photo: lake mist
MySQL offers ENVELOPE() to find the minimum bounding rectangle of a geometric object.
The result is a polygon with four segments, defined by five points. It took me a while to make sense of it, partially because the only documentation that I’ve run across so far for POLYGON() syntax is in the ENVELOPE() function mentioned above. [...]
It’s MySQL spatial data week here, though I am spreading out the posts to, um, ease the pain (or boredom). Anyway, here are some commands/functions I don’t want to forget about later:
Start with an existing table called geometry, add a spatial column and index it:
ALTER TABLE GEOMETRY ADD coord POINT NOT NULL;
CREATE SPATIAL INDEX coord [...]
MySQL has some powerful, and perhaps underused spatial extensions, but the most interesting functions are still unimplemented: “Note: Currently, MySQL does not implement these functions…”
Among those as-yet unimplemented functions is DISTANCE(). Alternatives can be found here and here, though neither is clean or simple. I wonder if a simple MBRContains() is good enough, though…
Plazes, a kinda-cool, formerly networked-based geolocation tool has just been revamped. They’ve been promoting this change for over a month (I got a cool invite to the launch party, but couldn’t make the flight to Germany), and they’re continuing the push now that it’s live. I’ve used the new service for a few days, the [...]
In yet more geolocation news, beermapping.com’s maps to breweries will make my travel planning easier, and my travels boozier.
Hey, it’s casual Friday, take off early and go find a new brewpub for lunch.
beermapping.com, brew maps, breweries, brewery, brewpub, casual friday, geolocation, mapping, maps
Wearing the badge “still beta,” Plazes, the free, network-based geolocation service, now sports a new coat of paint. Among the improvements is the Flash-based badge (above) and a much improved frontpage/dashboard that combines the map of known locations with the map of active users, formerly two separate screens.
On the downside, I sort of miss the [...]
Engadget alerted me to this GPS data logger from Spark Fun Electronics.
The device records up to 440 hours of data to a 256MB SD card in either a simple text file or KML-compatible format that you can display in Google Earth.
I like it, I want one (actually, I want three, and I’ll eventually post [...]
This post started with Ryan sending me this link demonstrating a KML overlay of county borders of his bifurcated state in Google Maps.
Then I found this Roundup of Google’s Geo Developer Day (btw, I so wanted to be at Where 2.0) with tales of the new geocoding feature of the Google Maps API, more details [...]
Here’s an interesting GeoPlace.com article on open source GIS tools, including GIS extensions to PosgreSQL and MySQL. Via The Map Room.
tags: geo world, geocode, geocoding, geographic information system, geography, geolocation, gis, gis development, gis guide, gis tools, map room, mapping, mysql, open source, open source gis, open source tools
I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more.
My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the “maps.google” [...]
Old news from Gizmodo and Wi-Fi Networking News (quoting WiFi NN):
Skyhook has assembled a database of information about 1.5 million access points across 25 major cities in the U.S. by driving every street in every city. Their software records multiple data points per sample for directionality. Fire up their software on a laptop, and it [...]
Who doesn’t love tagging? No, tagging as in annotating, not graffiti. Anyway, Rixome is the latest among a bunch of plans/projects to enable tagging of geographic spaces/real-life environments.
The good people at We Make Money Not Art had this in their post:
rixome is a network and a tool that turns mobile screens into windows that show [...]
Last week I got excited about the as-yet unreleased geolocation API for BBC Backstage. Now Larry D. Larsen of the Poynter Institute is excited too. In a post titled The Future of News (… Hint: GPS) he talks about putting news in geographic context with geolocation tags.
Eventually, clicking an article in a news/Google Map hybrid [...]
Geolocation by GPS my be the most straightforward approach, but we mustn’t forget the other ways to get lat/lon coordinates.
All current cell phones support aGPS positioning to comply with federal E-911 mandates, but not all phones make it easy for the user to get that information out of them. Still, some do and GPS-enabled moblogging [...]
The APIs aren’t yet out, but the BBC has already won me over with their Backstage BBC concept. Of course, I’m a fan of anything with an API, but the real deal here is that it appears they’re planning on releasing a “query by geo-location data” API — and I’m all a gaga about about [...]
