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.

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

Google Street view is awesome. You can pan, zoom, and view street level photographs. Unfortunately, this service is only available for major cities in the US. If you want to see street views of Chinese cities, try city8.com (城市吧).

City8.com is Chinese web map service that shows street level photographs of major Chinese cities. The site also features some social web functions. Users can vote on popular city locations and recommend places to eat, shop and play.

A demo video (in Chinese) is available on the front page. Here is a view of the Beijing Tiananmen Square on City8.com.

Spotted on: Virtual China

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging web service. Micro-blogging services differ from the traditional blogging services in that they restrict the maximum length of a blog entry — e.g., Twitter blogs must contain less than 140 characters. Twitter is one of the hottest social web applications today.

Many mashups have been developed around Twitter. Here is a few interesting map-related Twitter mashups:

1. TwitterMap: displays latest twitter messages on a map based on the author’s physical location.
2. TwitterVision: an animated mashup that cycles through latest twitter messages on a map.
3. TwitterVision 3D: same as TwitterVision, except that messages are displayed on a 3D Earth globe.
4. TwitterWhere: given a location name and this service will return an RSS feed of twitter messages that came from the vicinity of this location.

I’m not an active Twitter user, but I enjoy playing with Twitter mashups. Reading random Tweets (Twitter messages) are actually entertaining. As the Social Web embraces micro-blogging, there is much to be learned from the world of Tweets.

OpenSearch is a collection of specifications that describe how search results can be shared between search engines and meta-search engines. A recent discussion thread on the GeoRSS mailing list brought about a debate over whether OpenSearch’s Geo extension is better than OGC’s Catalogue Service and vice verse.

OpenSearch was founded by A9 Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.com. It’s a widely adopted specification on the Web today. Popular web search engines implement OpenSearch protocols and service descriptions. Modern browsers like IE7 and Mozilla Firefox have built-in support for OpenSearch extensions. For example, when you enter the string (e.g., “sea”) in the Firefox’s Search Engine toolbar, the toolbar will automatically display a list of possible matching keywords (e.g., “sears”, “search engines”, “sears.com” and “seattle times”). This feature is built-on the OpenSearch specification.

Some people see OpenSearch to be a direct competitor of other Web service description languages and specifications, including CSW, OWL-S and WSDL. I would agree with this thinking only if OpenSearch were designed to solve problems that others are trying to solve. In reality, this is not the case.

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Yahoo! Mapmixer is a mashup service that allows users to overlay map images on the top of Yahoo! maps. Many people will find this service useful and fun because they can combine atypical map data with the standard street map and satellite map.

I played around with the Mapmixer and created a UMBC’s campus map.The service is relatively easy to use. No special GIS knowledge is required. There is one technical problem with the overlay function. The Mapmixer works great if the uploaded map image is scaled properly (e.g., Yosemite Valley Hiking Map) . If the image is a pictural map, for example, the resulting map will contain serious image distortion. This is case for the UMBC campus that I have created.

Intel announced a new research project called Mash Maker, which is aimed to help users to augment web page functions using mashup technology. The technical details of this project is still sparse. Nevertheless, from the available documentations, we can guess the basic capability of the service.

Problem Statement

There has been a lot of hype about mashups recently, and with good reason. Mashups are allowing us to transform the Internet from being a collection of separate website islands, into a unified intelligence in which knowledge from one web site can be automatically combined with knowledge from another.

But mashups have still not really penetrated the mainstream. My mother is not using mashup sites, and she is definitely not creating them. Even if there was a mashup out there that did exactly what she wanted, the chances are that she wouldn’t know it existed, and would be confused by it if she tried to use it.

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Recently The Economist magazine published two different articles that paint the vision of the future Web. In the first article — “The World on your desktop“, the author talks about how geo-browsers (e.g., Google Earth) and map mash-ups have changed the landscape of our internet ecosystem. In the second article — “The web: some antics“, the author describes a future Web that is built on metadata and semantic descriptions (e.g., RDF and OWL).