Map data is an essential part of my work. Often I find myself looking for raw map data, for instance of the counties of Norway in vector format, typically shape/kml or any other geo-data format. The Norwegian Mapping Authority has of course a lot of high-quality data available, additionally several (or all) governmental institutions in Norway can join a “community” of data creators and share the data among themselves. NTNU, the university I’m at, are fortunate enough to be part of this consortium although we do not contribute to the data.

This all seems to put the necessary foundation for finding fairly standard geodata – it should be easy to find, download and use fairly freely. However, that is not the situation. The system created for accessing the data has so good security that is is in practice inaccessible. When I finally find the right person who has credentials to log in – the system for finding the correct data is packed with forms which do not have any meaningful labels or content in them – at least they are not describing what you’re actually downloading. In my quest for finding the county data for Norway I summed it up in a tweet:

Putting Norway on the map seems to be inhibited by costly licensing and non-existing accessibility (yes, you http://geonorge.no)

As you may imagine, I did not get the data I was looking for. I got some data – namely the municipality data in nice vector format, even with textual names and everything – however not the county they belong to or any other geographic meaningful information.

I admittedly gave up for a day or two. Then I started searching for alternative data – and after a while I found that the US government is far beyond the Norwegian (at least in geodata:). They have released a data set termed vmap0 which is vector data covering the whole world. The data is unfortunately in a bit inaccessible form which I didn’t care to figure out. (not that difficult it seemed, just some converting here and there). I found someone already had converted it to shape format, and nicely split up in continents. So I downloaded the data from the (seemingly) nice folks at GIS-lab.

I only needed the data covering Norway I extracted it and converted to svg (not geo), png+pngw, wgs84+utm32N and wgs84+latlon. The data is not perfect, it has a line across Norway – probably relating to the curvature of the earth – however it is “cutting” some counties and I haven’t figured out how to delete it nicely, however the data is good enough – and far better than nothing!

My frustration has finally ended – through the public domain with gratitudes to the US government! As this resolved some of my issues – I thought I’d try to resolve someone else’s by sharing alike:) You can find the vector data of Norwegian counties (fylker) in different formats and projections in the file here:

http://folk.ntnu.no/alexanno/geodata/NorgeFylker.rar

I hope you enjoy the data – remember to acknowledge GIS-Lab and the US Government if you care for it – my contributions are not necessary to acknowledge :)

Finally I’ve managed to send in my application for the PhD study program which I’m going to attend. I’ve been employed as a PhD Research fellow since August 1, however that is isolated from the study which I’m going to embark on and which will be my main concern and interest the next four years.

Applying for the PhD study program involves filling out a rigorous page-up and page down form of more or less useless information (i.e. what’s your name) – of course I see the necessity. A part from that, some parts are of more interest. A description of the project as well as a preliminary schedule is supposed to be made, involving milestones and similar and a plan for the obligatory courses to attend. My fellowship was an open project so the project outline was designed and written by me in cooperation with my supervisor (Terje Midtbø). Naturally I’ve put a decent effort into writing this, and as I’m very eager at others involving themselves in the project as well as the fact that my work is funded indirectly from the government, I’m publishing the project outline here, as well as a short, less academic, version of hit:) Hopefully this public, non-academic, dissemination will continue during my studies publishing projects, issues and results.

The project focus on applying and integrating map visualization techniques in uncommon domains such as large enterprises. Due to my previous collaboration with the COSTT project the enterprise in question will primarily be hospitals. However a general notion and applicability will hopefully be kept in at least some projects. If you’re still reading you may find yourself asking; “Maps in hospitals? That doesn’t make sense?”. Well, yes, it doesn’t. At least not conventional topographic maps (i.e. city maps, road maps etc). However, it is believed that position information may be a crucial part of both enabling easier coordination and collaboration support, as well as an enabler for “context-sensitive” systems. So, the notion of maps will not be of a conventional type.  Maps or “Visual communication of (spatial) information” is going to be the main focus. However, in order to communicate information one need to have some information to communicate. As such the project will also touch upon what information exists or can be generated as well as look on how this information can be filtered to only communicate the “right” information. These relations as well as an overall view of the project’s themes are depicted in figure 1.

Figure 1: Project themes and their relations

The project outlined is of a fairly general kind and it is intended to be. However, I envisage that my focus will be on elements that affect indoor cartography (what makes a good map indoors – and in which situations?). As well I will be probably be doing something in trying to integrate/apply different geovisual analytics methods into the hospital domain. This autumn I currently have two projects; A literature review on Indoor Positioning, Indoor Cartography and Use of position data in hospitals. The second project is on Semi Static Cartographic Animations – which I probably will be posting some more on soon.

So you’re still reading? Then I hope sincerely that I managed to explain what I’m going to do in my project – at least roughly. If not, post a comment and yell at me!

If you’re still interested in my project you will find the complete project outline here: http://docs.eksplisitt.net/

Libraries are in general a necessity in academic work but also for personal use. The main benefit they provide is to offer books and articles so you can either peek at them to consider buying your own copy, or you could take the book with you for a certain time and read it. In providing these services to the customers the library needs to have an extensive amount of different books – as well they need to have several copies of each book, especially popular books. The amount of books existing today is wast – and the library is restricted by both space and especially budgets. It is thus no surprise that not every book ever made is available in the library. This holds true especially for brand new books or books without a general interest field (i.e. not enough potential “customers”). This provides a problem with the easy solution being to buy a copy of the book even if you do not know for sure that it is a good book. Secondly the library face a problem with very popular books when they do not have sufficient copies to service all their customers. Figure 1 illustrates the essence of this.

Figure 1: Traditional library system

At universities the staff consists mostly of people that read a lot and in turn they own a lot of books. In some cases they even receive free copies of books as a medium for advertising. These books are of course located in shelves at the owners office. In general they are almost never read, at least not continuously – so it’s fair to say they have a lot of “downtime” in terms of the most efficient use of the book. Combined this forms an untapped resource. What if all these person-owned books were to be made available for the library customers? What if the library could integrate with this resource? Figure 2 illustrate the concept I propose in which the library is integrated with a peer2peer library.

Figure2: Peer2Peer Library

There are of course some issues which needs to be addressed in this idea. Firstly the book owners need to be willing to lend out their books to potentially complete strangers. I believe this is an issue of trust and security that your book will be treated well and returned. Overcoming this can be to integrate/adopt the library system in which you need a student card or similar to loan the book – and by which you are identified as the loaner. If the owners are willing, the books still need to be made available in a library database. This is a tedious task which needs to be as easy as possible. Solutions for this is to use the barcode/ISBN-code to look up the information on the book – this requires a barcode reader which is not common to have. However advances in mobile phone cameras enables software to interpret the image and “read” the barcode. Webcams found on almost every laptop provides also the possibilities of software “scanning”.  Although not always perfect this is one possibility of overcoming the problem of self managing the peers own library.

In a P2P library the books are scattered rather than gathered at one location. This is a problem when searching for a book. An essential requirement for the search results is often that it is nearby (i.e. at the local library and not in another city’s). Thus, some spatial consideration should also be included in a P2P library system. This could be as easy as taking the (work) address of the loaner/owner and assume the book is there – or at least not very far away. Search results should of course include and rank accordingly.

I believe this rather novel approach to the traditional library enable the use of the untapped resource of “shelf-books” as well it expands the books available to book-loaners dramatically without additional cost. However this should be awarded back to the book owners in some compensation (i.e. prizes for every 25 book made available or similar).

At NTNU the library is refurbishing the library system – this is one concept they should consider!

Is this a good idea? The main problem is the willingness of book-owners. Are book-owners willing to lend out their books? How could this willingness be supported/motivated? Will such systems work outside of an organization? For instance publicly available?