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SpatialNews.com Press Release
Norway's Award Winning Location-Based Interactive TV Application Uses ESRI's GIS
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Redlands, California-ESRI, the premier developer of geographic information system (GIS) software, announces that Geodata AS, its Norwegian software distributor and applications developer, helped to create an award winning interactive map display for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).
Other companies involved in the project include NRK's Division of Development and Teletopia, a Norwegian company that makes interactive television tools.
NRK's interactive map is broadcast as part of its flagship discussion and debate program Standpunkt, which allows viewers to express their opinions on various topical subjects. Viewers send Short Message Service (SMS) messages to the television network, which are broadcast while the location of the viewer is highlighted simultaneously on a map of the country. The location of the viewer is significant, because opinions in Norway are often regionalized.
Bjarne André Myklebust, chief technology officer of NRK's Division of Developments, says, "Knowing where in Norway the opinion maker is can be very relevant in relation to the topic discussed. Take Norway's relation to the European Union (EU), which is heavily discussed. People in Oslo, for instance, are more likely to be pro EU than people in Northern Norway."
For this application, NRK won the Mobile Messaging Award for Best Use of Interactivity at the recent Global Messaging 2004 Conference in London, England.
The interactive map is part of a Location-Based Services (LBS) application provided by Geodata to the television corporation.
According to Petter Nyborg of Geodata, "The LBS solution consists of many connectors to the mobile operators, an administrative interface, a database, and a reverse geocoding module." ESRI's ArcSDE, a spatial data server, is used for the reverse geocoding process to facilitate the conversion of coordinates to place names and administrative units.
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