See also Mobile | Embedded | Wireless | Google Maps API Reference | Nokia Ovi Maps API | Australian Government 2.0 | Spatial@Gov | Opensource GIS | Google Maps API Basic Tutorial
We plan on using Google Transit Public General Transit Feed Specification (GFTS) files to send transit information to mobile devices.
ACTION Buses in Canberra already use Google Transit in a loosely coupled way only suitable for standard browsers not mobile phones.
ESRI ArcGIS views Shapefiles. These were used in the Brisbane Floods in January 2011. We plan on developing 3rd party plugins or Web tools to manipulate Shapefiles for Web browsers and mobile applications. We attended a briefing of the DERM on Web services for delivering GIS data to agencies to satisfy the drastic need to repair damage. We will use opensource GIS tools to manipulate the data.
I visited Spatial@Gov Exhibition 15/11/2011 in National Convention Centre, Canberra and attended OSGeo meetup breakfast on 17/11/11. I learnt heaps about geospatial data and companies including Web services and Land Information New Zealand's standards.
We program Google Maps using Lat/Long to enable wireless hotspots, construction layout and roads to be built using mashups of mapping data and overlays. We built a wireless portal for Orange NSW which was never used but which we have used to program using XML to geocode points the world over! This includes PNG, Indonesia and Australia and will cover more and more of the planet including India, the Middle East, Asia, Europe and North and South America.
The maps include street, satellite and terrain maps.
There is no charge for freely available maps but there is a charge for the custom programming and configuration on the server as can be expected for this kind of programming. Our code is not open source though relies on open source or freely licensed subsystems to operate over the Web or mobile phone network.
This sort of programming is very useful for location-based services such as in transport and justice mobile or Web-based information systems.
We will extend our software into these very large countries off our shores via the mobile phone networks which are growing at a rapid rate in these emerging economies like BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China).
In June 2008, we were working with a Queensland Spatial Information Council (QSIC) Workgroup to define baseline spatial data. Queensland seems to have a huge number of spatial developers compared to other states may be because of its huge size!
In August 2008, there was another expression of interest in developing a Windows API for programming Google Maps on a PC. We could develop this as we are software engineers. We will use native Google Maps API. Why develop a Windows API for Google Maps? Javascript and PHP do just fine for mashups. Web services which is platform independent is a better way to go - more open and not locked into one operating system like Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. This is challenging for developers used to writing for Windows but we have always been Web-based and are used to writing to protocols, not to a certain binary application.
One recent expression of interest in Sydney, September 2008, was for a courier to run a mobile Web services application to map their vehicle locations using Google Maps. We have experience with Google Maps mashups using MySQL, PHP and Javascript which we developed whilst developing our own custom wireless database originally for Orange but now worldwide. We will build our own inhouse software to do this job.
In September 2008, we started porting the mapping software to Nokia phones (S60) but swapped to a networking program using Python for S60 which is not finished as need Windows for a S60 emulator.
In 2011, we still have not ported our Google Maps wifi hotspot software to Nokia Ovi Maps. This will use HTML5 now as it is cross-platform.