Lewis on The Small Things

“The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.”

–C.S. Lewis (1898–1963)
Irish writer and scholar

Sales attention…

How many of us have wished we’d given something (or someone) a little extra effort or attention earlier in the quarter/ year rather than later?

Lewis’s thought encourages us to care about what/ who is in front of us now… to fully use today (this salesday) and enjoy what it brings us in the future.

If you’ve not seen them, a few things we hope you enjoy during a well-earned break or over the weekend…

  • A quick (2.5 min.) video made by Chick-fil-A to remind their employees that their customers are people and they may have things going on in their lives (a good thing to remember as you sell and service your prospects and customers).
  • My personal experiment: A device diet last year that led to a permanent change for the better (speaks to that ‘life in front’ of you point).
  • A great little 15-minute video on the value of a smile, being encouraging and resilient, and the impact we have on others (even when we don’t realize it).

TBIF

(too bad it’s Friday, the last salesday of the week)

Search your geo data using spatial queries from Fusion Tables!

I’m Kathryn Hurley, a Developer Programs Engineer for Fusion Tables, and I have to say, I really dig Fusion Tables. The power it gives you to visualize your data is amazing! Plus, the team is working hard to add new features that give even more power to you, the developer.

It is my pleasure to announce that Fusion Tables now offers spatial queries! Using spatial queries, developers can (1) find all features that are located within (or overlap with) a given distance from a location (2) find all features that are located within (or overlap with) a given bounding box, and (3) find a given number of features closest to a location.

To demonstrate some of the new syntax, let’s go through a potential use case of spatial queries: creating a store locator map. For this demo, I set up a table in Fusion Tables, 297050, containing the locations of a fictitious pizza restaurant chain in the San Francisco bay area. The table contains the name, location, and whether or not that location delivers.

Now let’s say we want to display all the restaurants that fall within a bounding box. To do so, use the syntax: 

SELECT * FROM 297050 WHERE ST_INTERSECTS(Address, RECTANGLE(LATLNG(37.2, -122.3), LATLNG(37.6, -121.9)))

The map to the left shows this query in action using the FusionTablesLayer. The example shows all rows in the pizza table that fall within the bounding box specified with a lower-left coordinate of 37.2, -122.3 and a upper-right coordinate of 37.6, -121.9.

This is the code for the FusionTablesLayer: 

map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById('map_canvas'), {
   center: new google.maps.LatLng(37.4, -122.1),
   zoom: 10,
   mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
});
tableid = 297050;
layer = new google.maps.FusionTablesLayer(tableid, {
   query: "SELECT Address FROM " + tableid + " WHERE ST_INTERSECTS(Address, RECTANGLE(LATLNG(37.3, -122.3), LATLNG(37.6, -121.9)))",
   map: map   
});

We can also find the 10 features closest to a particular coordinate, such as the latitude, longitude coordinate of your house or a major city center. To find the 10 nearest features to Mountain View, CA at coordinate 37.4,-122.1., we use the syntax: 

SELECT * FROM 297050 ORDER BY ST_DISTANCE(Address, LATLNG(37.4, -122.1)) LIMIT 10

These 2 examples demonstrate how to create a store locator-like map, but the possibilities are endless! You could create an application that finds the most popular bike trail routes in your area or enable crowd sourcing to identify roads that might need more street lamps.

To learn more about the full spatial query offering in Fusion Tables, please see the Fusion Tables documentation. You can also join the Fusion Tables User Group to receive announcements about new features or post questions you might have about Fusion Tables. Or follow us on Twitter: @GoogleFT. And, most importantly, have fun creating awesome apps!

Posted by Kathryn Hurley, Google Geo Developer Relations

Clouse Encounters of the Semantic Kind

Explorers are we intrepid and bold
It was bound to happen. Some time ago I got curious about the whole semantic web thing. Working on the geoportal extension at ESRI, we’re looking for ways to improve connecting users with producers of geospatial resources. With the advent of systems of systems (although sometimes feeling like turtles all the way down), assuming that a single catalog will do the trick is not an option. So I embarked on a journey into the world of linked data, RDF, and all the fun that comes with that

Out in the world amongst wonders untold
A couple months ago, I got invited to participate and present in a workshop at WMO about information access enablers. Tim Berners Lee suggested to the organizer to look into the RDF model as a way to allow linking data across organizations.

Equipped with a wit, a map, and a snack
So after seeing data.gov experimenting with SPARQL I felt it time to do some experimenting myself. Got some content from data.gov through the REST interface provided by geodata.gov (all 270,000+ geospatial datasets in data.gov actually are registered in geodata.gov and data.gov reuses this content through a web service. how gov 2.0 is that!), downloaded joseki, generated a Turtle file of the catalog, and had my own SPARQL server up and running. All while flying from Amsterdam to DC on my way from WMO to the Gov 2.0 Expo.

We’re searching for fun, and we’re on the right track
At Gov 2.0 I got a unique chance to sit down with TBL and discuss some of our work. You just don’t pass on an opportunity like that! INFORMATION.ZIP. Later that day TBL met with Jack and it suffices to say that SPARQs flew through the room (pun intended). How to model spatial relations in RDF? How to handle relations that aren’t explicitly expressed but are determined on-the-fly as a result of some question? What does ‘nearby’ actually mean?

Like any meeting with your professor at college, you leave said meeting with more work than you entered… I loaded various w3c documents, RFCs, and more prior to board the airplane for California.We’re just starting to learn the possibilities of RDF, SPARQL. Providing a text box for someone to fill out an obscure query is not enough. But there already are some good examples available, such as the site This We Know.

to be continued…