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| Map your world - the Geoweb |
November 17, 2008 |
NEW Backbone TV Geoweb video >>
 The Geoweb is remaking mapping, the Web and perhaps your own corporate Web site
By Ian Harvey
When Samuel de Champlain arrived in North America in 1603, he started sketching a map of the St. Lawrence River and kept at it for 30 years, cataloguing and detailing the terrain of the New World.
Today we still look back in awe at those early maps, with their awkward perspective and annotations, complete with sketches of local aboriginal peoples he encountered on his voyages and in subsequently founding Quebec City. His contribution, however, wasn’t based on altruism: it was strictly business. If the riches of New France were to be carried back to Europe, then successive parties would need a road map to where those treasures lay, how to get at them and how to get them to port.
Some 400 years later, maps are still crucial, and the industry is entering a phase when services like Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth—mostly novelties until now—will become powerful business tools. They may even change the way we see the world.
It’s not just that the satellite images of Google Earth and Virtual Earth are sharper, more accurate and accessible from the street level up, it’s also that rich data and details are being incorporated. These new Geographic Information Systems (GIS) let us do and see things we never could before. Coupling that with search technology has spawned a new iteration: the Geoweb.
Until fairly recently, GIS has been an area left to governments and large enterprises who have the resources and the mandate to create data around topography, said Ron Lake, considered a grandfather of the geospatial industry and the inventor of the Geography Markup Language, a standard for the Geoweb in the same way XML is for the Web. Thus, the federal government would map the country, noting everything from forest density to ice packs.
“Today, we’re seeing that information created by a wide variety of sources, from people walking or driving with GPS devices measuring things like air or soil quality, to professional mapping from space,” Lake said. It is this constant stream of data that is building the Geoweb, in the same way that individual pages built the original Web.
Blank canvas
According to Ryan Storgaard, strategy manager for online services for Microsoft, much of this technology has existed for awhile. Large retail chains have long used GIS data to determine the best locations for new stores, and realtors were early adaptors. Realtor.ca maps homes for sale; the American company Redfin goes beyond this by adding links to neighbourhood information such as age, income and family size, how local students fare on testing standards and the area’s crime rate. Beyond that, there are the locations of doctors, dentists and specialists, and even anecdotal stories about homes and their famous or infamous owners.
Similarly, London, Ont.’s iLookabout has been working in the GIS space since about 2000 and is steadily building a customer base that includes the Detroit Real Estate Board. Its lead product is StreetScape, a visual tour of a neighbourhood at street level that lets prospective buyers get a virtual feel for the area around a house.
iLookabout creates these views by driving along streets with cameras that capture a 360-degree view every hundred metres or so, something both Google and Microsoft are also doing.
“It’s also useful for insurance purposes because you have an archive of a neighbourhood and houses before an event,” said Jeff Young, a co-founder and CEO of the privately held company.
It’s that kind of blank canvas for opportunity and growth that created much of the buzz at Lake’s annual Geoweb conference in Vancouver last July. Along with the discussion of what can be done now and what could be done soon, there were also poignant questions around who ultimately owns all this data and whether it should be governed by the private or public sector.
Big money
The race is on to commercialize GIS on a mass-market basis, with Microsoft arguably holding a lead. It plans to converge offerings like SharePoint and SQL Server with Virtual Earth, to develop a Web service platform that customers and partners can pay to play on. And that payment may be as little as $200 a year; for that, businesses can post data to Virtual Earth. More complex, proprietary and sophisticated users would pay more.
 Microsoft also plans to take the ongoing 3D capture of images from street level of major cities and offer it to Xbox game developers, suggesting the next Grand Theft Auto could be set in the real neighbourhood of your choice. Even Flight Simulator is going to integrate with Virtual Earth data, while other concepts from Microsoft Research include Mapcruncher, which allows PDF maps of transit systems or hiking trails to be “crunched” over a virtual map, and Photosynth, which takes a multitude of pictures shot by any number of users at ground level at a specific location and stitches them into a detailed tapestry. This will allow Virtual Earth users to walk through a location like St. Peter’s Square in Rome.
Other examples include the Joint Emergency Planning and Response System (JEPRS) from Infusion Development. It’s a real-time disaster management console that links existing GIS data with new information coming from personnel at a location. Kelowna, B.C., recently signed on for the JEPRS service.
In an urban setting, GIS layers can drill below the streets to find utility lines that may be at risk in the event of disaster, or sewer pipe that could carry toxic run off. These systems also integrate local weather data, to see if Mother Nature will be of assistance or merely add to their woes.
Until recently, buildings have just been grey blobs on maps or satellite images. This is changing as Building Information Models (BIMs) are built. These data sets encompass geographic information, spatial data and information on a structure’s systems. This data can then be used in the event of evacuation or fire.
This kind of detail can also help city planners and area residents when they consider how a new proposal might impact a given neighbourhood, Lake said, since they’ll be able to view the development before it’s built, along with other projects that may still be in the construction stage, all via public platforms like Google Earth and Virtual Earth.
“It’s important to know where shadows fall and the effect of reflected sunlight on another building’s HVAC system,” he said.
Thinking outside the map
Among the businesses likely to be early adopters of GIS are retailers and restaurants; Starbucks is creating detailed 3D interiors of its locations using TrueSpace, a Microsoft authoring tool, and almost any business could do the same.
Virtual Earth users searching for “sushi” in Toronto, for example, may get a tidal wave of results but might be more intrigued by locations offering a virtual peek inside. Similarly, retailers would be able to contract a local developer to build a 3D model of their store, with their seasonal offerings front and centre. A small town with an historic Victorian main street could use some of its tourism and promotional budget to create high-resolution street views and stores could offer interior tours.
Even large corporations could leverage GIS as a public relations tool, Lake said. Take the Alberta tar sands: developers could post images of how they plan to rehabilitate the open pit sits once they’re exhausted, or post images of their environmental protection and restoration projects.
“There isn’t a business today which would not have a Web site,” Lake said. “It will be the same for GIS.”
The convergence of storage space, bandwidth, software and high-resolution imagery is literally spawning a new window on the world and along the way the GeoWeb is evolving into a Wiki, figuratively and literally: check out wikimapia.org. This will all feed into a more intimate relationship with the planet, allowing anyone to track the erosion of the Arctic ice pack or the movement of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” the 100-million ton vortex of trash the size of the continental U.S. floating in the Pacific Ocean.
Far beyond the novelty of pointing PCs at a location anywhere in the world and zooming in, often getting within 200 feet and being able to circle around it like a bird, or looking up our childhood home or school, the GeoWeb is starting to tug on something deeply wired into our DNA. We need not wonder, as Champlain did, what is around the next hill or across the ocean, we can simply look it up. Still, when we do, there will be the joy and surprise of discovery, because you never know what you’re going to find when you get there.
Pointing out interesting places
Have a favourite biking route? Found the perfect place for a picnic? Want to know where the nearest CIBC ATM is? Or just want to share your neighbourhood with the world, pointing out all the cool places and unique stores?
With GPS fast becoming ubiquitous—on your mobile phone, built into your car dash or as a standalone device from companies like Garmin or TomTom—people are increasingly adding customized Points-Of-Interest to mapping systems.
Most of the navigation devices on the market come with some POIs pre-loaded, usually locations that have paid to be placed on the overlay or others that are of general interest, such as major tourist attractions.
Customizing POIs is as simple as uploading a file to your device from a PC. Most newer GPS devices have this capability, but unfortunately there’s a Beta/VHS war going on over standards, so check to ensure you’re getting the right format for your device.
 You can also buy POI collections or lease them via subscription, but as there’s no substitute for free, start your search at www.poifriend.com, a Canadian site out of Oakville, Ont., which has more than 25,000 registered users with 7,000-plus POI groups sharing their favourite places. There’s also www.poi-factory.com, based in the U.S. Both are free, either labours of love or posted by savvy corporations who want to help their customers find them easily. You’ll find listings for all the Tim Hortons in a given area, banks and gas stations by brand, but you’ll have to pay for premium files such as locations of red light cameras and speed traps.
Googling the oceans
What other mysteries will GIS data unlock before our eyes?
For the first answer we don’t have too look far: Simply gaze at the night sky with the myriad stars and the moon shining down. Both Google and Microsoft have launched deep space browsers—Google Sky and Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope—and they work in a similar fashion to their terrestrial counterparts.
Instead of combining satellite images with images shot from low-flying aircraft and ground-level cameras, they link to the databases of the world’s largest observatories and the European Space Agency and NASA’s own images, shot by spacecraft orbiting Earth. Software organizes the images according to their position in the celestial sky and then opens up the heavens for viewing.
And the final frontier? The ocean. Google Ocean plans to take the same Google Sky concept and technology out to the seven seas. It’s still the one area of this planet we know the least about. The images will be pulled from oceanographic institutes around the world and, while it won’t be a complete map of the sea bottom, it’ll grow as more scans become available.
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