Tag: collaborative

Tap & Go

Filling the niche that the lack of mymaps is opening on the iphone. What is up with that Apple, anyway?

Collaborative Mapping Redux

many NGO just want an interface for users to throw some information on the map – like Google Earth. But they don’t want to be passing KML files all around. they need a ‘cvs for the geospatial web’.

StreetsWiki

content encyclopedia project dedicated to sharing knowledge about sustainable transportation policies and practices from around the world.

OSM NL donation

Automotive Navigation Data (AND) is a leading provider of location, routing, mapping and address management are donating a street network of the entire Netherlands. Yes, an entire country. This is basically phenomenal.

major road networks in india and china, too. this is starting to feel like wikipedia in 2002. now if only they did not have such a huge mess on the backend side.

UK Flood Mapping

While OSM is a wiki with an archive, it doesn’t really handle change connected to specific moments in time. Roads are flooded for only so long. Here in Brighton, one of the core roads is reduced to one lane for a year while the Victorian Sewer is replaced. The changes need to be marked as impermanent. Also an issue in representing historic maps — I’m interested in producing historical literature maps of London, and that data needs proper tagging to show validity in only certain time slices.

makes the case that some of the flood data should be in the base map.

Congress Needs Git

Most people don’t get outraged when they hear that a clause has been inserted into a bill but that no one can say who inserted it. Those of us who use version control systems get outraged, because we think: why don’t they just check the commit logs?

Kernel poster

Greg Kroah-Hartman’s chain-of-trust poster for the 2.6.22 kernel. this may well be one of the largest trust networks (unless you consider a state and its citizens as one.. hmm..)

Galaxy Zoo

identifying 3M galaxies

Great moments in airline confirmation codes

Back in the day… early 90’s, before the interwebs was really popular, I was a travel agent, using Sabre, which is/was (I’m not sure now) American Airlines’ reservation system. Those confirmation codes are more commonly known, in the industry, as record locators. Pretty much anyone on the system could retrieve anybody’s record by record locator. When I was bored, I would pull up random record locators, by typing in words of the correct length (I believe they were 6 or 8 chars long) Doing this, I found a number of records in which American Airlines employees would chat in the comments fields. I joined them and made some friends that way. The way it works is you would add some comments to the bottom of a record. Then you save the record, and others would add their comments.

bookmarked not for the funny haha, but the awesome story about using sabre as a BBS of sorts for bored travel agents

We-Fi

Our goal is to make open Wifi act more like a wireless infrastructure that can compete with 3G networks, except freely created and shared by the users. We want to be able to get on fast, free Wifi wherever we go, so we’re building the tools to make that possible. Today we are releasing the first version of our client that replaces the wireless connection manager in Windows. It tests all the networks around you and automatically connects you to the best one. Metrics about all the access points users see are reported to our server, and we show them on a map, so you can see where there is open Wifi coverage – updated constantly, in real time, by the WeFi users.

any headway into the fearmongering surrounding open wifi is good. Tests all the networks around you and automatically connects you to the best one. Metrics about all the access points users see are reported to our server, and we show them on a map.