Monthly Archive for August, 2005

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TreeTagger: a part of speech tagger

The TreeTagger is a tool for annotating text with part-of-speech and lemma information which has been developed within the TC project at the Institute for Computational Linguistics of the University of Stuttgart. The TreeTagger has been successfully used to tag German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek and old French texts and is easily adaptable to other languages if a lexicon and a manually tagged training corpus are available.

Sample output:

word    lemma     

The      DT       

TreeTagger      NP

is          VBZ – be

easy      JJ

to          TO

use      VB

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Nolli Map of Rome

The Nolli Web Site presents the 1748 Nolli map of Rome as a dynamic, interactive, hands-on tool. The public now has access to cataloged information about the map in both written and graphical form. The map not only provides rich information, but it has the ability to be updated with new data over time to embrace expanding knowledge.

The interactive Nolli Map Web Site intends to:

1) resurrect the integrity of the original Nolli map, ?2) greatly enhance the quality and flexibility of its visual display ?3) grant easy access for scholars and students alike to a vast body of information.

Letarouilly 800Px-1

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Boston Online another Google Maps hack

Now we start seeing the effects of adding social/local information to a map. People can start playing with social rating and clubs, for instance. Here we see as Google Maps provide the perfect infrastructure to support this kind of communication.

The service is called Boston Online, a listing of stores and restaurants that are open around the clock.

Boston-Online

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Spatial Clustering Algorithm workflow

Today I had a meeting with my advisor on the clustering algorithm, and I came out with this refined version of the procedure I am working on. The goal of this is still finding the similarities between messages attached to a shared map. Such kind of data are non-spatial, or textual. Therefore lots of different semantic techniques can be used to the end of clustering.

Clusteringspatialalgo-Flow

Of course, these messages can also be treated as geographical entities, for which another sets of methodologies are more acquainted. Still, I cannot find a reasonable way to merge together the semantic and the geographical techniques.

The method described by Osaragi 2002 is a geographical method, while the method described by Ng 1994 is based on non-geographical features.

One one end of a continuum we have a similarities of keywords of messages that have no geographical meaning. On the other end we have distances of messages that are properly geographical. The goal is to understand how to use these two dimensions.

One of the idea we came out is this concept of running a geographical clustering several times, depending on a semantic threshold parameter, trying to minimize the clouds of different outcomes. The mathematical dimension of this is still fuzzy.

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Big maps from Google Maps

Noah Vawter  wrote an hack of google maps to extract big sized-maps from google maps

Outputgray

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Mapping the GSM landscape

These guys managed to make what we were planning since a long time, a datalogger to collect the positions of the GSM antennas and offer them, free of charge to the wide public.

The also offer the logger to volunteers that have a bluetooth GPS device. Please contribute.

Switzerland-Gsm-Cells

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A Sora Rosa

I was listening to this song today, written by Antonello Venditti, in 1987. I don’t know why he wrote these words, what motivated his intentions but I could not resist to find it extremely actual with what I am living today, what Italy is becoming, how politics is driving our country. I started translating the lyric but then I stopped. It is written in the dialect from the region of Rome but besides that it is impossible to translate poetry. Maybe you will find your mean in the words anyway.

A Sora Rosa me ne vado via,

ciò er core a pezzi pe’lla vergogna,

de questa terra che nu mm’aiuta mai

de questa gente che te sputa n’faccia,

che nun’ha mai preso na farce in mano,

che se distingue pe na cravatta.

Me ne vojo annà da sto paese marcio,

Che cià li bbuchi ar posto der cervello,

che vò magnà dull’ossa de chi soffre,

che pensa solo ar posto che po’ perde.

Ciavemo forza e voja più de tutti

Annamo là dove ce stanno i morti,

anche se semo du ossa de prosciutti

ce vedrà chi cià li occhioni sani

che ce dirà: “venite giù all’inferno

armeno ciavrete er foco pell’inverno”.

Si ciai un core, tu me poi capì

Si ciai n’amore, tu me poi seguì

Che ce ne frega si nun contamo gnente

Se semo sotto li calli della ggente.

Sai che ti dico, io mo’ me butto ar fiume,

così finisco de campà sta vita

che a poco a poco m’ha ‘succato l’ossa

più delle pene de satana immortale.

Annamo via, tenemose pe’mano,

c’è solo questo de vero pe’ chi spera,

che forse un giorno chi magna troppo adesso

possa sputà le ossa che so’ sante.

Antonello Venditti,  A Sora Rosa, Centocittà, 1987

Cloudalicious of my blog

Have been playing with cloudalicio.us lately, and I have to admit that is a great resource for understanding the people’s vie of a certain web resource. For instance I realised that lately the perception of the readers of my blog started to converge around the tags: “mapmemo”, “mapas” (spanish for maps), “pesquisa” (spanish for search)”, which I think is correct.

Cloudalicious

Cloud Blog

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TomTom navigator

TomTom navigator is one of the best navigation softwares out there. I could not believed till I could test the mobile version with a bluetooth GPS. It is great and so sensible that could be actually used even for pedestrian navigation. The interface is very well organized and easy to interact with. These guys did a tremendous job also in compressing the maps into a manageable dimension for a mobile phone. All the maps for Switzerland stays in 25 Mbyte, which leaves free room for application on a 64 Mb memory card.

3D Uk Small

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Some paintings

Graham Toms is a good friend of mine. He is a multi-talented artist. He paints, he makes sculptures, animations, 3D graphics, … but above all is a great person.

Today he sent me two of his last paintings, which I find great. He is also looking for commissions, so if you are interested, drop him a mail at toonfactory[at]fsmail.net.

Jacobs Ladder



The Circus Of Life 03

The common language of space

B. Hillier. The common language of space: a way of looking at the social, economic and environmental functioning of cities on a common basis. [url]

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This paper proposes that in addition to urban research which seeks to provide answers to policy questions involving the built environment, there is also a need for research which directly addresses the physical and spatial complexity of the built environment itself as the main variable of interest, and explores any effects it may in itself have on the functioning of the urban system. This type of research reflects the questions architects and urban designers typically ask, rather than those that preoccupy planners. For such research to be effective, the physical complexity variable must be controlled at the level at which real design decisions are made. Space syntax research attempts to do this by treating built environments as systems of space, analysing them ‘configurationally’, and trying to bring to light their underlying patterns and structure. Results from space syntax research into the structure and functioning of cities show a consistency which suggests that space can be used in this way as a general means of investigating the structure and function of cities, that is, it may be the common language of the city. On the basis of this common language, it is argued, it should be possible to build a domain theory of built environments as structural and functional entities in themselves, and this will lend greater precision to studies of its interactions with other domains.

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GPS position via python scripts on a Series60 phone

I found two nice scripts for connecting to a BT GPS device. The developer was using it to display his path or to geotag some pictures that he took with his phone.

Lots of different application can be developed starting from this point, and anyway it is cool for fast prototyping purposes.

Py-Gps

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maps.a9

Maps.a9 is a new map service from google that allows the user to see pictures of the street selected on the two-dimenstional map of the city. The pictures were entered by vans equipped with powerful GPS receivers so that each picture was correctly taken.

This was one of the application we were sketching and thinking about many times during these two last years. They did it. However in our vision the power rester to the people. We were thinking about a more collaborative mechanisms to provide the source data.

(thanks Antonio for the link)

Map.A9

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The Nimbus Project: semantic location

Nicolas is back and, as always, he keep pinging me with interesting links. One of them lead me to this Nimbus project, whose aim is to achieve a formal description of the space to support location based services.

To support developers of location-based services we created the Nimbus framework. Nimbus provides a common interface to location data and hides the position capturing mechanisms. To achieve an optimal flexibility, it provides physical coordinates as well as semantic information about the current location. With Nimbus, mobile users can switch between satellite navigation systems such as GPS, positioning systems based on cell-phone infrastructures, or indoor positioning systems without affecting the location-based service. As our infrastructure is self-organizing, it is flexible and easy to extend.

I found also that another researcher is working on the same issue, trying to extend and enhance the model.

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Reversing Google Sets

I found two interesting articles, both written by this guy, Both article concentrates on how Google Set should actually works. The author tries to operate a reverse engineer on the base of few observation on the actual way the algorithm should work.

He seems to suggest a parsing of the web content that should take into account the frequencies by which a word is counted in the same context/profile. However s/he seems to suggest that the algorithm parses the pages looking for tables or lists. This seems to be quite limiting and I personally think that in fact there should be some more complicated workings that possibly relays on clustering or similar statistical method.

Funny enough, the author suggest that similar techniques might be used to solve linguistic problems, and A.I. situations where there is the need to get to the actual meaning of the words.

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