randomosity

Faced with finding a place to live in Dublin, I decided to quickly attempt to create a mashup of potential properties mapped throughout the city. This is, I sense, an increasingly common sort of mashup. But when I did a quick scan, I couldn’t find anything that accomplished this for the area I wanted. Yes, you could plot each place manually in either the My Maps section of Google Maps or create a KML overlay for Google Earth. Viable, but I wanted a tool that would allow the list to be dynamically generated and capture the list current to when I was looking at it. I would note that many sites have their own spatial displays, and there are a lot of mashups involving craigslist, but none for me and the Dublin scene. The site I was using to look for rental opportunities is daft.ie. It’s got a great search engine, and it will map your selections on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) listings in the area of the listing you have chosen. You can additionally select a particular agency and have their listings plotted on a Google Map, but this was not quite what I wanted. My objective was to create a custom search, take the detailed results, identify the location, geocode it, and then pipe it into Google Maps. In concept simple - in practise subject to the vagaries of daft and the tools used.

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The HKL Helsinki’s Public Transit has a moving, real time map of bus locations available via their website. Now that’s what the public wants to know. Where is my bus? Why its right there. That’s what real time GPS reporting is for. I love this. You can even click on the bus icon/number and choose to display its routes, the stops it makes and make the connection you need. You can even choose to ‘follow’ the bus and have the map scroll with its progress. It is most fun if you do this in satellite or hybrid view (note: the buses don’t run 24 hours, so if there are no buses on the map, they aren’t on the streets either, so check back later).
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Why are we fascinated with the intersection of time and space??

A couple posts this morning caused me to take a step back and consider this larger question. I am fascinated with the visualization of the relationship between time and space. I used GIS tools kludged to allow for change over time in my MA work on hotels in late 19thC Guelph. Things have since evolved in wonderfully new directions. Visualizations have become increasingly rich in animation, detail, and creative approaches to adding two non-flat, non-static dimensions to flat and static media
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One of the more intriguing social networking applications that I have been enjoying over the last year has been Plazes.com. I blogged about my initial experiences with this spatial addition to the social sphere. Plazes uses your cyberspace IP to place you in physical space. If you are at a previously defined Plaze, then you are pinpointed. If you have discovered a new place, you supply some info about the place, refine the location and it is stored for future reference. You can discover if there are other plazers in your nearby space or plazes that have been recommended and you can also get a Traze (a spatial and temporal indication of where you have been over time). You can also use your mobile phone to plaze yourself or to find nearby plazes. The system works, is a hoot to use and you can even provide a little map to your blog readers showing where you are in real time –-> see my own sidebar.
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This one could also be called…another great time waster…but it is well done. FlickrVision uses streaming photo posts from Flickr that have locational references. It displays geo-referenced popups of the images as they are posted to Flickr. Hovering over a popup will display a large image of that photo for appreciation. If you are looking for the kooky, eclectic, or for the occasional flash of brilliance, check out the site. rather like StumbleUpon with a geo-twist.

I have mentioned the Exhibit project out of the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Enviroments (SIMILE) lab at MIT. Their Timeline project was one that I immediately was interested in. It takes and XML of JSON feed and creates a graphical animated chronological timeline. I threw 450 events from the life of Napoleon at it for fun and was quite pleased with the results. A couple months back they introduced Exhibit which allows a user to quickly and efficiently display a JSON dataset in a variety of flexible formats including searchable tables, Goggle maps, and the Timeline format above. Or as they state:

Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.
It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.

The beauty of this scheme is that it is a client side framework and approachable by anyone wishing to share their data and requires little knowledge of javascript or the like. Its quite robust and extensible. In fact, over the past week, the developer added scattercharts to the mix and the framework continues to evolve very quickly. In fact, the developer has been soliciting comments on users needs for future development. There’s a very active development community growing around this product.

Am trying out the Plazes service. I am still plugging away with it, but from what I can share, it has found me and I am here:

There you go. Have embedded same in my header, but like all the little baubles and doodads I have overloaded the header a bit. I will tweak with this, but kind of like the little locating service, as I am always very confused about where I am … now even I will know. What this pace for further mods.

Johan HolmbergThe Probabilist has a very interesting way of looking at one’s lifepath. He describes a way in which we can envision our self-improvement as a topographic map, or as he posits a topography of existence. His blog “links probability calculus with personal development,” and seems to do much more at times. The concept of seeing one’s lifepath from topographic perspective immediately suggests that if you can adopt this perspective, you can be in a position to appreciate numerous possible paths and trajectories rather than remaining focused and possibly trapped on a single linear route-based one. His example of envisioning oneself on a hill or plateau defined by current dietary or income-generating assumptions, but able to scan adjacent or even distant hills with differing definitions is quite apt. I now have a certain mental picture of myself on this vast schematic terrain…I wonder how you see your world after reading his thought-provoking article.

As Google officially released new versions of SketchUp! and SketchUP! Pro, bringing them to a 6.0 release, it reminds me to recommend these to those intrigued by spatial visualisation. I have been using SketchUp for the last few years and when Google acquired @Last Software, there was the usual concern over how the product would develop. Presumably Google needed useful 3D mass modeling software for the work they were doing with another acquisition, KeyHole, that they were using for their new Map initiativeand eventually as the re badged GoogleEarth.

Since that point we have seen the wonderful integration of user contributed models to the Google Earth community and the possibilities of wonderful ‘minds forever voyaging’ in wonderful virtual 3D. The model warehouses implemented were quite cool and have prospered in the last year. With the 6.0 release there are a variety of useful steps forward, most primarily concerned with closer integration between products and the ability to create some useful offline print-based presentation materials as well.

***Special Note: With this release, Google has sponsored an education-focused contest Build Your Campus in 3D! Prize is an all expense trip to the Googleplex and lessons from the SketchUp! masters.***

The entry level product with most of the functionality is absolutely free and is possibly one of the most amazingly simple pieces of software to use. You can actually work in three dimensions in an incredibly freehand way. One of the most amazing things about the product (of a huge number) is the inclusion of jitter to the drawing tools. Instead of having lines end at perfect squares, and thus look machine rendered, lines appear freehand drawn, with user-defined amounts of jitter in the lines themselves. The effect must be seen to be appreciated. I found an immediate use for this capability is drawing charts for presentation, and using this freehand feature. What I believe these charts gain is a certain sense of familiarity/informality that is combined with a still perceived sense of precision. I would posit that this actually lends additional credibility to the presentation of data.

In conclusion I also wanted to mention that the user tutorials available at SketchUP! are some of the finest I know and they can have you up and creating amazing three dimensional buildings and other objects right away.

One of the software engineers at Google Book Search has posted examples from his group’s experience in creating their own mashups. They created mashups from the places mentioned in particular books. As he states, he moved to New York and was in the gradual phase of getting his bearings and made a connection between what he was doing and where he was. Even more profoundly the mashups result from a connection between the context of the works being catalogued (ofter imaginary worlds, but nonetheless disembodied worlds) that have some reference to the real world in which he found himself. This in a pervasive realization and falls very much down the idea of traveling in history as well and the impetus for my own NapoleonicTourist concept. David Petrou was cycling to work past specific places which were noted in the works that he was indexing and by noting them on maps he made a concrete connection between the work and the real world and further is establishing his own sense of what his community means to him. To me this has far reaching consequences that build on Kevin Lynch’s work with mental mapping and communities to, in a sense, extend these through perception more known than seen aspects of your own neighbourhood. The ability to convey this added context has the potential to change the perception of visited locales as well by enhancing the experience and directly tapping into the way in which we perceive our immediate surrounding and augmenting this through this connection of place to context.

Check out the Travels of Marco Polo for a great example of a geographically broad application of their mashup technology.