Where 2.0 Tuesday
There are 800 attendees this morning. the first speaker was Earle Schuyler MetaCarta, and author of mapping hacks. Mapping the maximum city: mumbai is a book that inspired him to work with a group in India to map a small one acre slum with 500 people, Betwala Chawl that was set for redevelopment with a new building. He talked about how maps provide context for cities and the need for open data sets and standards to encourage these maps and stories to be created. The cost recovery for UK maps has probably inhibited over one billion pounds in commercial development, so his call was to drop the license charges (a minimum of 15,000 pounds for one part of London).
Rich Skrenta of topix.net has 20,000 communites with personal forums and stories from news sources and from local writers. they are mapping local stories along with geo data and showed some for San Jose.
John Hanke, formerly of keyhole and director of Google Earth.
2 years ago and now 200 million activations. "An opportunity is emerging for all of us to build something significant and meaningful: a more comprehensive and inclusive than any other map of the world, a map of images and user annotations."
Maps are more central to web services in the past year. It is integral to future strategies. The basemap: it covers more than 50% of the world's pop with high res. Examples of nunavit projects and one in the Amazon where people have mapped their territory and environmental assets. I asked him about a greyed out rectangle in the Amazon state in Venezuela (Lat 3.06' Long 65.56'), whether it was requested by the government. He said it was a bug or a bad image. He said they did not filter out any image even a request from the Chinese Ministry of Defense. We don't do that, he said.
Google street view street level immersive photography allows great zoom of photos linked to street addresses in five cities including San Francisco. Red map of the millions of user annotations on Google maps. Hanke said we need billions of annoatations not millions.
Google maplets is released today. he combined a real estate search with a transit map to make a mashup of a Chicago neighborhood.
David Troy of PopVox holding USA Today with article on Twittervision and Flickrvision. He presented this again today after polling higher than other presenters on Monday night.
Tele-Atlas has one of their orange vans parked in front of the Fairmont. They have more than 20 such vans driving around the U.S. and Canada filming the surroundings with a variety of cameras and lasers and GPS devices. I have posted a short video of the van on YouTube.
Swag break. 45 minutes to make the rounds of exhibits where I picked up one magic marker, two t-shirts, two CDs, a gorgous book of ESRI maps, a Mapquest road atlas, and giant clip. A woman roamed the crowded floor on a Segway. Why? the wifi network does work but is slow because of the hundreds of laptops I see open around the room of 800 or so attendees. At 11 a.m. I cannot reach the Google map server because of congestion.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a booth, and they are getting more into open standards, especially with regards to patents. It seems like there are several open geo efforts developing in parallel. By the end of the conference perhaps I can tell them apart. Kevin bankston of eff discussed government surveillance using location technology He spoke about privacy issues with these technologies. the government can get trinagulated data without any special paper or supoena. Look fo eff cell surveilance on Google. He offered advice to companies as they set their own terms of service or when they have inquiries from government agenies. EFF can help.
Jim Greiner VP of GM MapQuest
"How to lead in the evolving mapping marketplace. 5 success factors."
-demo the value to the user and then make it the standard
-give the user control
-reinforce the foundation
-don't just provide dat-help make a decision
-evolve with your users-help them whereeve and whenever.
After a nice buffet lunch Mike Liebhold of Institute For The Future chaired a panel of heavyweights: Stephen Lawler Microsoft
David Colleen Planet9 They announced Raygun which is virtual real world 3d data with real people walking around in real environments.
Don Cooke TeleAtlas
Jack Dangermond, ESRI
Michael Jones of Google
Mike commented, we are entering a phase of tremendous experimentation with 3d data on the web. We may have multiple geospatial 3d web or we will have one, regardless of the client software. Some of the converging technolgies we look at at IFTF. Both Teleatlas and Navteq are gathering 3d imagery. Mobile Augmented Reality Applications: MARA is a Japanese 3d tool for mobile phones. Retailers will want to go inside buildings in order to sell and allow the user to explore. Second Life has a version of the Chinese forbidden city with no geographic coordinates. He showed immersive travel sites, a cenotaph in India.
Bernie Krause is showing soundscape a new service of Wild Sanctuary. A wonderful recording of wolves howling from Algonquin Park in ontario two months ago and now they are mapped on Google Earth. Rather impressive ambience. I forgot about the maps as we were immersed in the sound. Next was the Galapagos Islands with birth of wild finches. There was a dramatic demo of a soundscape before selective logging in a Sumatra forest and after which was devoid of animal sounds, just running water. As he said, the soundscape had disappeared. Other examples were in the Brazilian Amazon and Yellowstone National Park.
Aaron Roller of Garmin showed how to put trail maps onto a Garmin device. they built a motion-based agent. they found motivated customers who sent their travel/running data for their own ego. There are even people mowing lawns, looking for the most efficient path and mapping their routes. They are obsessed with data. Their sales are up to 19 million and growing. developer.garmin.com is announced today. Another product is the garmin communicator plugin. http://geocaching.com is a user site for geocaching games.
stamen is San Francisco design studio whose primary focus is data visualization and maps. mappr.com They have mapped the prostitution arrest for 14street in Oakland California over a two month period. trulia is a client of stamen's and they are doing real estate prices. There were movies of buildings at the time they were built and then by price. Very abstract but interesting at a glance. Now they have a web-based map built on flash. hindsight.trulia.com is the new service.
Local Live of Microsoft. He showed 3d navigation of the hotel and park area of San Jose. they want to have data for most of the world and have it a good web platform where users can share geospatial data. They are stressing accuracy and realism and scale. They showed the Austrian library movie where all the objects were generated without human intervention, just using algorithms. Quite amazing. It takes them three weeks to generate a city. they now have 20 new cities. With New York they have over 50,000 buildings.
Ordnance Survey in the United Kingdom. Ian Holt
Learning lessons from neo-geography
We have been around for 200 years. During WWII they produced 20 million maps for the Normandy Invasion alone! The flagship product is th eOS MasterMap with integrated layers. rss is the main way of sharing structured information on the web. They are using GeoRSS.
OpenLayers. Chris of Metacarta. an open source javascript API. You can place any kind of geodata on any map whether it's from Google or Yahoo. They are part of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation Consortium. There is a great gallery of maps here . Gutenkarte maps works of literature in map form. Here's Around the World in 80 Days:
Graphserver. Brandon Martin-Anderson This is an itinerary engine you can have parameters like maximum walking distance. This is open source for small transit agencies that can't pay for big licenses. The itin. is rendered into human readable text. There are walking directions.
Love in the Time of Cholera Maps: Mapping Communities from the Ground Up
Steven Johnson, Co-founder, Outside.in He wrote Ghost Map which is set in 1854. A map was made of a cholera outbreak. He shows how the map of the deadly area centered on a polluted pump, and the further from the pump people were the less cholera there was. Snow used the map to market his ideas of preventing cholera. His map was sort of a Victorian mashup. The density of the neighborhood was such that it revealed a pattern of cross infection in this most densly populated part of London.
outside.in is a place where you can read stories from local neighborhoods searched by name, city, and zip code. When I signed up and tried to enter a place it could not find the address in San Jose and kept placing a community garden in Mountain View. Very weird. They now have a service for part time bloggers and everything is output as GeoRSS.
The Where Fair had more than a dozen of special projects including HyperCities, a UCLA project that has maps overlayed and with a rotating timeline for Berlin and Rome . Starting with a 1247 map of Berlin it continues up to the present and you can see the changes in the town before and after the Wall. This will be online soon.
iFIND: a location-based social software on the MIT campus lets faculty and students using the extensive wifi network to find others, campus events, and make contact through chat.
Other projects are listed here. Not all were present when I was there.
After a reception there were birds-of-a-feather sessions. I attended
Open Source Geo, Josh Levine. http://www.osgeo.org/ 30 people present
some open source projects are not part of this group. geotools is an osgeo project open planning project for govt. transparency and community participation
GDAL/OGR is a raster vector set of libraries for geo data manipulation. can read 20 vector formats and 50 raster formats. It is used in Google Earth.
Quantum GIS is a desktop GIS that runs on all platforms and is free.
mapbuilder is another tool. It is used by topozone.com where you can search for places and download topographic maps free of charge. topozone.com Here's one for Lake Alpine in California, a wonderful place for kayaking.
Open moko Michael Shiloh Sean moss-pultz ocenside, ca
It is an open source mobile computing platform framework. A Taiwanese manufacturer, FIC decided to be at the forefront of the ubiquitous computing revolution. There is one phone that supports the software framework. NEO is the ONE the first freed phone. Existing phones can be modified, but it depends on the openness of the manufacturer. FIC published all the data for communications and low level functionality. There are modules in development: dialer, main menu, music player, and history. The NEO is a touch screen.
The phone is still not ready for the end-user. it's a GSM phone and by exchanging a sim card he can call on Cingular, but there is still work to be done. his talk was more for developers and what needs to be done. The cost is $350 for the device and the developer's lunch box is $150. They are shipped from Taiwan.
A big encouragement for newbies like me.
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