Here's the talk we presented at Telematics Munich 2008:

Comments are opened -- you're welcome to give feedback.

United Maps „fills the gaps in road networks“ adding building footprints, pedestrians paths, mass transit information and relevant topical layers.

"Es gibt noch viel zu tun, uns liegen vor allem die kleinen Fuß- und Radwege am Herzen. Auch im Umland von Hamburg gibt es noch viele weiße Flecken"

rough translation "Much work ahead, especially smaller pedestrian pathways and cycling tracks in the outskirts are still blind spots." 

Rob Dunfey @ 'The Spatial Miscellany' points to intriguing artwork:

Russell concealed the addresses of 130 letters to herself in a series of increasingly complex puzzles and ciphers (more here).

Are they?

Nice article in 'The Globe and Mail' (UK), featuring Virender Ajmani and the mashed-up mapping efforts around.

Nobody had ever heard of San Serriffe before April 1, 1977, when the Guardian (UK) published a special 7-page supplement on the 10th anniversary of that nation’s independence from Britain. (...)

... and another lovely crafted story from 'Strange Maps'.

via Chad - 'The Earth is Square'

United Maps is proud and thrilled to present and premier its disruptive technologies at Telematics Munich 2008 (Holiday Inn, Hochstrasse 3, Munich) at Nov 6.

After attracting over 1,800 senior-level executives to its sister North American Conference Telematics Detroit, Telematics Munich will be the European mapping and navigation industry's flagship conference and networking hub for all key players.

Plenary Sessions are scheduled with 40+ speakers in three tracks:

• Telematics Services
• Navigation and Location
• Infotainment

United Maps can get you a discount of 350 Euros to attend - quote "SPONSOR1440" in the discount code box to book your ticket.

... directly copied from AllPointsBlog:

(...) coverage suggests such technology will be useful for finding seats in sports stadiums, parked cars, or specific stores in malls. Nokia’s already prototyping the app in 40 of its own buildings.

Mapping of public places is also underway.

A commercial trial will launch later this year at a shopping mall in Helsinki aimed at, hopefully among other things, figuring out how it can make money. It'll be in Nokia's Beta Labs, too.

Pointed to Nokia Conversations.

Naturally, hyperlocal indoor mapping is the next frontier - after the immediate surroundings are mapped on a local scale.

Nice quote at Chad Zimmerman's "The Earth Is Square":

Well, with Google latest change, switching to TeleAtlas from Navteq has now made that post null and void, as now both GMaps and Google Earth are both WRONG now (and in looking around the local area ... there are a lot of side roads and back roads that are now completely wrong in their names).

Anyone said they've been right?

Guess who won?

The satnav-guided car finished one-and-a-half hours behind the map car – driven by women – which itself came in half an hour behind the winning signs-and-directions-led vehicle – driven by men.

(...)  The satnav team were hampered by the gadget alerting them to non-existent roundabouts and exits and directing them into "no entry" streets and along slow country lane "short cuts" rather than motorways.

So how does this relate to today's announcement at Google’s LatLong blog for Google MapMaker? Is it good or bad for OSM ...? While OSM is an "open collaboration between people all around the world that are trying to solve the problem of outdated and expensive maps for GPS systems" (quote), Google Map Maker gets bad welcome from the OpenGeoData blog "a kind of faux OpenStreetMap where they own all the data".

Adding some more:

"If you contribute to Google MapMaker, you are contributing to one single map view that looks how Google wants it to look. If you contribute to OpenStreetMap, you are contributing to a myriad of possibilities … most not even thought of yet."

Sjors Provoost gets speculative for future options:

• Worst case: Google does not collaborate and we’ll have duplicate effort, which is not a problem because there is an astounding amount of disposable man power available on the planet.
• Best case: Google does collaborate and the OpenStreetMap project will be finished in a year or so.

Nevertheless - obviously Google (Maps) does have licence contracts with Navteq and Tele Atlas that simply hinder them from expanding inbound data with user generated map changes.

Why else would you bite hands that feed you?

Techcrunch has it: Nokia aquired Plazes for a (still undisclosed) amount.

A bit misjudgingly, Plazes is shortened to a “mobile social network”, putting it into the same basket as the Danish startup ZYB, that was acquired by Vodafone in May for an alleged €31.5 million.

Is Nokias buying spree signal or noise to location based services? Mechanically, Plazes doesn't do that much. Connect people with plazes they like. Scale it up and ... put it on a map. We'll see all this as part of ovi.com soon. It'll be interesting to see, how Plazes will integrate.

via fscklog:

Die Vorstellung eines GPS-fähigen iPhones lässt bei mindestens einem Hersteller von GPS-Navigationsgeräten angeblich unkontrollierte Furcht aufkommen:

«I recently sat down with the president of a GPS navigation system manufacturer to ask him how he felt about the prospect of a GPS-enabled iPhone. "Scared [expletive]-less," he said.»

AppleInsider had a story of a new beta of Apple's iPhone Software v2.0 update released privately to a select group of enterprise partners showing the beginnings of geo-tagging support for the handset's Camera app.

Quote:

Essentially, geo-tagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to media files such as latitude and longitude coordinates -- or even names of places -- so that those files can later be referenced, searched, and grouped based on their origin.

See a larger Screenshot at AppleInsider (no intention to violate copyrights).

If Apple does it - everyone will do. Throw another log on the "we-need-better-maps"-campfire.

Reminiscent of this post describing Scottish officials warning ambulances not to trust satnavs, come this story from Australia. After several incidents were motorists were lead onto unsuitable roads in rural areas, The Age newspaper reports:

Police are now urging motorists to take maps instead of blindly following instructions from a GPS.

Combine this with just another statement at GISLounge ... and get lost:

Paper Maps Being Phased Out:

The San Francisco Chronicle reports (see "Auto club’s paper map unit nears end of road") on the phasing out of the cartography division that serves the California State Automobile Association.

By the end of the year, the twelve-person cartographic unit will be disbanded with mapping services done only by AAA’s national headquarters in Heathrow, Florida. The cause for the demise is the widespread availability of online map directions and in-car navigation units which cut demand for the paper maps by 13% in 2007.

The high degree of research needed to keep current with local changes in roadways and street name changes leads some to question how well the national office will be able to provide accurate local maps. “I don’t know if (AAA has) the resources, now that this is suddenly dumped in their laps,” said Curtis Carroll, sales and marketing director of Benchmark Maps, also in Medford, Ore. Carroll further predicated highly detailed local papers maps will be a thing of the past: “Street maps with the level of detail as we know it on a paper sheet may not be with us in a decade,” Carroll said.

At United Maps, we wonder where the highly detailed local maps will come from ... oh yeah, we have a proposition ;-)

Have nice weekend, motorists!

Viel Vergnügen dabei - holen Sie sich bitte einen Kaffee, nehmen sich eine Viertelstunde Zeit. Es folgt ein längeres (und hoffentlich aufschlußreiches) Lesestück:

• Was bisher geschah: Eine kurze Geschichte der Kartografie
  • Kartografische Produktion
  • Produktion von Navigationsdaten
  • Navigation und Routing für die Straße <