2007 April « thinkwhere

montana

April 21, 2007 at 3:58 pm | In gis | Leave a Comment

Off to Montana and the Western states for a bit….

Vector mapping comes to the masses, but is it free?

April 5, 2007 at 10:53 pm | In Mapping, geo, geodata, gis, neogeography | Leave a Comment

In the space of a couple of days, OpenLayers, Microsoft’s Live Search and Google Maps have enabled vector drawing (that’s points, lines, and polygons).

Live Search (aka Live Maps, aka Live Local) have enabled publication of Collections of map data as GeoRSS, Google Maps as KML, or shared via a permalink. OpenLayers can serialise and deserialise gml, kml and georss, WKT and more…

Interesting times, we should be seeing more sharing and publication of these datasets, showing much more than a simple list of points can do. They approach GIS.

But, are they (excl. openlayers) free, is it derived data?
You use their mapping product, and make a derived work from it.

Who owns the copyright?

What are the terms?

Maybe the old “is drawing on a map derived data” question is about to be answered? Perhaps it can open the floodgates to better datasharing, more free geodata and better mashups and spatial applications….

open source j2me GPS- Mobile Trail Explorer

April 4, 2007 at 11:16 am | In Mapping, gps, j2me, openstreetmap | 2 Comments

Came across Mobile Trail Explorer which has released v 1.4 – a new and opensource j2me gps tracker – which looks like 1/2 of what I am looking for regarding making OSM maps on your mobile phone

There’s a small mailing list for support. So far I’ve not had chance to delve into the code, and, alas, it doesn’t find a bluetooth GPS device on Nokia 6230i phones yet… so when it does, I’ll write a full review. But it being open source is definitely the right way to go for this, there seems to be no other software out there, and many many people want to use their GPS with their phones.