Posts Tagged: place

Oh people of the interwebs; you are indeed a wondrous thing. If you build something and put it up on the internet, you’ve no expectation that anyone will see it, let alone look at it. But it appears that the combination of innuendo and some vaguely sounding rude place names (actually with some very rude… Read more »

No-one can really define what being British is, though many have tried. One thing that lots of people do seem to agree on is that part of being British is a love for and an appreciation of the British sense of humour. This can be roughly and with a sweeping generalisation said to consist of… Read more »

I once wrote two posts saying that people are mistaking the context (location) for the end game and that location is (also) a key context, but most people don’t know this. Two years or so after I wrote those posts, the concept of location based mobile services and location based apps shows no sign of… Read more »

As a precursor to last week’s mashup* Digital Trends event, I chatted to Paul Squires of Imperica about my location trends in more detail than the mashup* format would have allowed for. The write-up from that interview is now up on Imperica’s web site and, thanks to them adopting a Creative Commons  license, I’m able… Read more »

With Nokia, Google, Facebook and a whole host of other players recognising the inherent value in the concept of Places and Points Of Interest (POIs), it’s good to see that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body of the Web, is getting involved. On the 30th. September 2010, the W3C Points Of Interest… Read more »

In my recent talk to the British Computer Society’s Geospatial Specialist Group, I touched on the “race to own the Place Space“. While the more traditional geographic data providers, such as Navteq and Tele Atlas are working away adding Points Of Interest to their data sets, it’s the smaller, social location startups, that are getting… Read more »

I’ve been thinking a lot about the etymology of place names recently. That’s a slightly verbose way of saying that I’ve been thinking about the origin of place names and where they come from. Take London for example. That’s pretty easy as most sources of information seem to agree that London derives from Londinium, the… Read more »

We take the art of geographic lookup for granted these days; type a place name into a form on a web site or feed it into a web service API and hey presto! Most of the time you’ll be told whether or not the place name is valid or not and, in case there’s more… Read more »

It’s time to put the Theory of Stuff out to pasture. It’s had a good life. It’s appeared in 5 of my talk decks (or so Spotlight tells me), in 3 of my blog posts and continues to generate hits on my blog (or so my analytics tells me). When I tell people I’m going… Read more »

Longitude and latitude have been formally used as a geographic coordinate system offset from the Greenwich Meridian since the International Meridian Conference of 1884 in Washington D.C. As a spatial coordinate system, longitude (abbreviated as φ, or phi) and latitude ( λ, or lambda) work very well in defining a point on the surface of the Earth…. Read more »