Out of the UK comes a company called OpenStreetMap - they are using volunteers with GPS devices to collect location data. It makes sense. The real challenge is ensuring controls on the user supplied data. How is the data verified and how is it protected from vandalism?
http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39164006,00.htm
http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!7573.entry
3D maps is out the door and lets you view 3D perspectives of land and cities using the mouse, keyboard, or an Xbox 360 Controller for Windows.
With the navigation control you can view cities and streets from different heights and angles. Latitude, longitude, and altitude appear in the lower-left status bar of the browser window. A scale bar in the lower-right corner of the map indicates the distance from your viewing point to the objects below you.
The most important aspect of a locator is the ability to locate the closest store/dealer. If the mapping tool you are using isn’t current and doesn’t place the store/dealer location on the map at the address level then some systems will default to the center of ZIP code. This can provide false information to the user and misguide them, which typically isn’t what you want in a locator. If you think about it spatially the center of a ZIP Code could be miles from the actual street address of the store/dealer location so you could be telling a customer that the location is close to them when in reality it is much farther. Or the opposite could be true and you could be telling the customer that you can’t service them when in reality you can. In this case the search radius didn’t capture the ZIP Code centroid so the results would not show a store/dealer that is very close to the customer. For anyone contemplating a store locator, it is very important that your data be clean. If the locations aren’t in the right spot on the map then the ROI is devalued and the user experience is poor. Having locations wrong on the map can also lead to increased costs because customers will call and complain or worse go to a competitor who can provide them a quality experience the first time out of the gate.
Great story about the private sector using non-classified satellite imagery to validate North Korea’s nuclear test claims.
http://www.leesburg2day.com/articles/2006/11/02/loudoun_business/biz68geoeye110106.txt
Article here about a cellphone that snaps pictures of maps instead of using something like GPS.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn10416&feedId=online-news_rss20
GIS means Geographical Information System and it involves software and data that describe a physical geography.
In a regular database, there are fields that hold different types of information. Some hold numbers, some hold strings of text, some hold dates, etc. But regular databases don’t directly know anything about geography.
So if I have a table of cell sites, a regular database doesn’t have a data type to hold the coverage. We can use two fields (latitude and longitude) that hold numbers to store the coordinates of a cell site. These two fields only describe a single point. They do not describe the coverage boundary.
Just two numbers, a latitude and longitude, are required to describe the cell site. So, if you have a 1,000 cell sites, then you might have a database table with 1,000 records with the two fields plus any other data that you need about the cell sites. This is simple. But with a coverage boundary, each bend in the boundary requires a node, which is another latitude/longitude pair.
Therefore, a single cell coverage can have tens of thousands of nodes that describe it. When you consider multiple signal levels, multiple types of coverage, and thousands of cells, you can see the amount of data that the GIS has to manage is huge.
With each cell’s coverage potentially varying so much, you can see how GIS data is highly variable from row to row.
Contrast this with a traditional database – a database that is highly ordered and defined. Even with millions of customers, a billing system’s data can easily fit into traditional databases. The very nature of GIS data makes the data storage/retrieval/calculation issues more significant because you want to do “things” with that information. In a coverage application, some of those things are:
• draw the object (define the cell coverage); • compute the coverage area • understand what retail stores fall within the coverage; • calculate how many miles of interstate highway fall under the coverage; • define an exchange boundary to file certain FCC reports.
Remember, this is just coverage. Consider the myriad of other types of data and the uses: ZIP codes, county boundaries, Public Safety Answering Point boundaries, census, election boundaries, etc.
GIS has traditionally been heavily used in a workstation environment. With large datasets, the full power of the CPU and memory is required to process the data. For web based applications, I’ll call the GIS a “transactional GIS” because the applications tend to be more transaction based rather than analytical.
Some of the things that make a transactional GIS different from more traditional transaction systems are akin to what makes cellular different than AM radio broadcasting.
While the cellular industry makes wireless communications seem simple, the amount of engineering required to make it work is significant. If you think about how wireless works (multiple channels, hand-offs, capacity planning, terrain, roaming, etc.), it is easy to be amazed at the level of effort needed to simply make a phone call.
In a lot of ways, GIS is similar. No one really cares how it works, but that it just should work.
This is where SpatialPoint comes in. We have been working with applications for wireless carriers (engineering, customer service and marketing) for many years and we are familiar with the issues.
As a business, SpatialPoint is focusing on large transactional mapping applications. While we do GIS, most of the applications we build are consumer orientated rather than scientific or analytical. The word “consumer” doesn’t mean “simplistic” but rather scalable and easy to use.
To build “scalable and easy to use” we use an approach for clients that reduces risk because a large part of the computational effort and data effort is performed elsewhere and, therefore, we don’t have to worry about how many servers are required to handle the base maps, geocoding and routing. Planning is required to handle your application, data and how the system will be used and loaded, but because the licensed map content (MapPoint) is not priced by the server or processor, the cost to add a new server is much less than some other systems.
In other words, if the scope increases or the load estimates are wrong, the costs for scaling by adding hardware are not astronomical. Microsoft has produced a great web service that we all benefit from.
Finally, we take the long view of a customer relationship and we feel this will be a platform for many other applications.
http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=25696
Thanks to the addition of better GPS, Microsoft has improved functionality in their travel and mapping software. Improved GPS will give users more confidence in the data they are using.
Great article in Wired about MapQuest and the competitive mapping world.
How do the “maps” know the right directions, or which streets are one-way?
One answer is customer participation. Some companies do barter deals with locals – giving reduced rates to merchants who will edit its maps.
“We’ve had projects with pizza-delivery companies where we’ve printed out for them a big wall map of their 30-minute delivery area. The guys mark things that are wrong and send it back to us,” says former GDT president Mike Gerling, who now heads Tele Atlas’ North American division. Navteq, too, is enlisting individual users and plans to sort through the masses of comments and feedback it gets by giving priority status to the geekiest, most frequent customers.
The downside of customer participation is covered by an article in TechDirt titled if the map is wrong, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
“Online mapping services have proven to be very popular, and the technology that can produce accurate driving directions on the fly is definitely impressive.
But there are still gaps in the technology, and if you every ge badly burned by inaccurate directions, it can really shake your confidence in a given service. And though the technology will improve, it will still make mistakes. Now Tele Atlas, one of the largest providers of map data, is asking users to help it identify mistakes. So if it tells you to go left at the junction, and you should’ve gone right, you can let it know. This is a good start, but who’s going to remember to go back to the site and let the company know about a mistake after the drive is over? The real breakthrough will occur when reporting an error can be done easily, perhaps through an on-board navigation device. No solution will ever be completely perfect, but blending technology and human awareness should, over time, make these services much better.”
Here is a great article by GeoSpatial Weekly that talks about the impact of location intelligence on process improvement. The survey polled 1,700 executives worldwide to gauge the role that technology can play in delivering business-relevant location intelligence. According to the results, which were released by MapInfo and BusinessWeek on Wednesday, 64 percent of business executives believe that location intelligence can improve business processes. And 21 percent plan to investigate how such intelligence can impact their organizations within the next year.Location intelligence combines software, data, services, and expertise to enable an organization to detect patterns, risks, and opportunities that customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and business intelligence (BI) overlook. Approximately 80 percent of data that an organization uses to make business decisions has a location-based component. Optimizing such information as ZIP codes, telephone numbers, and/or addresses can help companies answer critical questions about the location of customers and competitors and identify the places where their products and services are most valuable.
