China announces GPS rival Beidou is now offering navigation data

It seems I have been watching for the development of alternatives to Amercia’s NavStar GPS ever since I started using GPS seriously in the late 1990s.

Although receivers had been available for some years, I didn’t buy my own until they started to come with base maps and routing installed (and detailed road maps could be loaded into memory) as they were of limited value when they still had to used with paper maps. Believe it or not, Google Maps and the like did not even exist in those days – but were just around the corner. Then, you had to buy your own digital maps for use on computers, and they were not as detailed as today’s online mapping – unless you bought from Ordnance Survey, and they knew how to charge, since all national mapping was/is copyright.

Alternatives were a long way off, and the Americans even made their signal inaccurate with a random error inserted, just in case someone tried to use their own system to guide missiles onto the US.

Wind on a few decades, and Russia’s equivalent to America’s military NavStar GPS has been released to the public – globally – and is called GLONASS.

Europe also seeks to be independent of America’s system, and has Galileo, a GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) that has stumbled from financial crisis to crisis, almost been cancelled, and is now promised for 2019 (with local service in 2014). I’ve almost given up on this, and even held off on buying a new receiver at one time, such were the expectations. However, the various systems are said to be compatible, so provided hardware is new enough, it will work with all available signals. If similar to my existing receivers, then these will be able to be told which signals to use, where available.

India has been a great user of GPS for many years, and for reasons of independence from the US GPS system, has its own Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System (IRNSS) coming online in 2014.

China has also been working towards independence in navigation, and this week saw the arrival of its system, Beidou, as a working product:

China’s satellite navigation system has become operational, according to an official.

Beidou now offered location, timing and navigation data to China and surrounding areas announced the project’s spokesman Ran Cheng.

China has been working on the system since 2000 to provide an alternative to the US government-run Global Positioning System (GPS).

The move should make China’s military less dependent on foreign technology.

A launch earlier this month delivered the tenth of Beidou’s satellites into orbit.

Beijing plans to send a further six satellites into space by 2012 to extend the system to most parts of Asia, and then expand the network to a total of 35 satellites offering global coverage by 2020.

Interested parties are invited to study a test version of the project’s Interface Control Document which has been placed online

via BBC News – China GPS rival Beidou starts offering navigation data.

Beidou Navigation Satellite System Interface Control Document

RCAHMS features US Navy aerial coastline obliques

News of an intriguing set of aerial images that could provide detail for anyone interested in the targeted areas during the 1960s:

Around 2,000 oblique aerial photographs of the coastline around Scotland and Cumbria, taken by the US Navy in the 1960s, are now accessible online thanks to an archivist on secondment from The US National Archives and Records Administration. Tom McAnear spent a month working in NCAP on an internship programme sponsored by the US Government.

The US Navy aerial photographs were taken to aid amphibious landing training, and show the port of Leith undergoing reclamation and expansion; the entire coastline of the North-East highlands from Duncansby Head to Inverness; and the shoreline of the Solway Firth from Whithorn to Barrow-in-Furness.

Tom, who is more accustomed to working with textual records in the US National Archives in Washington D.C., was trained by NCAP staff in a range of aerial photograph handling, preservation, digitisation and cataloguing techniques.

via News – US Navy Set.

View US Navy Aerial Photography Feature

View US Navy aerial photographs

View US Navy aerial photographs in Google Earth

The Google Earth view is particularly interesting, as it shows the location of every image pinned along the relevant coastal area.

Google Maps refined

In a classic example of Sod’s Law, no sooner do I air the thought that I seem to have missed any recent updates to the high resolution Google aerial view of my local area, than an update regarding Google Maps faithfully arrives on my desk moments after it has been announced.

This update relates to the appearance of detail in the various Google Map views, and how streets and similar details are shown. Much appears to have been done to refine how these appear on the maps and aerial views, with less obtrusive graphics being used, and finer detail being evident.

Google summarised the changes as follows:

Today’s changes are intended to keep the same information-rich map while making it easier to pick out the information that is most useful.  The changes affect both the ‘Map’ and ‘Hybrid’ styles, and include numerous refinements to color, density, typography, and road styling worldwide.  For example, in map view, local and arterial roads have been narrowed at medium zooms to improve legibility, and the overall colours have been optimized to be easier on the eye and conflict less with other things (such as traffic, transit lines and search results) that we overlay onto the map.  Hybrid roads have gained a crisp outline to make them easier to follow, and the overall look is now closer to an augmented satellite view instead of a simple overlay.

The old vs new view of the London area shown below gives a good idea of the subtle changes made, which work to give a clearer view of the desired area, and you can see more examples illustrating the old and new styles in Google’s more detailed account of the changes at Evolving the look of Google Maps

Relevant Google Earth/Maps high resolution update

Thanks to an observant member who happened to be looking in the right place, we’ve discovered that the city of Glasgow and its surrounding area has received a high resolution imagery update.

Although we should get a note of these things as we are subscribed to the relevant blog for updates, that last relevant one we were alerted to was some months ago. This was the one that added aerial imagery to much of Scotland which was not already covered.

This appears to be a much more selective upload, with highly detailed aerial imagery of Glasgow and the surrounding area, showing much more detail than was previously available.

We’ve no idea what other areas, if any, are included, but we have identified this newest upload to be from the period of May 2009, so the images are very recent, and this has also been confirmed by virtue of the content shown in some of the images we’ve checked – yes, the neighbours have been getting new conservatories and extensions added this year.

If there are any other areas that have had a similar update, we’d appreciate you taking a moment to let us know in a Comment below – thanks in advance.

We’d liked to have known sooner, so might be searching for an alternative, and less official, blog that reports on GE ad related updates.

The sample below shows one of our featured sites, the large drum blender on the former ROF Bishopton site. Coincidentally, this just happens to fall on the transition line between the old and the new imagery, and clearly illustrates the difference between the two:

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<a href=”http://www.secretscotland.org.uk/index.php/Secrets/ROFBishopton”>Secret Scotland – ROF Bishopton</a>

Live video populates Google Earth experience

One of the realisations that had me rolling about the floor laughing came about when I discovered I was repeatedly discussing Google Earth, and other systems which provide aerial views, with non-technical people who had assumed the images they were looking at were live, and were somehow being beamed to their computer screens. They stopped thinking that when I told them the probable cost and technology that they would have to invest in to make that true.

The blank stares of disbelief and realisation provided another classic ROLF moment.

It looks as if the laugh could be on me though, as computer scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta having been showing some of their recent work, and have augmented the scenery by using video feeds from cameras around the city. Their augmented version of Google Earth incorporates sports scenes, traffic flows, pedestrians and weather, all combined to provide a view that could appear to be real time.

Even better, by using additional software to analyse the movement of objects within the scenes, they are able to predict object paths, and fill the motion in areas where there are no cameras observing the scene.

The possibilities are endless, as television and internet technologies converge, televised events could be inserted into online aerial views, allowing users to choose their viewing angle, and fly over and around the event.

Individual security concerns that may arise from the use of surveillance camera feeds have been addressed by adopting techniques which render objects such as people and cars as models which take their place, and are animated using stop-motion techniques.

More details in: Live video makes Google Earth cities bustle – tech – 25 September 2009 – New Scientist

Google Maps introduces Place Pages

Google Maps has been enhanced with Place Pages.

Search results for places made using Google searches that led to maps have always featured a More info... option, either beside the search result itself, or within the popup window attached to the map marker.

Previously, this would open a small information window which offered further details on the subject. Now, clicking on the More info… option opens a new page relating to the subject place.

According to Google, a Place Page is:

a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.

This new page will display more comprehensive information about the place including photos, videos, street view preview and more.

Unlike most of the usual tools we tend to refer to for our information, which are generally of a historic nature, the will be complemented by the new Google Maps Place Pages, as these are primarily concerned with current information related to the subject location.

This new feature is a function of Google Maps and Google Search, so is not directly accessed from our embedded mapping, and you have to perform a search using one of these services in order to access the Place Pages.

Postcode data is free so long as you can afford it

Provided you are rich, you can use postcode geolocation data freely. Having access to this sort of geolocation data means that rather than having to determine the latitude and longitude of a site, a programmer can simply enter its postcode, and a line of code will return the latitude and longitude within the code, allowing applications such as maps to make further use of the coordinates.

In the US, zip codes do a similar job, but you don’t have to worry about going to jail or paying for the privilege if you want to use them, or resorting to subterfuge.

In this country, the government and the Royal Mail think that rather than make the data freely available, and stimulating applications, it’s better to see it as a captive revenue stream. Royal Mail, which owns the copyright to the Postcode Address File (PAF), generates millions of pounds of revenue from its monopoly of this data. In 2006 it generated a profit of £1.58 million from revenues of £18.36 million, of which £14.9 million was from PAF resellers.

If you are interested in this subject, you can find a number of projects set up around the web in an attempt to make postcode data freely available, some more successful than others, some of dubious legality – they probably have copies of the Royal Mail’s PAF file – while others are far from complete or workable, as they depend on volunteers submitting their own data of postcode locations, as read from their own GPS receivers.

There’s a new web site currently available – and it may not be available if those on high have it shut down – named after Ernest Marples who, as Postmaster General, introduced the postcode in 1959. ernestmarples.com provides a latitude and longitude pair for any of the 1.7 million full postcodes. Since a single postcode can cover 100 delivery points, with the average being 15, this is not a precision fix.

The site also offers the option of using the coordinates programmatically, by making a command line call.

It’s hard not to agree with the sentiments expressed in the article that “the loss to Royal Mail is zero – since those developers using a free long/lat service would never pay for one themselves“. This site would certainly never be able to pay, or pay, for using the official service.

Read more in Web developers working to make postcode data freely available.

See also Free our data.

It’s probably worth adding the warning suggestion offered in the ernestmarples.com web site:

Important: Given the inherent unreliability of using a service like this, it’s probably sensible to let us know you’re using it so we can hang on to your email and let you know if anything important happens. Hopefully the Royal Mail will be nice, and license us to use the postcode database. Then you’ll be able to rely on us and this service will become a seamless and transparent part of the web’s infrastructure, like it ought to be.

Poke in the eye for English thugs

I referred to the Thugs of Broughton back in April, when a group of villagers were whipped up into a mob by one ringleader who took exception to Google’s Street View camera car driving along the public road and taking pictures. He led them to surround the car and forced the driver to turn around and leave, rather than risk further provocation, and escalating the confrontation.

Their justification for this intimidation was the protection of their property,  and the ringleader, one Paul Jacobs who formed the posse to surround the car driver stated that the had been three burglaries there in the last six weeks (and without the help of Street View too!), stating: “If our houses are plastered all over Google, it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike”.

In reality, it would seem that fat from causing crime, Street View is being used to solve it, and it has been reported that two street robbers were apprehended thanks to Google Street View imagery in the Netherlands.

Last September a 14-year-old boy was robbed in Groningen. In March, the boy was looking at Street View and realised that imagery had been recorded just before the robbery took place, and showed the two men. He applied to Google for the uncensored imagery, and Google obliged. Police were subsequently able to identify both of the muggers.

There are other instances of such occurrences, but the stories are anecdotal, and so far at least, no-one sent me links to online sources to verify the tales, so I’m not including them.

In any case, it’s my opinion that while such cases will certainly exist, they will be the exception.

Despite the fact that many people still seem to hold the mistaken belief that Street View is some sort of live image that can be homed in on like some sort of magic or mystical global CCTV, the reality is that they images are archival stills, and record only a past moment in time. This means that unless some incident happened to take place at the moment the image was being recorded, there’s no way Street View can be “rewound” to replay some past moment in time.

Historic records

On a more positive note, Google has begun to receive requests from the victims of major disasters that have taken place since Street View images began being recorded.

In many cases, the Street View images represent the only complete record of some of these communities, destroyed by events such as floods and earthquakes. Google has responded by looking at ways of preserving these images for future reference, presumably much in the same way as can already be found in Google Earth, where a timeline of the available satellite imagery can be referred to, and changes to the terrain viewed over the years (when such material is available) can be seen.

Street View tweaks still working fine

A few weeks ago, I commented about an apparently Over cautious Google?

At the time, I had discovered that a personal request to have some of their Street View privacy technology applied to imagery that referred directly to me had resulted not in the simple tweaking I had requested, but had seen all the images deleted, and replaced by the ominous “This image is no longer available” frame. Then I found that the frames had been restored – untweaked.

I got in touch again, and re-iterated the original request. Again the frames became unavailable, but then quickly reappeared with the requested tweaks in place. At the time, I wondered if this would remain, or if the original untweaked images would return, so I promised to revisit them six weeks later.

The six weeks have passed, and I’m pleased to say that things remain as per the request, and no, I’m still not going to point you at them, which would have the effect of negating the privacy request.

Interesting to see that development is still continuing inside the system too, with some rather nice image zoom graphics being layer on the views to make them both more usable and user friendly.

Street View blurring technology has its uses

Following the shock revelation to some that I was Glad I’ve never financed KFC, after the American fast food giant tried to bully a Carnoustie pizzeria owner into removing items from her menu because the junk food chain thought it had the exclusive right to the words Family Feast – an action it had already failed to enforce in England a couple of years earlier (so had little or no chance of succeeding, having set its own precedent, but try telling a bully to change its ways) – the Titanic Pizza Co followed its namesake, and I got to write Titanic Pizza sinks Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Wandering around the web, I found that Google’s Street View was none to chuffed by good old Colonel Saunder’s countenance, and the wise, automated face blurring technology incorporated into the system had recognised his face adorning the KFC sign above the slop shop in King Street, Hammersmith, and blurred it in an attempt to protect our eyes, if not our stomachs.

Colonel Sanders blurred KFC sign in Street View

The view above is a capture, just in case the Colonel sends out the legal bullies to threaten Google and force removal of the blurring.

The view below comes from Street View, so you can see the current view of this frame, and see if the blurring remains, or is removed at some point. You can also use it to wander along King Street, where you’ll discover that, unfortunately, this was the only frame wherethe Colonel’s leering face was actually obscured. Everywhere else, he’s looking down on his prey.

Ah well, as they say, nothing’s perfect.It might have treated the whole sign like a registration number plate, and blurred the whole thing for us.

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