Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

The Russian government is reviving its Soviet-era project to create a navigation system that completes with the US GPS.

Three sputniks of the global GLONASS navigation system were successfully put into a pre-calculated orbit on Wednesday [26 December 2007].

The GLONASS system was put into operation for the Russian Defence Ministry in September 1993. It had a limited number of twelve sputniks. The system creates a continuous navigation signals space, allowing the most accurately determination of the coordinates and speed of seagoing vessels, air, land and other vehicles, provided with system receivers.

The orbital group was increased to the initially planned number of 24 sputniks in December 1995. However, due to shortage of finances, it was again reduced to a limited proportion. The GLONASS was declared as a dual-purpose system by the president’s order of February 18, 1999. President Putin instructed Roskosmos and the Defence Ministry in December 2005 to accelerate their work to restore the orbital group of the GLONASS system in order to make it even more applicable on the entire territory of Russia by the beginning of 2008 and to turn it into a global system by the end of 2009…

According to Engadget, we should expect to see the first compatible consumer device in mid-2008. By 2010, Russia will open the system up to the outside nations as well.

Given the growing importance of location-based systems in the future, governments around the world are trying to create systems to either compete or complement with the widely used GPS system — the EU develops the Galileo system, China pushes for the Beidou navigation system, and Russia builds GLONASS.

In a market-driven economy, competitions are usually for the consumers. But, I’m uncertain about the development of multiple navigation systems with isolated technology solutions. There is no doubt that governments pushing for their own systems are in the best interest of their national security and national pride. But, I’m worried that multiple incompatible systems will only create confusions in commercial product developments and hinder the speedy development of location-based technology.

LinuxWorld recently features an interview with Marc Wick, the founder of Geonames. In the interview, Marc revealed many interesting facts about Geonames.

GeoNames is a free and open source geographical database. Primarily for developers wanting to integrate the project into web services and applications, it integrates world-wide geographical data including names of places in various languages, elevation, population, and all latitude / longitude coordinates. Users are able to manually edit, correct and add new names with a user-friendly wiki interface. The data is accessible through a number of webservices and a daily database export.

Interesting facts about Geonames:

• Geonames data initially came from NGA, USGS and the worldgazetter. Today the number of sources has grown to around 100.
• Geonames API initially supports a single search service. Today its API has grown to around 30 different services.
• Prominent web sites use Geonames, including LinkedIn, BBC and Nike. Popular mashup tools like Microsoft Popfly and Yahoo! Pipes feature predefined Geonames modules for building customized mashups.
• The largest Geonames user base is in Spain.
• Geonames runs on PostgreSQL and Tomcat. Its search implementation is built on Apache Lucene.
• Geonames has a “marketing team” of 30 people — Geonames ambassadors, who help with questions regarding their countries and serve as local contact person for national data providers.
• Geonames’ core development team consists of 4-5 hard working engineers.
• The biggest technical challenge is getting data — the team has more liberal access to US Army data than to Europe or Australian “public” data.

Geonames is a great service in a niche market. It’s open source model will help the project to continue to grow and expand its user base. The structured data support in Geonames , publishing data in RDF/OWL, JSON and XML, can foster the next generation of web services for knowledge sharing. Without Geonames, the development of many geospatial web applications (e.g., gnizr, HeyWhatsThat and ongmap) would be extremely difficult if not impossible.

Spotted on: http://tinyurl.com/ysgbj2

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 now supports spatial data. This software is currently available under CTP (Community Technology Preview), which can be downloaded here.

Key features:

• Planar “geometry” type
• Geodetic “geography” type
• An extensive collection of methods to go with each type
• Spatial indexing

It’s good to see Microsoft SQL Server finally catching with other database servers that support spatial data. Here is a white paper that describes the new spatial data support.

Source: Isaac @ MSDN