glennon

Mapzen was part of Samsung.

Erik Klemetti, an assistant professor of Geosciences at Denison University, wrote a response in Discover Magazine after news outlets reported about the NASA project in August. His article discusses the notion of an overdue Yellowstone eruption, the context for the NASA exercise, and the state of existing technology. Klemetti concludes, "It is a fun science fiction short story...but it isn’t any sort of real plan to save the planet from Yellowstone." http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/rockyplanet/2017/08/31/225...

As an aside, I hold a Master's in Geoscience with an emphasis in hydrogeology, and have studied the Yellowstone geothermal system since about 2000. The NASA thought exercise is certainly worth considering in the very long term, and we should aspire to advance technology and our understanding of the associated environmental systems to afford it.

However, more immediately, there has been immense political pressure to allow geothermal energy exploitation outside the national park -- with unknown and poorly understood consequences for the geysers and thermal system inside the park. In 1994, a law that would cease any nearby geothermal drilling if Old Faithful Geyser was disrupted failed to pass in Congress. I worry that this type of article, the original post, is being floated to promote that drilling agenda: a near-term excuse for private industry gains under the guise of saving humanity and at the expense of one of the world's most fantastic landscapes.

For five-letter .com domain names sold within the last 12 months, here are some public sale prices: place.com $550,000; asset.com $406,000; sandy.com $46,100; hours.com $31,000; sleek.com $30,000; patty.com $21,000; drove.com $18,500; these.com $14,100; vents.com $5,500; swore.com $5,450

@thebiglebrewski -- do you have a link or reference to the regulations of concern? I did a quick web search and did not find anything relevant.

The new map appears to be emphasizing the road network and user-generated overlays; i.e., pick up, drop off, and (soon) people locations. There is less label contrast, and while that could be proven scientifically, it does not make the map "better" or "worse". Its appropriateness depends on how use case success is measured. Contrasting the 2.5 star app rating, tweets about the new UI show 20 to 1 approval. I agree with you, though -- I would love to know how the new map was tested.

This pointed me to another story about reconciling the jagged boundary and 160+ Indian/Bangladesh enclaves along that border. The story notes: "The area contained the only third-order enclave in the entire world. It was literally an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by another state." Cool maps in the article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/06...

The http://www.opentripplanner.org project is working on open multimodal routing too, and they have an associated Android app. Starting with OTP and Mapzen, it is good to finally see the first steps toward commercial-grade routing implementations on open data.

The map's creators, Viegas and Wattenberg, gave a talk on how they made the visualization at the Eyeo Festival 2012 -- https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=16m55s . They show the experiments that took them from static vector fields to the fading brushstrokes analogy: Static vector field: https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=20m34s | Particles: https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=21m16s | Particles with geographic outlines: https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=21m47s | Warping blocks: https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=22m21s | Static brush strokes: https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=23m16s | Fading brushstrokes: https://vimeo.com/48625144#t=24m57s

If you are ever looking for geyser data, I helped build an ODbL database of observations -- http://geysertimes.org ; API: http://www.geysertimes.org/api/v3/docs/index.html. We use the data to predict geyser eruptions when enough data are available. For instance, here's the next prediction for Old Faithful (JSON / unix epoch): http://www.geysertimes.org/api/v3//predictions_latest/2 -or- (cleaned up): http://geysertimes.org/predictions.php

You make a great point about engineering. The interaction of algorithms/techniques and the database, as well as computational infrastructure and UI/UX, are all significant areas of differentiation. I still disagree about algorithms themselves as a differentiator -- everyone has access to excellent shortest path algorithms already. Other geospatial optimizations (scheduling, circuits, flows, etc) are a different story; as represented by the many scientific disciplines that pursue those problems: operations research, graph theory, network science, location science, etc.

+1 ...and open source under Apache License 2.0 :)

@karussell,

For a public source, Dennis Luxen updated his Linkedin profile.

Thanks for adding your knowledge about the internals of Valhalla code.

For speedy street routing, the Open Source Routing Machine: http://project-osrm.org/ Like Google's proprietary routing engine, it leverages the scale of local and regional travel (via contraction hierarchies, arterial travel is suited for precomputed cacheing); result: the system can be tuned to give near instantaneous results. OSRM had been led by Dennis Luxen of Mapbox, though he just moved to Apple. The OP (Mapzen's Valhalla) appears to have a similar approach as OSRM. Good libraries for other scenarios exist; e.g., cycling and multimodal planning -- see: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing and OpenTripPlanner https://github.com/opentripplanner/OpenTripPlanner

There's an academic Thesis on the principles of contraction hierarchies that is worth a look if you're in this space. http://algo2.iti.kit.edu/documents/routeplanning/geisberger_... My favorite is actually a Master's thesis that steps through the process of using contraction hierarchies to build a routing engine (MoNav) on OpenStreetMap data. https://code.google.com/p/monav/downloads/detail?name=thesis...

For nuanced or complex problems, set up your objectives and constraints against a good solver: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_optimization_software I'm partial to Google's OR Tools https://github.com/google/or-tools (Apache License).

Depends on the application. The developers that made Valhalla (Mapzen) recently hired my doctoral program office mate Indy Hurt to answer some aspects of that question. She's on Twitter at @indymapper. Elsewhere in academia, Muki Haklay has been studying the problem -- here's a link to one of his original papers that can provide a seed to find his more recent work: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfamha/OSM%20data%20analysis%20070808...

There are also numerous dev gatherings that examine OSM applications and data quality. One starts in a few days: http://stateofthemap.us/program/ You might check out the program and see if your application area is addressed.

Summary: OSM data offers the best free geospatial vector data available. It is a good starting point. For serious commercial applications, however, the data are rarely ready "out of the box". You will almost certainly need to improve/transform/annotate the data for your own purposes. Keep in mind that consequential improvements are expected to be submitted back to the OSM project.

The OSRM routing engine appears to focus on contraction hierarchies; is that also the case for Valhalla? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_hierarchies

Glancing at the Valhalla repos, it looks like the MIT license across the board: https://github.com/valhalla ; https://github.com/valhalla/thor/blob/master/COPYING ; https://github.com/valhalla/chef-valhalla/blob/master/LICENS... ; etc...

Also, it's not so much that the routing engines are proprietary -- the best ones are not. The underlying databases are the secret sauce.

Build something awesome. Arbitrary rules vanish when people believe they can make more money with you (than from those that followed the rules).

Invite or not-- if you applied with an interesting demo or product, and you're able to share it, please do. Would love to see what's cooking.

Every .co I checked was down at 13:10 PST. I was starting to diagnose when everything returned by 13:20. Los Angeles.

This wikipedia table lists top level domains; if you click on an individual domain, the associated article usually includes restrictions, if any: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_doma... Otherwise, I don't know of a simple definitive list.

To be Mr. Know-it-All, these types of names are often referred to as domain hacks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack

I was happy to grab dra.in a few years ago, though I wish I had bra.in.

Doctor_Fegg makes a good point. The OSM Legal FAQ states: "For a browsable electronic map (e.g. embedded in a web page or mobile phone application), the credit should appear in the corner of the map, as commonly seen with map APIs/libraries such as Google Maps." Link: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3a._I_would_lik...

Perhaps add a "date added" for each project, and allow sorting of projects new-to-old.

Congratulations! Good luck on the interview. Please share what you can when you can.

Since Nissan is the only major international company unable to acquire their first choice of domain, it appears an outlier. The lesson perhaps is that the market, coupled with the dispute resolution system, works well with respect to web domains.

"Among the top 5,000 global sites, .com addresses are in the minority"

Could you provide a source for this? I just picked a random top website page (http://stuffgate.com/stuff/website/top-1000-sites) and found that 637 of their top 1000 are .com. It appears their rankings are from Alexa.

Not to downplay the real security concerns, but the mortar attack from geotagged photos almost certainly did not happen.

Here is a March 2012 post from a skeptic about the mortar story: http://www.spacerogue.net/wordpress/?m=201203

It's also worth noting that there are no contemporary 2007 accounts of the incident. The wikipedia listing of aircraft losses in the Iraq War lists contemporary sources for every incident except for this four helicopter attack -- Wikipedia lists the 2012 geotagging source Steve Warren. This is the Internet though, so I'll email Mr. Warren and see if I can get his citation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_and...

Here's a few links about the open source Mapbox iOS SDK: http://mapbox.com/mobile/

Installation/Guide http://mapbox.com/mapbox-ios-sdk/

Github Repo https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-ios-sdk

Contributions from individuals unwilling to accept the project's move from CC-BY-SA 2.0 to Open Database License (OdbL) 1.0 are being redacted. OSM reports that less than 1% of data will be removed. http://twitter.com/harry_wood has created a live map of the bot's progress: http://harrywood.dev.openstreetmap.org/license-change/botpro...

There's an interesting commentary about the acquisition by James Fee. http://spatiallyadjusted.com/2012/07/10/esri-eliminates-geoi... He argues that, "...there is one company in that (geospatial govt contractor) space and it is Esri. Either you work with them or you don’t work at all."