Project report "Busboîtescartesmaps"
2009-10-25 17:49:23 - by Nicolas Malevé

More than time for a project report on Busboîtescartesmaps project that took place last November.

The project proposed to the participants to drift within Brussels using the post boxes as elements to create their itinerary. The walks were conducted by several guides (Peter Westenberg, Christina Clar and Natasha Roublov, Lottie Child) who imagined different experiments to understand space and urbanism differently.

Walking blindfolded

Ears enhancement

This project was the occasion to make a first software prototype, using the Tresor’s toolbox, to record the meanderings of people in the city.

Here follows a series of notes explaining the first steps of the project.

The scenario goes like this. We select a series of spots in Brussels. These spots correspond to the postboxes spread in the center of the city. Their locations cover a wide range of places and environments, you can find them near schools, streets with heavy traffic, dead end streets, parks, etc.

Postboxes as anchors for a walk

A group of people go in the city with an audio recorder and a GPS and visit the spots. The clocks of the GPS and the recorders are synchronised. The GPS records all the time the tracklogs of the people and the audio device capture the sound for the whole duration of the walk. When they come back after the walk, the GPS data and the audio data are copied on a computer. By comparing the time code of the GPS track and the start time of the audio track, we can extract audio segments based on location. we can extract the audio recorded by the walkers when they were nearby the spots.

The software captures the audio fragments recorded near the postboxes

These audio segments can then be placed on a digital map where the visitors can listen to them. The interface allow them listen to the chaos of all the sounds they have recorded near the spots or to select the sounds one by one, turn them on and off.

Samples: Some walks have concentrated on the atmospheric sound, recording the ambient atmosphere( ie. pool_atmosphere_long.ogg), or interacting with it (scratching the surface with shoes ie. scratching_the_ground.ogg). Other guides gave instructions like describing aloud what one was seeing (STE-003-workingcopy_00m_43s_40h__01m_25s_90h.mp3, STE-003-workingcopy_35m_43s__38m_59s_40h.mp3, STE-003-workingcopy_09m_01s_80h__10m_37s_60h.mp3, STE-003-workingcopy_51m_30s__55m_28s_60h.mp3,STE-003-workingcopy_15m_55s_50h__19m_37s.mp3,STE-003-workingcopy_23m_17s_40h__27m_52s_90h.mp3) Etc etc.

Interface:

The spots are displayed and all sounds played

By default, the software lets you listen to the ’mumbling’(all_walk-5.ogg,all_walk-0.ogg) of the whole last walk, or to select individual takes within this.

The user can filter the sounds and select the walks

Using the menu, you can chose a walk or chose a date or a guide.

Software in use:

openstreetmap, setting the coordinates
gpsbabel, can extract data from a gps unit. can also select data by region and time
sox, given a start time, it can cut audio fragments for a certain duration
mp3splt, cuts an mp3 file in segments
gstreamer allows for playing audio files concurrently
perl, php and java to glue the elements.

The software prototype has been developed by Ivan Monroy Lopez and Nicolas Maleve. The pre-alpha soon available for download.

Des logiciels libres aux données libres
2009-07-15 11:20:44 - by Nicolas Malevé

Un article fort complet d’ Yves Jacolin sur les logiciels et données libres pour la géomatique. On y apprend entre autres qu’ Openstreetmap adopterait une nouvelle licence (en remplacement de la licence Creative Commons actuelle) pour préciser davantage ce que signifie la réutilisation de données et les travaux dérivés.

Lire en ligne

(Merci P !)

Walking papers
2009-03-30 21:35:57 - by Nicolas Malevé

«It’d be interesting for generated printouts of OSM data to encode enough source information to reconnect the scanned, scribbled-on result back with its point of origin, and use it as an online base map just like GPS traces and Yahoo aerial imagery.»

Read more of this beautiful idea

Où ? Ici, avec OSM !
2008-10-30 16:32:28 - by Pierre Huyghebaert

Pour répondre à une question récente (« Où se passera la semaine de workshop Busboitescartesmaps ? À Recyclart. ») d’une manière plus cartographique, utilisons Openstreemap dont la qualité ne cesse de progresser !

En utilisant le rendu Mapnik (proposé par défaut) :

View Larger Map

En utilisant le rendu OSmarender (proposé en alternative) :

View Larger Map

Et pour pousser plus loin la découverte de la modification de rendu à partir d’une base de donnée GIS : http://tile.openstreetmap.nl/ panman/styledit/

Geonames
2008-09-15 09:36:05 - by Nicolas Malevé

"The GeoNames geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.5 million unique features whereof 2.2 million populated places and 1.8 million alternate names. All features are categorized into one out of nine feature classes and further subcategorized into one out of 645 feature codes. (more statistics ...). The data is accessible free of charge through a number of webservices and a daily database export. GeoNames is already serving up to over 11 million web service requests per day."

An example of this data being used: Walter Rafelsberger has worked on a vizualisation of the worlds cities with a population of more than 1000, [...]. Cities with more than 5 million inhabitants are labeled.

More than the sum of the parts
2008-09-10 11:47:14 - by Nicolas Malevé

In his PhD’s dissertation, Ben Shaw discusses «how shared representations enhance design collaboration. I draw on examples from my field study at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where real-time teams have radically accelerated the design of next generation exploratory spacecraft and science missions to Mars. My results highlight the roles representations play in generating possibilities, synthesizing perspectives and consolidating commitment to action, thereby helping collaborative groups bring about preferred futures.»

For his dissertation he created a few network animations of the Nasa designers team meetings.
«The behavior of these networks reflects important aspects of the interaction taking place in a design meeting at any given time, including the level of support and commitment expressed for different proposals, the extent to which participants engage one another’s points of view, and the degree of integration of shared representations in conversation. This behavior can be visualized using animated layout diagrams such as those below (produced with a program called SoNIA and viewed in Quicktime movies). The qualitative information conveyed by these diagrams can be complemented by applying numerical metrics to the network structures, as described in the dissertation.»

Read more

Desktop GIS for Linux, a series
2008-01-28 21:36:32 - by Nicolas Malevé

The Linux Journal is publishing the first issue of a series about Linux and GIS desktop publishing.

Thanks, Eric!

CityGML : An Open Standard for 3D City Models ?
2007-11-27 10:48:27 - by Pierre Huyghebaert

Une série de villes, allemandes entre autres, développent des modèles 3D complets les représentant.

Excerpts :
"CityGML is a common information model for representing 3D urban objects. It defines classes and relations for the most relevant topographic objects in cities and regional models with respect to their geometric, topological, semantic and appearance properties.
(...)
Currently most virtual 3D city modeling efforts, like the Google tools, provide only graphic or geometric models, neglecting the semantic and topological aspects of the buildings and terrain being modeled. A common issue with these and other city 3D modeling efforts is lack of interoperability. Web-aligned open standard geometry models for computer graphics (e.g., X3D and geospatial technologies (Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3)) are available but still relatively new and not yet widely adopted. Though their common XML foundation provides the elements needed for convergence, this convergence has not been addressed - yet.
(...)
Visualization is just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, some applications of great importance to society, such as disaster management, homeland security and advancement of sustainable energy facilities, would benefit immensely from being able to immediately integrate 3D city models developed for other purposes. This will only become possible through the development and widespread use of an open 3D city model standard that is harmonized with various other standards. CityGML is intended to enable and achieve all these goals."
The entire text + un communiqué de presse en français.

OSGeo Journal
2007-06-13 20:55:41 - by Nicolas Malevé

The first volume of the osgeo (Open Source Geospatial Foundation) journal is out.

The OSGeo Journal is a digital publication containing case studies, news, tutorials, project updates and more. With a general aim at promoting, highlighting and educating readers about open source geospatial applications in general, but also provides updates on OSGeo projects.

Link to the complete issue in pdf

gipfel - and you know what you see
2007-01-05 20:11:55 - by Nicolas Malevé

from the gipfel’s website:

gipfel helps to find the names of mountains or points of interest on a picture. It uses a database containing names and GPS data. With the given viewpoint (the point from which the picture was taken) and two known mountains on the picture, gipfel can compute all parameters needed to compute the positions of other mountains on the picture. [...] You can think of gipfel as a georeferencing software for arbitrary images (not only satelite images or maps). gipfel also has an image stitching mode, which allows to generate panorama images from multiple images that have been referenced with gipfel .

To get the idea, firefox or konqueror users can point their browsers here. The hotspots on the image appears when you move the mouse over it. Please scroll to the right-hand part of the image as all the linked elements are concentrated in this area.