Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

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.

Central to the Semantic Web is a collection of RDF documents. Unlike the traditional HTML documents, RDF documents contain explicit semantic descriptions of Web resources (e.g., people, place and things). We all use web browsers to view HTML documents, but what do we use to view RDF documents?

A new site called zitgist.com is attempt to answer to this question. Developed by Frédérick Giasson at the OpenLink Software, Inc., zitgist allows users to browse any RDF documents on the Web and help them to navigate between resources that are linked in those documents.

In zitgist, RDF statements are display as groups of “tabbed” tables. When a RDF resource has nested resources, zitgist creates nested “tabbed” tables within the parent table. This is the typically behavior of RDF browsing. For some special RDF documents, zitgist plays a different trick.

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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.