Ever found yourself struggling to figure out the bus routes when you are planning to get from A to B?

Obscure bus stop names are almost a de-facto standard, at least in Norway – and quite often they do not have a name (or any other identifier) at all. Even if you know the bus stop name from where you are going to take the bus and the destination, you don’t always know where these stops are.

In Trondheim a natural language system has been developed called BussTUC (Buss The Understanding Computer) or more commonly “Bus Oracle”. Here you can write, in natural language, a question about bus routes. I.e. “When is the next bus from busStopA to busStopB?” and similar. The answer is quite good, and is correct according to the current routes.

However, the problem occurs when you don’t know the bus stop name – but you know where you want to travel, or approximately where you want to travel.

To better fit this Atle and I developed a prototype of a map interface to BussTUC. In essence it is a map where you can click where you are and where you want to go. The system then finds the nearest bus stops to this and suggest the closest, all represented visually in the map. While using the map interface to input where you want to go, suggestions of relevant query to BussTUC are suggested – and a link to submit the query is provided.

The system currently knows about almost all bus stops provided by Team Trafikk and works quite well.

Extensions to the system are:

• Enable for mobile devices – primarily location-enabled devices
• Add the spatial route-data suggested by BussTUC in the map (i.e. draw the actual route)
• Speed up BussTUC or develop own route suggestion system based solely on spatial information

Suggested improvements (numbered for identification purposes only):

1. Display all nearest markers regardless of selected (emphasize the one selected) [Thanks to anders]
2. Enable user to define “near” using circle (or similar + visual representation
3. On the fly display of near markers when hovering mouse (i.e. indicate what to expect from query)
4. Enable user to config how many markers to display near a point
5. Clustering/star-shaping overlapping markers (ClusterMarker)
6. Visual-magnifier over selected areas (i.e. similar to: Map Magnifier)
7. Retain simplicity of system, regardless of functionality (i.e. enable configuration)
8. Release Open Source (CC, Public Domain, limited license?) [Atle, Magnus]

The system is developed in PHP, JavaScript with a PostGIS enabled database. Source code is available by contacting me or Atle. Give it a try and give some feedback!

http://geomatikk.eksplisitt.net/atle/buss/

Screenshot of BussTUC map interface

The system is (unfortunately) not affiliated with Team Trafikk and is a prototype not designed to scale very good.

Microsoft recently launched their new controller for the XBox 360 called Natal. The idea is similar to the Wii’s eye and consists of movement tracking as interface to the XBox. The Natal looks pretty amazing, at least in the demo video. The software developer in my almost instantly thought of ideas to systems which could benefit from such interface, or at least be interesting to further examine. Map systems must be developed for this! Dragging, dropping, altering and jumping in Google Earth would be quite amazing. For more boring commercial application, the idea of a common (totally) virtual scribble board with the addition of a live video conference would be interesting to see.

I challenge thus, all developers which can, or have, got their hands on the XBox Natal and an application development kit to integrate (primarily) map systems and more advanced GIS’s – as well as making commercial applications for this! Are you up for the challenge? Is there even an SDK (or similar) for this?

[update:] Small bugfix, fixing last eaten and times eaten.

Tools which enable easier decision making is very interesting. GIS is said to be one such tool – however, many exist.

Every day I have to make a vital decision which will inevitably affect my life quality for the rest of the day. Namely, what to have for dinner? Trivial you say? Well, it might be – but still a trivial, vital decision needs to be taken.

Several years into the dinner-decision-making-process I have recognized that some attributes of recipees tend to manipulate the decision:

1. Well known and used recipees tend to be chosen more often than innovative recipes (at least in a hectic week day situation)
2. Time since last eaten is crucial – it the time span is less than some days it ranks poor in the decision making.
3. Suggestions are always appreciated – especially if their from the “well known set”.
4. However, suggestions are not always welcomed. The lack of creativity and part-time memento motivates for listing all well-known recipes and their attributes.
5. Comprehensive recipes are not inspiring – you know how to make them – you just need to navigate to the right one.

In a response to these recognitions I rapidly (almost lightspeed) implemented a system which provides a solution to the decision making problem. To what degree the system will perform in terms of; usefulness, technology acceptance, coding errors – will stand the test of time through comprehensive empirical research – conducted by myself with myself as participant.

Anyway, enough rambling. The point is. I have this problem of dinner decision. I eat dinner everyday. “All” others eat dinner everyday. Well, don’t need to be a Rocket Surgeon (!?) to figure out that probably some other finds use of this.

Thus, the system is open-sourced.

Licenses are probably worth about Ø, however, it is licensed under 

Essentially, do what you like – just give me a pop here if you like it:)

Requirements are; MySQL, PHP – no testing of browser support! (only FF3.0)

What the system supports:

• Automatically wrapping links with <a href>  tags
• Automatically wrapping image links with <img> tags
• Automatically make the first line a header (<h2>)
• Storing when you ate the dinner
• Counting how many times you have eaten the dinner
• Users (very low-level, but still, working)

And for all those wondering. Yes, this is a procrastination work. Master thesis writing is really inspiring – although inspiring in probably not the correct direction :)

Screenshot