Open Source

Nokia is showing off its tie-in with the upcoming Batman movie. This preview seems to be related to this upcoming game. CLAIM GOTHAM CITY Join the battle for Gotham City in this real time, location-based The Dark Knight Rises challenge, powered by Foursquare and exclusive to Nokia. Build a profile, choose to fight for Bane or Batman, and start checking-in to claim locations for your side. Then continue the fight as you attack your enemy’s territories or defend your own, either by yourself or in groups. And receive updates with a dedicated Live Tile on your Nokia Lumia 900 homescreen. The 3D Gotham City mapping is at http://www.nokiaconnects.com/exploregothamcity/ You have to log in with a Facebook account and agree to “like” Nokia’s page for access.

Matt Zook, Ate Poorthuis, and Monica Stephens explain the exciting event they hosted in Manhattan, Iron Sheep. Loosely based off the popular television show, Iron Chef, Iron Sheep was a map hacking event where instead of editable ingredients, teams are given geo-coded data and asked to create

Here is an introduction to Directions Magazine's Location Intelligence and the Oracle Spatial User Conference. Directions Magazine and Oracle are collaborating to offer consecutive events over two days in Washington, DC. First, on May 22, the LI Conference will offer a multi-track program exploring the latest industry trends. Then, on May 23, the Oracle Spatial User Conference will offer a day of technical deep dives and use case sessions around Oracle's spatial technologies. Attendees may attend either event on its own, or both together. Held in an exclusive venue in Washington, DC, both events will include tracks of value to senior management, C-level directors, as well as developers. For more information and the complete agenda, go to: http://www.locationintelligence.net

This video demonstrates a multi-agent traffic simulation for the scenario of an emergency indoor evacuation. As a simulation framework MATSim (http://www.matsim.org) is utilized. The required files (network, agents etc.) are automatically generated from volunteered geographic information (VGI) of OpenStreetMap. The data in OSM is mapped according to the IndoorOSM mapping proposal (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IndoorOSM). The use case buildings consists of four floors with three bigger (lecture) rooms and several offices. The scenario assumes that the building is fully occupied, that is all lecture rooms and offices are occupied, which results in a total number of 313 agents. All agents are routed to one single building exit, thus the scenario describes a organized and structured evacuation. 100 simulation iterations have been conducted, whereby this video features iterations zero, 50 and 100. http://giscience.uni-hd.de

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 435 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that

This video shows all edits made to the OpenStreetMap project in 2011. OpenStreetMap is a free geographic database that anyone can edit; it's like the wikipedia of mapping data. This animation shows all additions and modifications of nodes (white flashes) and cumulative edits (purple) in 2011. It gives a good overview of the effort that 1000s of contributors put in to make OpenStreetMap the best source of mapping data. This animation has been made by Derick Rethans entirely out of free and open source software. The added data is parsed and rendered by PHP and its extension, and the mapping and animation itself with POV-Ray. It's licensed under a Creative Commons license.

An animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world and this animation displays a white flash each time a way is entered or updated. Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data.

As head of the Defense Department’s best-known research branch, Regina Dugan oversees the agency’s technological engine. Its mandate: “The prevention and creation of strategic surprise.” In a Wednesday morning session at D9, Dugan discussed security on the civilian Internet, explosive detection, homomorphic encryption and how DoD relates to the tech industry. Below, some highlights from the session on what’s sometimes described as “the coolest agency you’ve never heard of.” The interview was hosted by Walt Mossberg.

Today, there are hundreds of volunteers in more than 50 countries creating maps of crises around the world, using a system that incorporates the lessons learned in Haiti. Alison Stewart reports on this worldwide network of volunteers – regular people — using a breakthrough technology to help others.

Data visualization of global Android device activations from October 2008 to January 2011.