A few people pointed out that in my resent post MapCruncher and the Stubaitalbahn my demo page did not work in IE8 beta 2. It does work in IE8, but you need to use compatibility mode. However I have discovered that many new IE8 users have not discovered compatibility mode yet! As I have not yet had time to fix the page properly, I wanted to force the page to always use compatibility mode in IE8.
Luckily I went to an excellent presentation on IE8 (by Travis Leithead) at ReMix in Brighton recently and I learnt that all you needed to do is to add this tag to the html:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
You can of course see this action on my MapCruncher demo page
So I survived the 80s party last night and enjoyed some great conversations and debates on Day 2. As before here are some of the highlights for me…
Charles Kennelly - ESRI
Charles did a bit of a defence of ‘traditional’ GIS. Although he stated that “Understanding mapping is at a historic high” he made the argument that “…understanding of GIS still lags behind”, saying that the neo-geographers are a “community that does not realise that this [GIS] is hard”. Of course ESRI can solve these hard problems for you!
He gave a demo of integration of GIS for Forestry into Outlook - a great idea as outlook is now the main tool many of us use on the desktop these days.
Stuart Hayes - Defence Geographic Centre
Stuart’s presentation was really interesting. I liked the idea of “forensic cartography” (i.e. reverse engineering a map to see how it was made with what data). There were some interesting approaches to data extraction from imagery and LIDAR for areas with little mapping (e.g. Afghanistan). The best quote was “Every officer now does to war with their own laptop, because they can’t take an MOD laptop out of the office these days”
Johannes Kebeck - Digital Globes
I just caught the end of Johannes’ presentation which generated a great deal of interest in Virtual Earth and the new features released last night.
Just released is version 6.2 of Virtual Earth Map Control and the new Virtual Earth Web Services. I will be blogging on the new features in detail over the coming weeks. There is some really exciting stuff.
Meanwhile heaps more information is on Chris Pendleton’s blog
I am a the AGI 2008 Conference in Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK. This is the annual conference for the UK based Association for Geographic Information.
These have been some highlights for me today…
Sean Phelan - Multimap founder
Sean did a great presentation on the history of Multimap and its sale to Microsoft. The interesting piece of advice was “Understand the economics” or you are doomed. Sean pointed out that there were very few economists in the GI industry, as compared to say the Telecom industry. Out of the AGI audience of 600 today there were none! We are doomed?
Geoff Zeiss - Autodesk
A great presentation on the value of truly 3D models. My favourite bit was the thought: “If you show something in 2D, you always have to explain it. If you show something in 3D people just get it”. His example was explaining to a mayor about a new development.
Andrew Hudson-Smith - MapTube (UCL)
Andrew did my favourite presentation today. It was great sideways look at the 3D modelling work they have done (the Virtual London Project) and MapTube. The highlight for me was seeing 3D London models within an Xbox 360. Cool! My favourite quote was “The world wanted 3D three years ago. Now Virtual Earth have done it” And the phonetic tongue in cheek change from London to Phuket after some licensing issues…
Your GIS is Dead…
And I managed to do my “GIS Is Dead” presentation without getting lynched. Phew… My slides are on skydrive.
One of the common problems with Web Mapping applications is that what end users regard as a place often does not match the ‘official’ place names in the commercial gazetteer data that web mapping services depend on for geocoding. For example in London everyone knows where “Soho“, “Bloomsbury” and “Big Ben” are, but in reality these are not official place names. These kind of unofficial place names are often referred to as “Vanity Areas”. End users rightly expect that there web mapping application will take them to these places, but if we rely on commercial gazetteer data alone this is not enough.
Sp how can we fix this? Well, Multimap have integrated GeoNames as an additional data source for address look-ups. You can see it in action not only on multimap.com, but also in the Multimap API.
From the Multimap blog:
GeoNames is a global geographical database that contains over 6.5 million places, with 2 million alternative names in up to 200 languages, that is continuously updated by users around the world, through a friendly wiki interface. Any changes are integrated into the Multimap databases within 24 hours.
GeoNames contains geographic places such as mountains, seas, lakes, valleys, coasts, and places of interest. In addition, it also contains alternative names so you can find a place like ‘London’ in many different languages (Londres, Londra, Londýn, Londain, Londinium).
A great example cropped up recently with a customer I work with. They had recently developed a new web mapping application and were demoing it to all their local sites. They knew that one local web master always tested mapping applications by searching for the small hamlet in which they lived in. This hamlet is so small it does not appear in any of the commercial gazetteers. So they added this hamlet to Geonames before doing the demo. When the web master saw the application and found their hamlet they said it was the best web mapping application they had seen!
It is also possible to integrate Geonames with Virtual Earth. Johannes Kebeck has done a blog post on this.
Tom Taylor has done a great post of “Eight ways to orientate yourself anywhere” . There are some unusual ones there. I love the satellite dish one, I had never really thought about that.
What’s this?
Answer is here (one of my favourite blogs).
John Mckerrell (an ex-Multimaper and creator of the Multimap API) has just released his MapMe.at application. This is really cool, it allows you to track your current location (and track where you have been) for geo-social networking. It uses 8 ways of tracking your location (including Fire Eagle). More info on how it all works is on http://blog.mapme.at and on John’s Blog.
It is good to see it uses the Multimap API!
I find it interesting the way web Mapping applications are now moving further and further into the world of GIS… People now come to expect a rich user experience form one of the web mapping services, but are pushing the boundaries with the analysis.
InLET (The Internet-based Loss Estimation Tool) is a great example where you can do earthquake modelling for a specified event (e.g. you choose the epicentre). It predicts the number of damaged buildings, injuries etc. You can’t get more hardcore GIS than that!
Is this the death of traditional GIS or a new renaissance? I hope to explore this further at AGI 2008.
This blog post is an interesting evaluation of the support of different mapping applications on Chrome and IE8. Chrome issues with SVG and Silverlight (not surprisingly!)
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