Webware

As expected, Mozilla Labs released a Firefox plug-in Tuesday called Geode that lets Web sites figure out a person's approximate geographic location and use it in online services--as long as you grant the software permission to access the information.

Geode, a preview of technology to arrive in Firefox 3.1, taps into technology called Loki from Skyhook that deduces a computer's location from the signals of nearby wireless networks, according to a Mozilla Labs blog post on Geode.

To show the technology off, Mozilla shared an application called Food Finder that shows the user's approximate location and nearby dining establishments. Others that work with the technology are Pownce, a microblogging site that can record users' locations as they post notes or photos, and Yahoo's Fire Eagle, which lets users govern which applications get access to their location information.

There's one thing I find interesting about the general thrust of this technology. The Internet has broken down geographic barriers, letting people stay in touch with high school buddies, tap into a global market for used books, and find comrades with shared interests such as speaking Latin or photographing mating insects.

But a lot of new work on the Net is trying to unlock the location information. After all, people often need to keep from getting lost or to find their friends at the concert. And of course, plenty of advertisers would like to target ads at people who are likely to walk past a storefront.

Although Geode today uses Skyhook's service, Firefox 3.1 will be configurable to select other options as well, such as a GPS device, Mozilla said.

The Food Finder demonstration application showed my location, almost, with a blue dot, and nearby pastry shops listed at Yelp.

(Credit: CNET News)

Mozilla envisions more than just more intelligent online maps. Its other examples: local news based on where a person actually is located, a Web site log-in process that only works if a person is at a specific location, and an RSS feed reader that changes what subscriptions it shows users depending on whether they're at work or home.

Web designers who want to take advantage of the feature can use the W3C's Geolocation Specification, currently in draft form.

Geode asks permission before letting a Web site use your geographic information.

(Credit: CNET News)

Mozilla Labs plans to announce a plug-in called Geode on Tuesday that gives the Firefox Web browser a better ability to understand and use geographic information on the Web.

Geode details at this stage remain sketchy, but here's the example used in the alert about the project: "With Geode, a user who is looking for restaurants while they are out of town will be able load up their favorite review site and find suggestions a couple blocks away and plot directions there."

Geotagging most commonly refers to photos with geographic data stored within the file, but there are plenty of other cases, too. Many Wikipedia entries have geographic information encoded, and YouTube users also can geotag their videos.

There also are plenty of cases in which Web sites have geographic information such as a business address that's not formally encoded as geographic data. The gradual arrival of the semantic Web, in which descriptive elements help computers understand the data on a Web site, could expand that significantly.

The quintessential tools that make the geographic Web useful today are online maps. Those applications are getting more useful as mobile phones--especially GPS-enabled mobile phones--incorporate their use.

Flickr is now utilizing maps from the wiki-based Open Street Map project to improve the detail level on cities where Yahoo's maps fall short. The first city to get the treatment is Beijing in honor of the Olympics. Flickr has posted before and after shots and the difference is profound. What was once a brown blob now has streets, landmarks, and of course geotagged shots.

Despite the improvement in Flickr's world map, parent company Yahoo's maps, which power the rest of Flickr's world map cartography, have not been cross-updated to share the changes. Flickr is using the data from the Open Street Map project under a Creative Commons license called attribution-share alike which allows for free remixing and distribution of the data with proper links back to the sources. Yahoo is unlikely to adopt larger portions of the project's map for the sake of consistency, although it contributed aerial photography to the project back in late 2006.

The Open Street Map was launched in 2004 as an open project, allowing anyone with proper GPS data or local knowledge of a city to contribute to the map of the world. Like Wikipedia, it has groups of people working on various areas, to edit and maintain the cartography as cities change. Presumably we'll be seeing more data being ported over to other populated areas where Flickr users have had to geotag their shots without the aid of proper local maps.

Related: Geotagging in Flickr now faster, simpler

Flickr's previous map was nothing more than a blob. The new map is chock full of streets and local landmarks.

(Credit: Yahoo Inc. / CNET Networks)

On Friday, photo host Flickr introduced a slight tweak to the way users are able to geotag their photos.

Clicking on the "add to your map" option on the right side of any photo now pops up a mini Yahoo Map with an address finder. Previously, users were required to go into Flickr's somewhat complicated Organizr tool and add geotags en masse. If it's your first time using the Flickr map to geotag your photos, you'll still need to hit the Organizr, but only to change the initial privacy settings.

I've already used the system on a handful of photos, and it's far more efficient for one-off shots than using the Organizr tool. However, if you're planning to geotag three or more shots, it might be worth it to stick with the Organizr if only for its batch-editing capabilities.

To help speed up the process of tagging your photos with the new pop-over map, there's a new recommendation system that will suggest landmark locations or neighborhoods, based on where you've dragged your shot. If the system has any potentially overlapping areas, they'll be listed as suggestions that you can simply click on to re-map your shot. I found this to work well with things like parks or general neighborhoods, but for businesses you're out of luck.

On a side note, if you're an iPhone user and wondering why photos you've uploaded to Flickr via e-mail are not showing up on Flickr's map (despite having geocodes in the EXIF data) it seems some of that geodata is being stripped out by Apple before it hits Flickr. To upload shots from your phone without having that information stripped, you can use several third-party Flickr uploaders that tie into Flickr, like AirMe or Flickup.

You can now geo-tag photos right on top of any photo you're looking at. It'll also recommend places nearby in case you're trying to remember where you shot the picture.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

IM2GPS compares a sample photo (top left) to geotagged Flickr photos to find other similar shots (top right) to guess where the sample was taken.

(Credit: Carnegie Mellon University)

Thousands of others have taken the trouble to geotag their photos, so why should you have to jump through a lot of technical hoops to add location data to your pictures?

That's the upshot of a technique devised by Carnegie Mellon researchers and announced Wednesday. The technique, called IM2GPS, compares a single photo to the millions already on Flickr that already have latitude and longitude coordinates.

The algorithm looks at a photo's properties, such as textures, color distribution, and line patterns, then looks for matches at Flickr.

"We're not asking the computer to tell us what is depicted in the photo but to find other photos that look like it," said Alexei A. Efros, assistant professor of computer science and robotics, in a statement.

Efros also has been involved in photo research such as the scene completion technology that can patch over unsightly elements in a photo by drawing from similar ones stored at Flickr.

The researchers found they could locate sample photos within 200 kilometers for 16 percent of their test photos, which may not sound terribly useful, but it is 30 percent better than chance would predict, the university said. And that could still be useful for tasks such as forensic crime research or for guiding other image-processing tasks--for example identifying a taxi in Japan.

It worked more specifically at times, for example matching Paris' Notre Dame cathedral well, but the algorithm found Sydney's Opera House similar to a hotel in Mississippi and to a bridge in London.

Geotagging today is a complex task that typically requires a user to run specialized software that pulls location data from a GPS device's track log, then adds it to photos depending on the time each was taken. Geotagging isn't for the faint of heart today, though higher-end cameras from Canon and Nikon make it easier with the ability to plug a GPS directly into the camera, and camera makers have begun building GPS into some models.

Geotagging may seem abstruse, but it has potential advantages. You could find out just where that photo of the nice church in Ireland was taken even long after your vacation itinerary has faded from memory, for example.

Or with technology that converts geographic coordinates into actual place names, you could find your own photos or others' shots with ordinary search terms. For that latter challenge, Flickr is working to try to make it easier for users to identify in works the locations of their geotagged photos.

This brings some new meaning to the idea of local news: Google has added a new layer to Google Earth that shows Google News related to the area shown on the screen.

The search company announced the addition on its Lat Long blog about geographic matters.

Google Earth now can show Google News.

(Credit: Google)

"By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide," said Google product manager Brandon Badger.

I've been a fan of geotagging photos, but clearly the trend is much broader than that.

The Internet has made global news a reality, but there are several efforts under way to meet the demand for local news, too. Google News can be customized to show headlines from a given city, state, or ZIP code, and MetaCarta overlays links to local news on a Google map.

Google Earth is software that shows the planet, letting people zoom up close and show different layers of geographically relevant information. The company's online equivalent, Google Maps, is gradually growing more similar, gaining Google Earth's satellite views and its ability to show local photos, for example.

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Think of it as crowdsourced cartography.

In about three weeks, Yahoo plans to launch a project called Corrections in which users of the Flickr photo-sharing site can help with a thorny computing problem: providing the name of the place where a photo was taken.

Flickr's geo expert, Dan Catt, speaks at Where 2.0.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Flickr has 68 million photos that have been "geotagged" with latitude and longitude coordinates, said Dan Catt, who works on geographic work at Flickr, in a speech at the Where 2.0 conference here. Coordinates are fine for computers, but human beings looking at a Web site generally prefer place names to numbers.

The trouble for Flickr is that it's difficult to actually retrieve a place name for a given set of coordinates, a task called reverse geocoding. One problem, for example, is that not everyone agrees where one neighborhood ends and another begins.

With the new feature, Flickr will offer its best assessment of where a photo was taken, then let users fix it, Catt said. The site will start with offering information at the neighborhood level, but if a user doesn't agree, it will gradually step back to larger-scale regions.

"If you're not happy with what we're saying, tell us, and we'll learn from that," Catt said in an interview after his talk.

The service will remember a user's settings, so a given location that's one person's Lower Haight San Francisco neighborhood could be another's Upper Haight. As more people weigh in with what the name for a given location actually is, Yahoo will update its boundaries, Catt said.

Initially, Flickr will offer its own alternatives for a given area, but later, people will be able to type in the location, Catt added.

Most of the time the service should work fine, but geography can elicit passionate responses. "This will ruffle a lot of people's feathers," he predicted.

Yahoo is letting outside Web sites use information from its own catalog of geographic information, thus allowing programmers to employ the Yahoo data and services into their own applications.

The company now provides an interface to the data, said Dan Catt, an engineer and geotagging buff at Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site. The catalog gives locations a numeric identifier--where on Earth IDs, or WOEIDs, to various locations.

"Yahoo have opened up their geo database," Catt said in a blog entry. One specific example: the Sydney Opera House has the WOEID of 28717584.

The service is part of what Yahoo calls the Yahoo Internet Location Platform, a service currently in beta testing that's designed to help developers build geographic features into the Internet.

Expect more news on this at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, which begins in earnest on Tuesday in Burlingame, Calif. Yahoo will preview the location platform at the conference, according to the Yahoo Developer Network Web site. Catt is giving one of those speeches on Wednesday.

The service fits neatly into the Yahoo Open Services plan, aka YOS, under which the company is trying to make its Web site a foundation for other applications, either built directly on Yahoo properties or employing services over the network on outside sites.

The Yahoo Internet Location Platform provides programmers "with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world's geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner," the site said. "The Internet Location Platform is designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web."

According to documentation, there are about 6 million WOEIDs, including postal codes, cities, time zones, and suburbs. So far, though, natural features and bodies of water aren't included yet.

According to former Yahoo employee Simon Willison, Yahoo got the geographic data through its 2005 acquisition of WhereOnEarth.

The WOEID interface permits operations such as translating a place name from one language to another, looking up the WOEID for a landmark, and supplying a list of likely IDs that match a specific place.

It also can let programmers find the "parents" of a specific WOEID. For example, Hearst Castle's parent is the town of San Simeon, whose parent is San Luis Obispo County, whose parent is California, whose parent is the United States.

It also permits finding neighbors--for example, towns near other towns or countries near other countries. It doesn't assign WOEIDs down to the level of addresses, though.

(Via Read Write Web)

LAS VEGAS--A company called Geotate hopes to use an Internet service to lower a significant barrier to the technologically challenging practice of geotagging.

Geotagging, which uses a global positioning system to attach location data to photos to build in more descriptive data, is at present a difficult and largely manual process appealing mostly to serious photo enthusiasts. That's largely because it's too hard right now to build GPS directly into a camera for automated geotagging, so photographers must carry a separate GPS device and then marry the location data to the photos after the fact.

But Geotate, which NXP Software is in the process of spinning off, thinks it has an answer to some of the GPS integration difficulties for camera makers. Here's how it works, according to product manager Paul Gough, who described the technique Wednesday at the Photo Marketing Association trade show here.

First, a camera has to include a built-in GPS radio or have one attached externally to its flash hot-shoe. When a photo is taken, the camera or an external device records about 2 milliseconds' worth of GPS signal data.

That's not enough for the camera to get a location fix; one of the big problems of geotagging is that GPS receivers often take 30 seconds to get their first fix. Geotate's method, though, relies on a central server that later can figure out the location information from just that brief record of GPS data by comparing it to its detailed records of GPS satellite positions.

Geotate today has Windows software that handles communication with its server, and that software then embeds the location data in JPEG images. (It doesn't support raw images or Mac OS X at this point.)

Eventually, Gough said, he hopes camera makers will license the technology to build their own interfaces. Geotate plans to license an API (application programming interface) that could give camera customers access to the service for a particular camera or for a subscription, he said.

Geotate also announced a partnership Wednesday with a New Zealand company, Rakon Limited, to integrate its software with Rakon's GPS radio hardware. The radio measures 1/4 inch by 1/5 inch.