Published by rwatstein September 27th, 2008
in Google and mapping.
Google has added the nation’s biggest public transportation system to its popular mapping service, showing travelers how to navigate New York City’s mass transit system. As of Tuesday, people looking up locations in the city get public transit options alongside driving directions. The feature includes information about subways, buses and commuter railroads. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and some other organizations already provide transit trip planners, but Google executives note that their version is integrated with other search features, such as street views and restaurant reviews.
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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008
in Google, mapping and Microsoft.
Microsoft will launch Worldwide Telescope, a tool for exploring images of the night sky, by the end of May, free to anyone who wants to use it, Microsoft’s chairman said recently. Worldwide Telescope is software that allows people to gaze at the universe through the data collected by telescopes all around the world — and above it: there’s even data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
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Published by rwatstein May 4th, 2008
in Google and mapping.
Elinor Mills writes: “Google has assembled an advisory group of oceanography experts, and in December invited researchers from institutions around the world to the Mountain View Googleplex. There, they discussed plans for creating a 3D oceanographic map, according to sources familiar with the matter. The tool—for now called Google Ocean, though that name could change—is expected to be similar to other 3D online mapping applications.”
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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008
in Google, mapping and United Nations.
Internet search giant Google Inc. unveiled a new feature for its popular mapping programs recently that shines a spotlight on the movement of refugees around the world. The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is working with Google on the project, said the maps would aid humanitarian operations as well as help the public understand more about the millions who have fled their homes because of violence or hardship.
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Published by rwatstein March 3rd, 2008
in Second Life, collections and mapping.
A new installation inside Second Life is bringing alive one of the world’s largest collections of antique maps. Called the David Rumsey Maps Island (registration required), the Second Life site is San Francisco map collector David Rumsey’s latest high-technology plan to share his collection with as large an audience as possible.
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Published by rwatstein January 26th, 2008
in web sites, museums and mapping.
“Get Lost is a collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one international artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw a map of downtown New York, uncovering a territory that is both real and imaginary. “Get Lost brings together fictional landscapes, utopian visions, private memories, and obsessive instructions to explore Manhattan, its past, present, and future.” Browse by artist. From the New Museum, New York.
Get Lost website
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Published by rwatstein December 9th, 2007
in archives and mapping.
The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers. Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific? “That’s the kind of conundrum, the question, that is still out there,” said John Hebert, chief of the geography and map division of the Library of Congress.
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Published by rwatstein December 1st, 2007
in Google, mapping and Wikipedia.
Google Inc., striving to sell more local advertising online, will allow users to add and adjust information in its Internet mapping service and share the changes with viewers.Users now can move home and business address markers if signed in to a Google account, the company said in a written statement. Google also plans to allow them to add new points of interest and change business information at a later date.
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Published by rwatstein December 1st, 2007
in digital, archives and mapping.
It the mid-18th century, teams of men spread out across Vermont to map the tractless wilderness. Measuring with long chains and other primitive equipment, they climbed mountains, forded rivers and slogged through swamps, dividing Vermont up into 251 towns and then dividing the towns into lots. Two and a half centuries later, those maps and their lotting plans remain valuable frames of reference for 21st century real estate deals. But many have disappeared or been hidden away in dusty vaults in town clerk’s offices from Massachusetts to Quebec. Now, the Vermont State Archives is using modern digital technology to give people access to those old maps from their offices or homes, putting them online to help lawyers, surveyors, landowners and historians to analyze ancient roads, boundary lines and titles.
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Published by rwatstein November 12th, 2007
in mapping.
A new startup called YourStreet is bringing hyper-local information to its users by collecting news stories and placing them on its map-based interface, down to the nearest street corner. While there have been many companies that combine information and maps, YourStreet is novel in its focus on classifying news by location.
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Published by rwatstein September 29th, 2007
in geospatial and mapping.
Understanding how people use online maps allows data acquisition teams to concentrate their efforts on the portions of the map that are most seen by users. Online maps represent vast databases, and so it is insufficient to simply look at a list of the most-accessed URLs. Hotmap takes advantage of the design of a mapping system’s imagery pyramid to superpose a heatmap of the log files over the original maps. Users’ behavior within the system can be observed and interpreted. This paper discusses the imagery acquisition task that motivated Hotmap, and presents several examples of information that Hotmap makes visible. We discuss the design choices behind Hotmap, including logarithmic color schemes; low-saturation background images; and tuning images to explore both infrequently-viewed and frequently-viewed spaces.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in Google, privacy and mapping.
More stringent and complex privacy rules in Canada would make it more challenging to roll out street-level photography there. The Canadian act appears to require consent in some circumstances, where individuals are identifiable in photographs, before publication. The act is broadly geared toward providing “Canadians with a right of privacy with respect to their personal information that is collected, used or disclosed by an organization in the private sector in an era in which technology increasingly facilitates the collection and free flow of information.” As a practical matter that would be impossible. Google has a process in place to request removal of images after they appear in Street View.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in geospatial, mapping and Virtual Earth.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency has selected Microsoft’s Virtual Earth Platform for its geospatial mapping applications. The combination of diverse capabilities and imagery appears to be what appealed to the agency. Previously, when the EPA sought to develop geospatial applications, the agency bought imagery from disparate sources to combine it with agency maps, often an intensely time-consuming and costly process. Virtual Earth provides not only three-dimensional city models and satellite and aerial imagery but bird’s-eye imagery, which gives users a unique 45-degree-angle perspective, a feature found only in Virtual Earth.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in web 2.0 and mapping.
The 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. We have done it again – and better. Upon popular demand – here is Information Architects Japan’s next Web Trend Map which takes the form similar to a subway map.
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See the map here (increase the zoom percentage to get a closer look at the details on the map)
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