The Washington Metro system has announced that it’s going to support data published in the Google Transit data format – an open, published format for posting schedules and stops. The Metro’s decision followed an online petition drive last fall. The drive was started by riders that were frustrated when talks between the Metro and Google to add the Metro data to Google Transit broke down. Google Transit has more than 115 agencies on the system now, but according to the Washington Post, the talks broke down over liability. The Metro will make the data available to anyone that agree to it’s terms.
So where is SEPTA in all this? They won’t agree to give Google their data, but the difference is that they won’t agree to give the data to the public either. Imagine how great iSEPTA or other, unimagined applications could be with structured data and locations published by SEPTA. And SEPTA has even more than most transit agencies – they’ve got GPS feeds on every bus!! Would you like to see it change? The list of board members and their address is online.
We’ve been running a free public lookup service based on our Cicero API for the past year or so. It enabled people to enter an address in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand and display the elected officials that represented them. We’ve been working on an updated version and launched it on Friday. This new version adds some features and highlights some of the changes we’ve made to Cicero in the past year including:
- Watershed boundaries for the U.S. at the HUC-2, HUC-4, HUC-6 and HUC-8 levels
- County boundaries for the U.S.
- School district boundaries for the U.S.
- New cities
- We’ve changed our map boundary display services to that it can be more easily mashed up with GoogleMaps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, ArcGIS Server or other web mapping systems. We’ve also added transparency, color and boundary styling control.
- Changed the layout so it’s easier to read and will display faster
- Did some re-skinning of the graphic design
And we are adding more data all the time. We’re currently at almost 10,000 legislative boundaries, more than 11,000 elected officials and almost 15,000 non-legislative boundaries (watersheds, police districts, etc.) I’m pretty excited about the new public version of Cicero and we are continuing to think about new ways we can enhance the data and highlight capabilities of the API. Do you have ideas? What’s the next city, state or country we should add? Are there other features we should add to the API or the Live verson? Check it out and let us know.
Screenshot of Cicero Live
In the closing days of February, Microsoft announced that it had filed suit against navigation device maker, TomTom, for violation of certain patents (I’m a bit late – I just found out last week). There has been much speculation since about why they are taking this action at this particular point in time. DirectionsMag did a podcast on the subject last week. Joe and Adena suggested that motivations might include: a) a bid to make a low-cost takeover of TomTom, which is heavily burdened with debt from its acquisition of TeleAtlas; b) an initial shot at leveraging its huge patent portfolio. The open source world has been particularly fixated on the latter possibility, with Slashdotters quickly suggesting that this was an opening salvo directed at Linux by the newly elevated corporate vice president, Horacio Gutierrez. While Linux is not named in the Microsoft filing, some of the patents in question involve file access protocols in TomTom devices that use the Linux kernel. Microsoft denies that any open source software is the target, but I can see why the move would make the OS community nervous.
However, in a conversation with Russ Nelson at yesterday’s Philly OpenStreetMap meetup, I made the following suggestion that I’ll summarize here. Last September, Google announced that it has moved to exclusively using TeleAtlas street data for all of its online map products. This had already been the case in the GoogleMaps API, but autumn saw the Navteq data was dropped from the browser tools and mobile products as well (probably due to the acquisition of Navteq by Nokia). I’m wondering if the target of Microsoft’s patent move is not TomTom itself but rather the TeleAtlas unit, which would give it a global street database as well as leverage over Google and many other enterprises. If this turns out to be the case, I would speculate that we will likely see greatly increased attention to OpenStreetMap from many directions and perhaps a major investment in the project by Google and others.
Or, perhaps a cigar is just a cigar, and MS is simply going after TomTom because it’s a large commercial firm infringing on its file system and navigation patents. Given the customary speed of patent suits, it may be a while before we know.
Nice article by Alex Willmer on potential successors to the shapefile and why we need one. He’s right about the File Geodatabase. It would be a good option if the format were published. But SpatiaLite seems in its infancy, at this point, and the Personal Geodatabase wouldn’t work on non-Windows systems, even if it were published. We’ve labored under the limitations of the shapefile for some years. It’s time for something new.
Richard Florida (Rise of the Creative Class) has an interview and article in the Atlantic on how the financial meltdown is likely to affect the geography of human settlement in the United States. Following on his point in an earlier October 2005 article “The World is Spiky“) he argues that we should be optimistic about the outcome of what will essentially be a major realignment of the geographic distribution of prosperity and innovation, but that there will be winners and losers. There will be enormous losses in many parts of the country, but the major mega-cities will likely thrive in the aftermath and grow. Home ownership rates will decline (with a more mobile population of renters providing greater labor flexibility), and both innovation and wealth will be attracted to increasingly dense nodes in networks of creative professionals. His prescription for accelerating the changes: liberal zoning to densify urban core and surban ring, investment in rail, congestion pricing on roads, and an end to the tax deduction for mortgage interest. The article is nicely decorated in the online magazine with an interactive map displaying geographic distribution (with time slider bar, no less) of patents, income and population. The concentration and increase in patents is an interesting story, though I’m not sure the income or population ones necessarily back up his story.
As a resident and homeowner in a large post-industrial American city and a member of the so-called “creative class”, I’ve always found Mr. Florida’s arguments seductive. However, I was also intrigued by an article in The Economist this week, making the case (with a map of the distribution of retirees) that communities in California that had fewer young people, opposed new development, had lower populations of renters and more retirees were more stable and had experienced little or no economic decline.
