Relocation Based Services

No, the title for this column is not misspelled and you did not miss a new development in the field of GIS. The term reflects one of the reasons for this column and my own recent experiences in relocating and the role location-based services appeared to play.

Location based services are sometimes defined as based on the position of the user in space. My opinion is that location based services need not be limited to mobile devices. Logging in to my office network from some desk and finding that my computer automatically configured a printer near me is one of the less obvious examples of a location-based service although it is available in many office networks. The point here is that the field of application of location-based services might be much wider than mobile devices only.

So what about relocation? Relocation has settled in my mind lately, since my family and I are about to move from the Netherlands to California. In the process of relocating, at least two distinct locations and a route between them play a part. First of all I wanted some information on our destination and typed ‘go Redlands’ in my browser. Apart from a list of 53 sites with interesting information, I also got a great offer for a video camera system that can be used for surveillance purposes. Unfortunately I’m not a US resident yet nor am I logged on to a computer in the US meaning that the offer is not for me…

These Internet marketing campaigns clearly lack a location-based service and did not read Alex van Leeuwen’s article ‘Geo-targeting on IP Address’ in the July/August issue of GeoInformatics! But things are not as bad as they may seem. Part of relocation is to find a new place to live. Surfing the web taught me that realtors are clearly beginning to see the added value of GIS. Some time ago you were lucky to find a picture of the offered houses on the Internet. Nowadays, most real-estate web sites offer a map showing the location of the houses. Some even give additional information on the neighborhood, schools, demographics and such. To me these sites qualify as ‘offering a location-based service’. The nice thing about the Internet is that once you’ve followed one of these links you enter a new ‘world’ of information and more links to follow…

Beware not to get lost in cyberspace. But then again, being able to get lost is one of the key properties of a world, isn’t it? Fortunately the chance of my goods getting lost during the relocation is next to zero. I can actually track the relocation of my goods from my present to my future location. This means that even in the event that the container ship carrying my stuff across the ocean does sink, I will always know where they are. Isn’t that comforting?

Location-based services are not a thing of the future anymore and we do not have to wait for UMTS or other high-speed mobile networks and Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled devices. Geo-targeting can be seen as the GPS of the Internet. The nice thing about this is that your IP address is always known when connected to the Internet, and that is independent of your physical location on the earth. That means that Internet services that make use of geo-targeting will travel with you, wherever you go!

We have seen that even in a common thing as relocation one already can experience the benefits of location based services. All of these services were offered through the Internet. This leads me to conclude that the Internet, with its links, and references, is perhaps the largest location based service provider around. This column will be my own contribution to the expansion of location-based services.

Appeared in GeoInformatics Magazine (www.geoinformatics.com) in September 2001

Google Earth 5.2 Thoughts

Sorry for lack of posts last week, my family is over from New Zealand so I took some time out.

GE 5.2 has already been reviewed well by Mickey and Stephan, I share their enthusiasm for the tracks, elevantion and slide in browser functionality. I’ve noticed some other features in the 5.2 Pro version (not sure if they’re in the normal version) that IMHO deserve comment:
Table: (Tools > Table) This gives you a table view of the KML that you’ve selected in the places column so you can see the text in the description boxes of a number of placemarks at once, its similar in functionality to Northgates KML editor. Table isn’t documented anywhere I can find and I was disappointed to find its read only, it really would be useful if you could use it to write to KML directly as per GIS tools and the Northgates tool.
GE gives you the ability to produce KML within the editor already but I’d love to see functionality where I could put time tags into KML without having to copy raw KML out to a text file.
Regionate: This is documented to a degree but it didn’t tell me exactly what this functionaility does, e.g. it doesn’t chop up paths into smaller segments. Maybe it only deals with placemarks?
I was also excited to see a contextual help button in the dialogue box. Contextual help in GE is something I’ve advocated before so I was disappointed to find its only in the Regionate and flight simulator dialogue box (given a cursory hunt around). Why not link to help files from all dialogue boxes?
Slide in Browser: Stephan makes a nice point about the slide in browser, I agree with him that maintaining the option of the split screen would be good. However, I think that the sliding browser screen would be excellent for using GE in presentations, set up a tour, fly into an area in GE then pan across a presentation slide in a browser from the web, use that to support your talk for a while then return to GE to continue the tour. I think Google should think about linking the Google Docs presentation tool with Google Earth in this way, I played around with the idea but currently:
  • It takes 2 clicks to open a presentation (open balloon, select link)
  • Opening a GDocs presentation in the GE browser currently crashes GE pro!
Polygons and Ruler: I was pleased to see that the polygon bug has been fixed, that was a real pain. Being able to save paths produced with the ruler tool is also smart.