… an interesting tool that allows a visual comparison of the coverage of various maps, e.g. google maps vs. open streetmap (OSM). Based on people’s enthusiasm, in many (local) places the OSM coverage is much deeper/exacter. However, with respect to quality necessary for routing and navigation applications, OSM in its current status will not be sufficient.
Comparing google maps (left) and open streetmap (right)
The tool for comparison is available at
http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=googlemap&mt1=mapnik&lon=0.00012&lat=0.00043&zoom=17
it points at Techno-Z, home of Salzburg Research. One can see that buildings, local paths, etc. are covered much better in OSM than in google maps. Still, this is what we as human users interpret; software/machine readability can be – and is! – quite different.
January 19th, 2009
… The sixth conference on alpine space, orientation and navigation took place November 20-21, 2008, in Salzburg. FFG (Dr. Klaffenböck) and Salzburg Research were the organisers. Some 60 people attended the event.
The program can be found here.
November 21st, 2008
Today we celebrated the fifth anniversary of Salzburg NewMediaLab, a so-called industrial competence centre (it was the first competence centre in Salzburg). Peter Reiser principial field technologist of Sun Microsystems gave an excellent key note on community equity. See http://www.slideshare.net/peterreiser/how-to-build-vibrant-communities-presentation?type=powerpoint for the slides.
The key messages I personally took from his talk
- He really believes in sharing vs. ownership of knowledge (sharing is power vs. knowledge is power)
- He argued that there was a shift from “know-how” to “know-how knows how”
- and he believes that IT-support for processes will be less important. Which is probably the only thing in his talk that I would agree with.
BTW: Salzburg Research has a strong relationship wih Sun Microsystems. We hosted a SunTREC, an AAJC, got awarded a Sun Center of Excellence for map-based online participation and we are in the process of establishing a follow-up agreement for a CoE for a “Mobility Lab – A Lab on Engineering of Location-based Systems”.
October 2nd, 2008
