Notes"Spatial indexing is increasingly important as more and more data and applications are geospatially-enabled. Efficiently querying geospatial data, however, is a considerable challenge: because the data is two-dimensional (or sometimes, more), you can't use standard indexing techniques to query on position. Spatial indexes solve this through a variety of techniques. In this post, we'll cover several - quadtrees, geohashes (not to be confused with geohashing), and space-filling curves - and reveal how they're all interrelated."Unfurl
Notes"We’ve just released a brand new API for BlockChalk. It’s very easy to learn and use: requests are made via HTTP GET and POST, and data is provided in XML, JSON, and RSS formats.
These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services."Unfurl
Notes"As a new Pre owner, I was curious to learn to code for the Palm WebOS SDK (Mojo). Whenever I try to learn a new technology, I try to build a functional test project. So… what to build for WebOS? Since the Pre’s web browser doesn’t currently support the W3C Geolocation spec used by Flickr Nearby, I figured a good “Hello World” might be an application to get the GPS coordinates from the Pre, and then load the appropriate Flickr page for that location."Unfurl
Notes"Introducing Geode, an experimental add-on to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 ahead of the implementation of geolocation in a future product release. Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification so that developers can begin experimenting with enabling location-aware experiences using Firefox 3 today, and users can tell us what they think of the experience it provides. It includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data."Unfurl
Notes"With something like this it becomes trivial to leech this information without actually having to build a IP to Geo tool yourself. Since it’s in JavaScript instead of a dynamically constructed image you can either overwrite the document.write function wUnfurl
Notes"Here's a great idea: Twitter+Location+iPhone. Twinkle is just that; a Twitter client which taps into the iPhone's location finding feature to let you tune into tweets from nearby people."Unfurl
Notes"wikinear.com shows Wikipedia pages near you, based on your location according to Yahoo! Fire Eagle. The site is optimised for use on a mobile phone."Unfurl
Notes"Fitting with the principles of unobtrusive JavaScript, we’ll start with a semantically marked up list of restaurants, then use JavaScript to add the map, look up the restaurant locations and plot them as markers."Unfurl