Pete Warden's Data Science Toolkit offers cool geo capabilities

I just had an interesting chat with Pete Warden, a fellow Brit who was living in Boulder for a while and is now out in San Francisco, and who has worked on various interesting development projects including quite a bit of geo stuff. He is most famous for his cool map of Facebook users, which led to Facebook threatening to sue him :( !!


He has just launched a new project called the Data Science Toolkit at the GigaOM Structure Big Data Conference.

Watch live streaming video from gigaombigdata at livestream.com

It's an open source project and contains a variety of tools for analyzing data, including several geospatial ones. Everything is nicely packaged up as an Amazon AMI, including some large databases, so you can just fire up one or more Amazon machines and use the functionality (and you can do some basic testing here).

• Geocoding (currently US only) - this uses the open source geocoder developed by geoIQ using TIGER data. The nice thing about this is that there are no transaction limits or restrictive terms associated with it. And you can run it offline if you like. Lack of good geocoding is currently a weakness of OpenStreetMap, so this is a nice complement to that. It found my home address very accurately - not an extensive test but a good start :). While this is all open source, it takes a good bit of effort to download the full TIGER database and get this all set up, so having a packaged version is a good thing.
  
• Reverse geocoding - takes a point and gives you information about where it is - country, city, district, etc. Again this is not unique, but has the same advantages as the geocoding functionality in terms of setup and lack of restrictions.
  
• GeoDict is a tool that emulates Yahoo's Placemaker and pulls location data out of unstructured English text - its API is identical to Placemaker.
• IP address to location

It's a nicely packaged collection of free and open source tools to add to your kitbag!

New open source server options for Ubisense myWorld

We have been busy working away on various aspects of Ubisense myWorld. One of the biggest enhancements is behind the scenes, with support for new server options, so that we can run in the cloud or in house.

Up to this point we’ve been working with Arc2Earth, which runs on top of Google App Engine, and both these platforms have worked very well for us, and were a great way of getting an initial system up and running quickly. We see a lot of benefits to running in the cloud, as I’ve talked about on several occasions.

However, a number of our customers, including large utilities and telecom companies, have said that they really like what we’re doing with myWorld, but they would be more comfortable with a solution where the server can run in house. So to support this we have added a new server architecture based on the open source products MapFish and PostGIS. As many of you will know, PostGIS is a very robust spatial database, built on top of PostgreSQL. I have used this on a few projects including whereyougonnabe and have always been very impressed with its functionality and performance. MapFish provides services using data from PostGIS (or from other spatial data sources, including Oracle Spatial, MySQL and Spatialite), using a very similar REST API to that used by Arc2Earth, so that made the migration straightforward and means we can support both server options with a largely common set of code. We’re just using server side components of MapFish, not its client side components (though we might consider using those in the future).

This new server code can run on various operating systems, including Linux and Windows (and Mac!). Customers can run the server in house, while we can now offer services using many different cloud infrastructure providers. We’re currently using Amazon, which has been working well, but it’s good to have alternatives available. We've continued to be pleased with PostGIS, and MapFish too based on our experience so far.

Stay tuned for more news on other cool new functionality on the front end of myWorld coming soon!

Who knew glass was so cool?

Very slick future technology vision video from glass maker Corning. Quite a few maps make an appearance. Worth watching! (Courtesy of fellow FortiusOne advisory board member Jeff Harris).

GITA Geospatial Solutions Conference 2011

If you haven't already signed up for the GITA Geospatial Solutions Conference, which is coming up in Dallas (Grapevine) from April 10-13, you should check it out. There's a lot of great content in the program, including an open source track, which is a first for GITA. I'll be speaking on that track with my colleague Jason Sanford, about some of the latest developments we've been working on with our Ubisense myWorld product. Jason will also be talking in a workshop on geo in the cloud, and I'll be speaking in the opening session together with Geoff Zeiss. I'll also be chairing the closing panel. I'm just finalizing the participants, watch this space for details, but am aiming for something which will be as interesting as the panel I chaired at the GITA conference last year on the topic of "Not your father's approach to geospatial data creation and sharing" featuring Steve Coast, Andrew Turner, Ron Lake and James Fee. This year we'll be covering a broader range of topics across the geo-universe.

GITA Panel: Not your father's approach to geodata creation and sharing from Peter Batty on Vimeo.

I'm looking forward to the conference and hope to see you there!

Cool Egypt tweet map on GeoCommons

My friend Chris Helm, who is a co-conspirator both at FortiusOne and on the organizing committee of FOSS4G, has been doing a lot of interesting work with analyzing and mapping tweets recently. He produced a cool animated map showing the location of tweets tagged with #Egypt #Jan25 or #Tahrir over time.

View full map


When you play the animation (click through to the full map and press play at the bottom left) you can clearly see the moment when Mubarak finally stood down, everything goes crazy. Diane Sawyer from ABC news featured the map on her blog too, which was very cool!

Geospatial in the cloud

As mentioned previously, earlier in the week myself, Brian Timoney and Chris Helm did a set of presentations and demos on geospatial technology in the cloud, to the Boulder Denver Geospatial Technologists group. We were aiming to give a quick taste of a variety of interesting geo-things currently happening in the cloud, and we did it as six slots of about ten minutes each, and apart from my introductory opening slot these were all demos:

• Peter: Why the cloud?
• Brian: Google Fusion Tables
• Chris: the OpenGeo stack on Amazon (PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, etc)
• Peter: Ubisense myWorld and Arc2Earth
• Chris: GeoCommons
• Peter: OpenStreetMap

We got a lot of good feedback on the session. Here's the video (for best quality click through to vimeo and watch in HD):

Geo in the cloud from Peter Batty on Vimeo.

Here are links to the demos we used, or related sites:

• Utah Oil Wells in Fusion Tables (Brian)
• Denver Elections map in Fusion Tables (Brian)
• Centennial address lookup (Brian)
• FOSS4G 2010 attendance map in Fusion Tables (Peter)
• FOSS4G 2010 attendance map in GeoCommons (Peter)
• How to run an OpenGeo Amazon instance (Chris) - blog post from OpenGeo, our demo instance is not running permanently
• Video demo of Ubisense myWorld (Peter) - public demo not currently available
• GeoCommons (Chris)
• OpenStreetMap (Peter)

And finally, here are my slides on slideshare:

Geo in the cloud

View more presentations from Peter Batty.

Google Chrome notebook review

Today I was very happy to receive out of the blue a Google Chrome notebook. It's very black and stealth-bomber-like! I've written a short review of it over on my new posterous blog, where I'll be writing about (mainly) non-geo-things, including general tech, photography, videography, travel and anything else that comes to mind!