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.

GPS is a technology that people in the modern world can’t live without. But what did we do before GPS? Professor John Lienhard answers this question in this episode of the Engines of Our Ingenuity.

Back in the 1920’s, without GPS, cross country flying was a real challenge. The US Government in 1926 began promoting a primitive but remarkable solution for aerial navigation. The project was to paint names of towns on roofs of barns, buildings, water towers, gas storage tanks, and hangers. Paint the letters ten to thirty feet high — black on a chrome yellow background. Include an arrow pointing to the nearest landing field.

Read the rest of this entry »

GeoSpatial Expert, a company specializes in developing software for GPS cameras and geotagged digital photos, announces the release of GPS-Photo Link 4.0 that add Google Earth functionality.

A key business of the company is selling GPS camera bundles. For example, their GeoExplorer Bundle comes with a GPS camera and software for processing geotagged photos. The GPS camera supports wireless communication over Bluetooth (i.e., receiving GPS signals from a Bluetooth GPS module).

As location-based technology enters the mainstream consumer market, I think we will see more wide usage of GPS cameras and applications of geotagged digital photos. Though I think many people (including me) would be interested to buy a set of those GeoExplorer Bundles, but I think its price ($3000-$6000) is a bit too expensive for an average consumer.

Mobile computing is a big market for GPS navigation. According to this IHT article, as the price of powerful mobile devices descreses, the demand for GPS-enabled mobile devices will increase.

Signal loss is a major problem for the existing GPS devices. In cities, tall buildings sometimes can break the links between the mobile devices and the satellies.

TeleNav is working on a new technology to solve this problem.

Hassan Wahla, senior director of business development at TeleNav, said
the system calculates where a user is and then - based on speed, as
determined by an internal accelerometer - indicates where the user is
likely to be whenever satellite signals are interrupted.

“If you lose signal while traveling under a bridge or because of a tall
building, you keep navigating,” Wahla said. “The entire trip is
downloaded in the first minute of a trip and is stored on your phone or
BlackBerry as you’re driving. If the GPS goes off line, you will
continue to be given guidance. It knows your last known location and
speed.”

Sometimes the easiest way to solve a network connection problem is by caching.