I am looking for a map application with the following:
Windows based.
City/Town street maps are downloaded to computer (i.e. does not required a wireless internet connection to get the map images real-time).
Uses GPS on the computer via comport.
Allows me to visually track where I am on the map as I drive around.
We actually have written our own GPS application which uses ESRI shapefiles. Periodically we get complaints from customers saying the GPS is significantly "delayed" (i.e. the icon showing current location is 2-3 blocks behind the true location).
To help isolate whether it might be hardware related or our software, I would like to test alternative applications to see if they have the same delay.
I personally used Microsoft Streets and Trips on a couple of road trips. The mid-level package even comes with a GPS receiver.
If you just want tracking, then there are many applications, such as deLorme, and Microsoft's Street and Trips. S&T's big brother, MapPoint allows a programming interface, which could allow you to test various things.
None of the consumer products will support ESRI formats, although the business-oriented MapPoint can import Shapefiles using a third party add-in (yes I sell one, but there are others).
MapPoint and Streets&Trips both come with road data on DVD. The road data cannot be changed with a download.
Related
For a project at my university I have to collect information about Google Indoor Maps. I spent several hours searching information about how Google Indoor Navigation really works. I've found several links on how to create Google Floor Plans like this:
http://support.google.com/gmm/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1685896
And how you can improve location accuracy with the Google Maps Floor Plan Marker app:
http://support.google.com/gmm/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2667756&topic=1685871&ctx=topic
They say the app collects public broadcast data. But nowhere information about which information is collected and how. Several discussions here and a few articles I found say that google uses wifi-access points and the cellular antennas for indoor positioning. But I couldn't find any official information from Google, which I can use in my project.
Can you suggest me where I can find answers to the following questions:
How does the Google Maps Floor Plan Marker really work? Which information is collected and how? A official technical Google paper would be nice, so I can use that for my work.
How can I increase the accuracy of the Google indoor navigation, by adding Wifi Access Points, Bluetooth stations or other technology?
How can I add additional information like Emergency exits and toilets to a floor plan, so the user can navigate with his smartphone to this special points?
Is it possible to add information about rooms, so the user can tap with the finger on them to get additional information? For Example which department is situated in this room and so on?
I found a lot stuff about indoor positioning and indoor navigation. But nothing about how google uses them.
Thanks in advance.
This project just provides maps for indoor places. It doesn't do anything special to augment navigation in these places beyond the standard (GPS, WiFi, etc).
When they talk about (augmenting) positioning with Wifi and Cellular data, they are talking about the same stuff they use on the regular Google maps. This data is collected from cell tower info, and the Wifi stuff is sniffed from the Google street-view cars and then augmented by user-data as people with devices come into contact with these devices and send info back to Google.
It is not very accurate - or even accurate as GPS. It is kind of a "ballpark" estimate. For example, if a Google street-view car detected your WiFi signal when it drove by your house - if you had no GPS, and Google Maps saw your WiFi box, it could estimate that you were somewhere within a few hundred feet of where the Google Street View car detected the signal.
Not as accurate as GPS - but not too bad if you conciser within a few hundred feet better than "no idea". In short - these sources to not give you better or more refined positioning of indoor places. They would be good - for example - to be able to tell you that you are in that particular building if you were inside, and out of GPS coverage.
Indoor positioning uses WLAN interface. To estimate the real-time location of a user, location systems have to perform a number of steps and various calculations. The calculation of more than one distance from several Access Points (APs) could be used to estimate the exact
location.
The main principle states that signal strength at the receiver is inversely proportional to the square of the distance that the signal travels.
RSS fingerprinting method is used which is based on recording and sampling of patterns of radio signals in specific environment called as pattern recognition or fingerprinting.
Since this post is a little old I thought I would still add my thoughts. First of all you can make edits for your own custom maps using MyMaps. As the previous answers stated Google Maps uses cell data, wifi data, gps, etc for tracking. It can also use phone sensor data such as your accellerometer. With the current level of wifi infrastructure it can actually be quite accurate using a method of wifi fingerprinting (The more access points the more accurate it will be given they are effectively positioned). There are several scholarly articles demonstrating its viability down to a couple meters of accuracy. I would suggest reading an article on RSSI fingerprinting. Also check the google maps developer documentation for more detail on editing map information.
Also I was reading that they will be using light detection for additional indoor accuracy (not sure if implemented yet).
I'm currently developing a small webpage for a customer where i need a simple map with pins. It's really basic usage and the customer is going to hit the page maybe 50-100 times/month, what is a good service price-wise? I have tried contacting google, bing, and two local (swedish) providers, but the customer service is.. not good...
Your problem is that you say it's an "internal" project - I assume this means that it's not hosted on a publicly-accessible webpage?
For non-public sites, both Google and Bing require you to take out an enterprise licence agreement, which is normally prohibitively expensive for small businesses. (Licences are individually-negotitated, but think of the order of $10,000 per annum).
Alternatively, you could look at using the Leaflet JS map control (http://leaflet.cloudmade.com), displaying data from open street map (http://osm.org) - both of which are free and open source (and, in many cases, have higher quality data than either Bing or Google anyway)
ask about the new Bing Maps CRM licensing thats available, it may well meet your needs and be cost effective for you
Get location(lat/long) without GPS, just like my location feature in Google maps. I have Google Maps in my mobile (Sony Ericsson G502 without GPS). It works fine without GPS in India.
1.How Google finds my position?
2. When i am searching cellid in opencellid database, it has less number of records for India. but Google Maps works fine in my mobile(India)
3.Is Google uses opencellid database or its own?. if Google uses its own, shall we have access to it database
4.Is there any commercial cellid database for India?
The answer is that cellular phones use various location methods, most were introduced as part of E-911 (Enhanced 911) or equivalent emergency service for other countries (e.g. 999 in UK) or since.
I don't know if GSM or CDMA has any localization protocols or standards itself beyond whatever E-911 and such requires. So I doubt there is a general API for all mobile phones.
Mobile phone localization is done via:
plain GPS
Assisted-GPS
Cellular triangulation / multilateration
Cell (tower) identification (FCC/etc. cellular tower database lookup)
Enhanced Cell Identification (E-911)
Uplink-Time difference of arrival (U-TDOA)
Time-of-Arrival (TOA)
Angle of Arrival (AOA)
E-OTD (Enhanced-Observed Time Difference)
and/or a hybrid of these technologies and approaches.
(Src: Wikipedia / Mobile_phone_tracking)
These approaches vary in accuracy and precision from ~35 km (22 mi) to ~5-10 meters (16-32 ft) or better.
3.Is Google uses opencellid database or its own?.
It appears that they have their own database without a public documented API.
4.Is there any commercial cellid database for India?
I don't know.
Google almost certainly uses a proprietary database. They admit as much as:
This involves analyzing the Wi-Fi access points around you and your computer's IP address, and sending this information to a Google server to then be translated into a location that we can show on the map.
http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=153807
Google Street View cars have been known to collect data about wireless access points that could be used in such a database.
Skyhook offer an API for geolocating devices based on Cell ID, Wifi access points, and if available, GPS. The iPhone OS uses this to provide its CoreLocation functionality.
They have SDKs available for most mobile and desktop OSes. It's very good, but you'll have to speak to them about licensing.
As other posters have mentioned, both Skyhook and Google maintain proprietary databases of location information for WiFi SSIDs and cell tower IDs. I believe Geomena is trying to start an open database of located IDs, but that it doesn't yet have the breadth of coverage that the proprietary competitors have. Google also provides a simple client-side JavaScript interface for IP geolocation (called ClientLocation), which might be just accurate enough for some applications, and a wide variety of IP geolocation databases exist.
If your application is web-based, you can take advantage of the W3C Geolocation API, which abstracts away the particular geolocation technology and provides your website user-controlled access to whatever geolocation method the browser chooses to use. On the iPhone, Skyhook's database is used to locate the phone with cell tower or WiFi or GPS location; Firefox uses the Google Location Service, which uses WiFi triangulation and falls back on IP geolocation.
Using some abstraction layer (like the W3C API) can have real advantages if you want your application to work across different platforms which have their own location methods, if you want your application to degrade gracefully when only rough methods of geolocation are available and you want your application to get the advantages of additional precision as your customers upgrade to devices with GPS technology.
I am not familiar with the GIS (or map), but recently I have to do some work related to this field. I know some map providers: OpenStreetMap, CloudMadeMap, OpenCycleMap, OpenAerialMap ...
My questions is: Do those map providers have the same standards? I mean the tile size, zoom levels, scales for each zoom level and so on.
Is there any standard for open GIS? If yes, where can I find them or some one could give me some references or links?
Yes, all the services you mention, along with many others in the open-source GIS mapping world, share the same defacto "z/x/y.png tile standard". The tile numbering, zoom levels, scales and so on are all the same across the these providers.
The "standard" isn't official, but the OCG are formalizing the details under the acronym "TMS", unfortunately in an incompatible way with what is in practice (different origin for the tile numbering. Gah!)
The OpenStreetMap wiki has the best description of the numbering scheme. You can display such tiles in OpenLayers using the XYZ or OSM layers. Note that the projection for all these layers is "Spherical Mercator", aka EPSG:900913 or EPSG:3857.
I run the OpenCycleMap servers, and was the Technical Lead for CloudMade when we chose this scheme. Both were chosen to be identical to OpenStreetMap, which in turn was based on the scheme Google were using at the time.
I am also very new to GIS programming, but it seems GIS is heavily standardized. From the storage layer (WKT, WKB), to the server layer (WMS, WFS, SLD..). Try lookinh those up on wikipedia (I think I can't post this many links with my reputation?).
We started developing using the following open source stack: PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers and so far we are happy with our decision, everything fits together beautifully,
You might be interested in the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service (WMS) standard. It is a standard protocol for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet.
Consumers of web map services can "mash up" lots of different layers from different providers to create their own applications.
There are no exact standards regarding tile sizes, zoom levels and such because these are highly customizable.
There are technical standards regarding file, db and web service formats.
Some file formats of ESRI (i.e. Shapefiles) are de-facto standards, for better and for worse.
Others are open standards from the OGC, but don't expect to see all of these open formats in commercial products (i.e. even the ubiquitous KML format is not 100% supported in ESRI products).
There are two relevant OGC standards with regard to map tiling. The Web Map Tiling Service (WMTS) currently in candidate standard form and a proposed extension to WMS to add a cached/tiled version.
So the short answer is "no", there's no official standard yet.
The three major vendors have standardized on a defacto standard for tiling scheme's. A description of the scheme can be found here, among other places.
From what I know of the map providers you listed, they each have their own scheme... though I don't know for sure. You will likely have to check each individual provider for their tiling scheme. You will also need to make sure that their usage agreements let you use the tiles directly (as opposed to using any API they might provide).
This doesn't really speak to standards, but I thought it worth pointing out that the first three you mentioned, OpenStreetMap, CloudMadeMap, and OpenCycleMap, are all related projects.
OpenStreetMap is the project to collect the open mapping data, OpenCycleMap is an implementation that uses that data to a create a map tailored to Cyclists, and Cloudmade is a for-profit company founded by a number of the people who founded the OpenStreetMap project, and they also use its data.
When I wanted to add OpenStreetMap data to my website, I ended up using a (for now, free) tile serving service offered by Cloudmade. This saved me having to worry about generating tiles or serving them myself. I've had a good experience with it.
How do popular routing gps/phones/mapping web sites update their route information?
And do any phones send back data based on the users actual trip to allow the system to update route information?
What do you mean with "route information"? The map data they use to calculate routes is usually provided by companies Like NavTeq. They provide updates to the data on a regular base.
Concerning data collected by users, TomTom provides so called "IQ routes" which are based on actual traffic data. Meaning when you travel at 5am the system will likely suggest a different route compared to travelling during rush hour.
The required data was collected by the TomTom systems but AFAIK users have to manually upload it to TomTom or at least agree to provide the data when they do an online update of their system.
The two major players in this world are TeleAtlas, a TomTom subsidiary and NavTeq, a Nokia subsidiary.
IMO TomTom/TeleAtlas has the most advanced system. They operate a real-time system for measuring traffic flows, HD traffic. This takes into account data from other HD Traffic users, but also anonymixed data extracted from the GSM network. Now, in addition to the real-time view this provides, TeleAtlas also compiles a statistical average out of this; TomTom sells that as IQ routes.
Now it follows logically that if there's a lot of new traffic across a river, then probably someone built a bridge there ;)
In addition to HD Traffic and IQ Routes, TomTom also allows their users to report map erros and updates with MapShare. For many classes of changes (e.g. one-way roads or blocked roads, or changed roadnames), TomTom can use MapShare to immediately distribute updates for their maps without issuing a full map update. As a TomTom subsidiary, TeleAtlas presumably has access to these reported updates as well.