Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

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

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.

November 7th, 2006 is the day for the U.S. mid-term election. On this day, people across the country will exercise their rights to vote and choose their representatives. With advanced GIS technology, this year you can view election competitions on digital maps.

1. Election 2006: Competitive House race (from MarketWatch.com)
2. Google Earth Election Map (see it in your Google Earth application)

Additional election coverage can be found on CNN and the U.S. Depeartment of State websites.

BTW, people have dreamed about an election mash-ups a year before. From Copia in Oct. 2005,

With all the talk of Web mash-ups, I wonder whether anyone has any sort of site or tool for overlaying elections district information over mapping services. I suppose one big problem is that there isn’t much commercial prospect for such a service, but surely this would be a prime candidate civic service mashups, funded by government or philanthropies. Another question is whether districting information is available in computer-readable form regular enough for inexpensive implementation of such overlays.

The Web has made people smart. It allows the everyday people to discover, publish, and share information. The Web is a profound technology not only because it allows the display of pretty pictures and the layout of well-formatted texts, but also because it’s a technology that everyone can use.

Like the Web technology, geospatial technology should also be developed for the everyday people. The key is to help everyday people, not just few groups of elite techno-geeks, to do more by doing less.

So, what’re those useful geospatial technologies? Many speakers at the Where 2.0 conference have talked about them.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. daddytypes.com: a Google Maps mashup that shows all known New York City men’s rooms with baby diaper-changing tables. This mashup was featured in a recent New York Times article.
2. Kayak Buzz: a Google Maps and Kayak mashup that tells you where you can go for under a certain amount of money? It displays airfares under a user defined amount of money on a Google Map.

I always believe that geospatial technology will find its way into consumer products and services one way or the other. When you see people begin hacking iPod to display maps, you know the time has arrived.

iPod-iWay is a powerful step-by-step directions saving tool that will export online driving directions from results by Yahoo Maps and import them into your iPod Photo.

Source: iPodiway — Yahoo Maps on Your iPod

For those who only use Google Maps, here is a manual way to put Google Maps onto your iPod.

In the past, when the term “geospatial” is mentioned, people immediately think digitial maps. Today most people think Google Maps and Google Earth when the same term is mentioned. To me, seeing mapping technology as the sole component of geospatial technology is a nearsighted vision.

Geospatial technology is more than just pretty maps. A recent IDC study shows that the spatial information management industry is undergoing radical technology changes, which is likely to impact many IT ecosystems.

Fundamental shifts in the spatial information management industry
include basic changes in the nature of geospatial work, and transitions
in the broad IT environment toward easier integration and support for
business processes.

The study finds that geospatial data, and not the map, has
become the raw resource for creating location-specific information.
Therefore, efforts to convert paper maps to digital data have been
replaced as geospatial data is used to generate new maps, decisions,
and automated processes.

Let me take things one step further. I think a wide adoption of geospatial technology in IT is only the begnning. Some of the most exiciting applications in the future will be the ones that exploit geospatial semantics, not just geospatial data.