Friday, July 22, 2011

BBC - The Beauty of Maps

Just couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about The Art of Geographic Data. It seems that BBC thought about it before me and made whole TV series about related topic...

The BBC documentary The Beauty of Maps is a fantastic TV series looking at maps in incredible detail to highlight their artistic attributions and reveal the stories that they tell. The British Museum in London is a home of staggering 4.5 million maps, most of which remain hidden away in its colossal basement. The programme delves behind the scenes to explore some amazing treasures in more detail. However apart from TV Show their is an BBC website complementing the series on-line.
The website gives us a chance to experience and explore five of the world's most beautiful old maps and discover their secrets starting with Psalter Map from 1260. But it as well presents  how we map virtual spaces and understand our world today. Click of the image to explore this website: 


I found couple of episodes of the series on You Tube:



source: BBC

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Location Based Services - a little bit of theory

Fig.1.  Location Based Services
In this post I'm summing up a little bit of theory about Location Based Services (LBS) that I will use for my further academic research. In some papers, books and blog posts it is possible to see different terms interchangeably used to describe the same service: location-aware services, location-related services or location services. Nonetheless the term Location Based Services has been already used and acclaimed by most scientific and professional communities.

Location based services - definitions.


Although LBS is a fairly new domain of science one can find several definitions:

"LBSs are information services accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the location of the mobile device." [1]


"Location-based Services are IT services for providing information that has been created, compiled, selected, or filtered taking into consideration the current locations of the users or those of other persons or mobile objects."[2]

So basically LBS are using potential and capabilities of modern mobile devices, positioning technologies and mobile internet to deliver to user value added information or service based on his location. The main value of LBS for users is that they don't have to enter location information manually but its automatically collected (with positioning technologies) and used to generate personalized information. 

 Fig.2. LBS as an intersection of technologies
(Brimicombe 2002).
LBS - intersection of technologies.

LBS is a field that uses achievements of several technologies. Brimicombe in 2002 proposed to present LBS as an intersection of several technologies: Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Internet, and Mobile Devices (or New Information and Communication Technologies). This concept is pretty straightforward and doesn't need much explanation. The crucial observation is that the technology is actually going in those three directions: information (Internet), mobility (Moble Devices), location (GPS, GIS). According to statistics only in the 4Q of 2010 there where 100.9 million units of smartphone sold. And it was the first time in the history that sales of smartphones was higher than PCs [4]. Moreover already 25% of users prefer using smartphones over a computer to browse the World Wide Web and the number is growing [5]. Conclusions? Decreasing prices of modern mobile devices are pushing Information Society to go mobile. Now how about location and Geographical Information Systems? People are getting more conscious about the spatial aspect of life. Due to popularity of Google Maps they are already used to certain location-based ideas and their utilization. Maps are in fact one of the first five priorities of Google for the future. Maps are naturally linked with space and for centuries they have been used to find position and to navigate. In the most basic model users where trying to localize themselves on the paper maps and to find their way to targeted place. With the development and release to the public Global Positioning System and first PNDs (Personal Navigation Devices) users started to utilize digital mapping in a mobile way. Therefore it is not a surprise that the most used application on Android and third most used application on iPhone platform is Google Maps. Google recently disclosed that 40% of all Google Map use takes place on mobile phones. There is as well growing number of users of popular Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN). Already well known in USA, LBSNs are gaining popularity in Europe and Asia.

LBS components.


Almost all LBSs are based on components present on the figure 3. All of them create LBS infrastructure and parameters of each of them are crucial for the service to work. Those components are: Service and Content Provider, Mobile Device, Positioning Systems, and Communication Network.   
Fig.3. Basic components of LBS

Service and Content Provider
These are all companies providing service, data and that are responsible for the service request processing. Those providers are for example Location Based Social Networks or GSM operators. 

Mobile Device
These are all non-stationary devices that are tools for the user to request the needed information. For example mobile phones, smartphones, PDAs, tablets, laptops. Those devices can have build-in  or external positioning module (e.g. GPS antena).

Positioning System
Positioning of the user is of course the heart of LBS. The user position can be obtained in several ways. The most common two of them are GPS with a several meters accuracy and the mobile communication network which uses one or more cell towers to determine the position of devices with several hundred meters accuracy. The other possibility is to use the position are WLAN stations - there are companies specialized in capturing information about wi-fi location and using it for positioning. This option is possible only in the cities because of need of high network density but it can give surprisingly good accuracy of several dozen meters. Other topic is indoor navigation which can use as well wi-fi or Bluetooth for determining position inside buildings.

Communication Network
The last component is communication network which is responsible for transferring the user data and service request from the mobile device to the service provider and then the requested information back to the user.

References:
1. Virrantaus, K., Markkula, J., Garmash, A., Terziyan, Y.V., 2001. Developing GIS-Supported LocationBased Services. In:  Proc. of WGIS’2001 – First International Workshop on Web Geographical Information Systems., Kyoto, Japan. , 423–432. 
2. Axel Kupper - "Location-based Services: Fundamentals and Operation", 2005, John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
3. Brimicombe, A. J., 2002. GIS - Where are the frontiers now?. In: Proceedings GIS 2002., Bahrain, 33-45. 
4. http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/idc-says-100-9m-smartphones-sold-in-fourth-quarter-pcs-outsold/
5. http://www.tnblive.com/article/jul/2011/one-quarter-smartphone-owners-use-internet-web-surf

Friday, July 15, 2011

Nokia Web OVI Maps optimized for iPhone and Android.

After acquiring Navteq in 2007 Nokia seriously disturbed GPS Navigation industry. With free Nokia maps and its dominance on the market many analysts foreseen the death of the paid navigation. At that time I was working for one of the local European car navigation producers and the management was seriously concerned about the future of the company.  Then Nokia missed smartphone revolution and competitors (including Google Maps) made many improvements to their navigation apps. I always had a feeling that Nokia is not fully utilizing potential of Navteq (acquired for $8.1 billion). Although Navteq is the biggest geographic data producer in the world, Ovi Maps could never successfully force it's way through competition. 

Nokia Ovi Maps - version 3.8

The Nokia Beta Labs has just released version 3.8 of Nokia Ovi Maps. Apart from several improvements in home-screen and functionality the most important information is that Nokia Labs optimized a beta Web version of Nokia Maps for Android and iPhone. You just need to go to: m.maps.ovi.com with your smartphone to access the web app that allows for basic navigation functions like calculating routes and location your position on the map. Currently  “turn by turn” navigation and voice directions are not yet available. 

Competing on iPhone and Android market?

Obviously this functionality is not enough to compete on the smartphone navigation market but it's a good step forward. Nokia has enough resources to create great navigation product for all major platforms. Probably it's contradictory with company's business strategy but as we could observe during last couple of months Nokia's strategy was not very consistent. As I have a sentiment to Nokia (I still think that Nokia 3310 was one of the best phones ever) I would really like to see them disturbing this time smart phones navigation market.



source: Nokia

Friday, July 08, 2011

Nokia 3D World Gaze - hit or kitsch?

Nokia Beta Labs Scientists released new Symbian application  called Nokia 3D World Gaze. It actually looks very cool but it seems to be another gadget app - fancy but not really practical. 

How does it work?   

The application uses compass and GPS from your phone to locate you and direction that you are looking at. Than it gives you possibility to kind of browse the world in this direction by showing data from services such as: panoramio.com, wikinews.org, wikipedia.org, and geonames.org. For example, you are in Münster in Germany and point the phone directly south, you’re likely to see detailed information of Zurich in Switzerland, with the added bonus of being able to see geotagged media in the forms of images. If you're pointing your phone directly downwards, will show you what’s on the other side of the world. 

Useful?

Well... it's another augmented reality app that is rather cool than actually practical. One year ago everyone was talking about Layar and how they’d change the world with their augmented reality application. They didn't. This application is rather fancy gadget to present on even more fancy press conference than a useful tool. But you know what? I like fancy gadgets!!! 



source:  Nokia