May 19th, 2008
Great story in today’s New York Times about maintenance/repair issues with subway elevators in the New York City Transit system. Umibot finds this interesting because it draws attention to the hidden world of attribute data. While spatial elements (station points, entrances, routes, etc…) are valuable, attribute data allow users to act on information–hours of operation, are elevators in operation (today), real-time scheduling/routing, parking facilities, etc…Last week we announced our mass transit initiative, and lots more about that coming soon…
Great Flash graphic showing elevator entrapments and downtime.
Tags: gis, musings, spatial data, subway map, transit data
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November 9th, 2007
Rafe Needleman’s Webware offers a concise overview of UMI’s neighborhood database product.
Tags: geodata, geospatial, gis, maps, neighborhood database, neighborhoods, neogeoghraphy, panamap, pressworthy
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September 19th, 2007
News from the National Weather Service that is sure to get (geo)data-wonks excited…
From the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Adminstration (parent agency of NWS), the current means of tracking severe weather events is done in the following manner:
…The NWS currently issues and disseminates warnings for tornado, severe thunderstorm, flood and marine hazards using geopolitical boundaries.
As of 1 October 2007, this system will change to something new:
Storm-Based Warnings (threat-based polygon warnings), are essential to effectively warn for severe weather. Storm-Based Warnings show the specific meteorological or hydrological threat area and are not restricted to geopolitical boundaries. By focusing on the true threat area, warning polygons will improve NWS warning accuracy and quality…
You may want to ask Umibot “what’s the big deal?” Some graphics from the Storm-Based Warnings (NB: press release to follow on 10/01/07) illustrate this:
On the left, the county is used as the unit of measure–this means if a predicted storm path touches a county boundary, the entire county will receive an alert. This is especially cumbersome in some Western states, where counties can be extremely large. Deploying emergency resources (first responders, food, supplies, etc…) and alarming the public when not necessary could prove and expensive proposition.
The image on the right highlights the new approach: “threat-based polygons” might sound menacing, they are no different from what the NWS currently uses with a key exception: the granularity has changed such that the unit of measure is now the municipal boundary.
From UMI’s perspective, what is interesting to note is that NOAA prediction accuracy did not drive the Storm-Based Warnings program–there are meteorological (and related) advances that help officials understand patterns of severe weather, and that is independent from presenting those data. Because prediction science has become more accurate, a smaller unit of measure (ie, municpal area) can be used. From this perspective one could say predictions were ‘hiding’ behind the larger unit of measure (ie, county).
Umibot likes these kinds of stories because they play directly into his (or her?) sweet spot–the design of data. And this was the focus of a talk Ian gave last year on the very subject.
The analogy for local search is clear–data should drive the use case of an application. If one is going to offer an application that allows for (say) mobile search, will a user have the granularity that is needed to have a meaningful experience? An example here is “restaurants in San Francisco”–mobile means you are, well, mobile, on the go, and a city is (probably) not a meaningful geo-constraint. Something more granular, like a 2 mile radius (if the device is location-aware), cross street, or neighborhood will likely be more satisfying.
Tags: design of data, geodata, gis, local search, musings, national weather service, nws, polygon, storm tracking
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June 28th, 2007
UMI’s Ian White will speak at GeoWeb 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, July 23-27, 2007. His talk, Web-based GIS or GIS-based Web?, will address how neogeographers have changed consumption habits of spatial data.
Tags: conferences, geodata, geospatial, gis, local search, maps, neogeoghraphy, pressworthy
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June 7th, 2007
A several weeks ago we posted a few thoughts about the death of the ZIP code. There’s a lot more to say from the geo-perspective on local search, and here’s some more fodder…
To give any data a geographic context, it must be spatially-referenced to the Earth. Geographic information systems (GIS) serve as a means of referencing this information. Within the context of local search, addresses, city boundaries, postal codes or other geographic data must be ‘translated’ from human terms (690 Fifth Street, San Francisco) to latitude and longitude, ie, machine terms (37.775429, -122.397314). This geocoding process allows databases to recognize human-language requests. To geospatially reference (say) a postal code, one would expect that area to be spatially-defined. When a user searches for (say) “coffee in 94107,” the ZIP code should serve as the geographic constraint, searching within this polygon. Correct?
Wrong! A variety of reasons are to blame for why the logical doesn’t happen: most obviously, ZIP codes were defined as letter carrier routes. They were not meant to serve any other purpose. As such, the ZIP may not even conform to what you expect–one side of a street, one floor of a multi-story building or one-half of a block may not be fall within what postal code you expect. In fact, many parties claim to use a ZIP code database in fact obtain this info from a sister governmental agency, and these boundaries are stylized representations of the USPS data.
More to the point, these stylized boundaries are likely not used. Instead of associating (say) 50 latitude/longitude points to define a the postal code boundary, technical optimization says one point is sufficient. The analogy here is reducing a novel to a word–in the context of local search, granularity matters, and using the mathematical center of a polygon serves to distort and misinform a user’s search. In practice, the centroid is used because it is more efficient to calculate than the actual shape. Reducing the contours and nuances of a small area to a point, often with a radius drawn around it, effectively makes all postal codes look like circles. Gaps and overlaps are formed, further distorting the expected reality for a user.
Graphically this can be represented with the ZIP code boundary and circle (with the center serving as the centroid). The circle includes area that is not shared with the postal code area and vice versa. A user searching in this ZIP will therefore not be returned all the relevant listings. Some will argue this is a technology issue, but from the above example, it clearly more of a mindset–getting product managers to think about the how and why of data will go a long way.
Tags: centroid, gis, local search, musings, neighborhood database, polygon, usps, zip code
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May 16th, 2007
Surprise! Yahoo! Maps is going inhouse with its own map server. This is after 5+ years with Telcontar, aka deCarta. Some new changes out today and apparently more in the works.
Thanks, Adena.
Tags: dds, decarta, geodata, gis, local search, mapas, maps, spatial
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May 3rd, 2007
Umibot feels that many readers won’t bat an eyelid over this, but my master feels strongly, so I must be a good slave and report…
The original idea was to have a Top Ten list, but frankly there aren’t many moves worthy of the Power Move moniker, so we will instead post them when we think of them.
Our favorite is AskCity’s draw-your-own-polygon and search within. There’s no hiding the fact that this take some serious geo-skillz to implement. To hell with ZIPs (or neighborhoods for that matter)–draw your own boundary!
This screen grab shows an area being drawn near UMI’s offices. As it is late morning, we are always hunting for new lunch spots in this half-industrial/half developed part of town.
This grab shows results–presto!
Tags: askcity, asklocal, geodata, geospatial, gis, IAC, local search, map api, maps, musings
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April 29th, 2007
Ever since Ian immersed himself in this entrepreneurship thing, he’s spent a hell of a lot more time thinking about maps, geodata and all that goes along with it than he thought possible. The Panamap resulted from a fascination with an odd printing technique and mass info-complexity. The digital products UMI currently develops came from sheer need to *do* something. The ah-hah moment came sometime in 2005 at an Internet travel conference.
While carrying around one of the few remaining copies of the Panamap, somebody asked if the company had the neighborhood data in digital form. It wasn’t too long after that Ian began saying, “It’s the media, stupid.” Whenever people ask how the company was started, we return to the weary map. Their next question is “what happened?” to which the only answer is, “some people believe print is dead.”
Within that comment lies the interest–as a society, we have begun a generational period of shifting to a digital age. It will be another 15-30 years before we are really there–ebooks are nice ideas, but adoption is marginal at best. This isn’t going to change any time in the near future. The tactile is a fundamental to our experience. A conversation with Ted Stout got me thinking along these lines.
In a recent column in Metropolis Magazine, Henry Petroski argues that the printed book will endure because, well, because it has:
Still, the book is probably here to stay. Its resilience underscores what I call the power of maker tradition and user expectation. Proponents of electronic books argue that bound paper as we know it will eventually be replaced by newer technology, but that’s not likely to happen in the foreseeable future. The fact that some early e-books were designed to mimic the traditional reading experience by being about the same size as conventional titles and containing “pages” that “turn” emphasizes a kind of unwritten law of maker tradition: when replacing one technology with a newer one, the latter must resemble the former as much as possible.
Similarly, printed maps aren’t about to go out of style. The segment of the population that cries out for a techno-embedded solution is in the minority, but as in many other areas, the vocal minority (in this case the Digerati) expresses its will, somehow injecting this perspective.
What the Panamap can provide is a useful way for people to embrace interactivity without a chip (note to the Digerati: yes, interactivity can exist without silicon). Our excitement in this media stems from the fact that the user controls the nature of the engagement; the interactivity is directly controlled by a user, not an external interface (mouse, pointer, keyboard, etc…). The simplicity of the interface allows us to focus on a goal-seeking activity, not a process-oriented one.
Tags: geodata, gis, information design, map, musings, neighborhoods, panamap, roi institute, urbanware
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April 27th, 2007
Ian’s panel at the SXSW conference last month got him thinking on a post-modern GIS stream of consciousness sort-of-thing. The idea is this: everything whose location can be known will be known. Costs have fallen, technologies have evolved, and ubiquity is near. This mean the value and importance of attributes will continue to increase–tying location to metadata that is related to some asset–will broaden the appeal of spatial awareness. A simple example is the Empire State Building. We all know (or rather we can know) where it is. What we don’t know is hours of operation, handicap accessible entrances, admission fees to visit the observation deck. Tim O’Reilly riffs on this with the idea that Data is the Intel Inside.
Tags: data, geodata, geospatial, gis, inside, intel, map, metadata, musings
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April 23rd, 2007
Fabien Girardin will be dropping by UMI this Friday for a lunchtime show-and-tell. He’ll give a version of his CHI presentation, “Bridging the Social-technical Gap in Location-aware Computing.”
Here’s the abstract…
Building ubiquitous applications that exploit location requires integrating underlying infrastructure for linking sensors with high-level representation of the measure space to support human activities. However, the real-world constraints limit the efficiency of location technologies. The inherent spatial uncertainty embedded in mobile and location systems constantly challenges the coexistence of digital and physical spaces.
Consequently, the technical mechanisms fail to match the highly flexible, nuanced, and contextual human spatial activities. These discrepancies generate a social-technical gap between what should be socially supported and what can be technically achieved. My research aims at exploring, and hopefully reducing this gap in the context of location-aware computing.
Umibot is thrilled to have him–my master has been corresponding with him for several months and we look forward to a lively exchange of ideas.
Tags: fabien girardin, geodata, gis, LBS, location aware, musings, social mapping
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