemy : BL, BLM, 652 (FIPS : TB)

Saint Barthélemy is named after Christopher Colombus’s brother Bartolomeo. It was a Swedish possession before being sold to France and it’s capital Gustavia bears the name of King Gustav III of Sweden. The Arrawak Indians called the island “Ouanalao“.

The island Saint Martin is separated into a northern part Saint Martin, a French overseas collectivity, and a southern part Sint Maarten which is part of the Netherlands Antilles.

A commercial version of our popular web services is now available to everybody. The commercial web services offer faster response time and higher uptime than their free siblings and come with two types of service level agreements. We recommend that professional users and mission critical applications upgrade to this premium service.

The GeoNames web services are incredibly popular and the growth rate is amazing. We regularly serve over 10 million requests per day. Donations, however, don’t keep pace with this increase and we will have to limit the number of requests per IP address on the free servers to be able to keep up with the exponentially growing demand. By the end of February this limit will be 100′000 credits per IP address and by the end of March it will be 50′000 credits. Luckily we have an alternative for heavy users with the commercial web services announced above. The credits policy accounts for the fact that not all web services generate the same load on the server. For most services a request equals one credit, some reverse geocoding services are more expensive whereas others like gtopo30 are less resource intensive and cost a fraction of a credit only.

Spot Image, a leading provider of satellite imagery, are making a fantastic offer. Spot Image are teaming up with GeoNames to help improve the availability of free geographical data and offer high resolution 2.5m satellite imagery for automatic feature extraction.

Features that we think can be extracted from 2.5m imagery are city contours, airports, streets, shore lines, lakes, rivers and others. We believe this is a fantastic opportunity for researchers and student-works to find algorithms for feature identification and extraction. Drop me a line for more details if you are doing research in this area and would like to work on this challenging task.

Contact : Marc Wick, marc@geonames.org

The data extracted from satellite imagery will be made available through GeoNames. Up to now GeoNames was exclusively focusing on point data due to the lack of good and free vector data. The extracted features will allow us to provide vector data and we will be able to include shapes of cities and other features into the GeoNames database. It will be a gigantic step forward for the availability, quality and coverage of free geographical data on global scale.

[Image : Spot Image Quality ZoomifyViewer Casablanca, Morocco]

Spot Image, based in Toulouse (France), are providing satellite imagery to GoogleEarth and they are selling images to professional and private users. If you are looking for images of a particular area you can use this gallery layer on GoogleEarth to view and find relevant images. As an example the 2.5m image from 24. Sept of Barcelona.