Where 2.0 Wednesday
Tim Foresman International Society for Digital Earth and the International Center for Remote Sensing education. He gave a general talk on the importance of geo-data and some of the historic projects including Data Exchange Platform for the Horn of Africa, an under-the-radar project.
The morning demos were less interesting and I was rather sleepy. Maybe it will pickup after the break.
I told a friend of mine who runs the .travel domain about schmap.com. I returned to their booth and found out about schmaplets. You download a Window app. (Mac comes later) and this allows you to make a guide to a place with text, photos, and linked maps. The photos are not much bigger than thumbnails, but the integration of the whole package is quite nice. Guests can download the schamplet. There are samples including a wedding in Aix-en-Provence .
Dash. Eric Klein. Mountain View, California. " Geo-located information breaks free." This is the first connected navigation device in the U.S. using GPRS and wifi for two way connectivity. Out of the box each device is a traffic probe. If you come to a jam it will communicate with other Dash drivers and see what the others are doing. The dash device contributes anonymous data to the Dash network. You can send addresses to your car and get the best route with time. Searching from the car: He searched for wifi network, cheap gas near his destination, and then talked about how ads will improve the user experience. Right... but will you be able to tell the ads from the regular listings that may be more neutral? However, this company is screwed if states ban in-car use of electronic devices like phones and navigation devices, especially two way ones that demand more attention. I spoke to the woman at their booth, and a couple hundred units are being tested in this area, and 1000 plus around the U.S. the price is not set but may be around $500 plus about $10 a month for full service. She said she is doing a lot of searching (Yahoo!) before she leaves the driveway. Never when driving.
where is a mobile GPS based consumer application. They will deal with the carrier gardens so you, the developer, don't have to. "They are our friends, but they don't need to be yours! " There are millions of sets that are locked, but where can unlock these sets for GPS information. they help developers make widgets and distribute them to users. It seems like a company which helps small developers reach larger markets and carriers.
Chris Holmes the open planning project
Grassroots mapping can't be stopped. Open street map openstreetmap.org started in 2004. the success of collaborative mapping? a diverse commons of mapping data constantly updated by citizens, gov and the private sector.
How to speed this up: encourage innovation through an ecosystem of reusable tools, and clear up legal ambiguities. He thinks it will be cheaper for a big company to fund an modification of an open project than to pay for complete devlopment. He thinks wikipedia is better and with more safeguards than do some critics. would cartographic mistakes such as you find in wikipedia be more important than some other collaborative project? Holmes is working on GeoServer. I was surprised to see that there is a project for Baghdad. What could be more dangerous than gathering GIS data outside of the Green Zone?
Ian white, Urban mapping started with paper maps. Legal issues. We do informal space: neighborhoods He spoke about legal issues and the problem of getting New York transit information and the bureaucratic barriers to getting public information. Some municipalities use extreme language when denying reuse of local data. They bring up harm to riders, mayhem, and of course aiding terrorists. However, Mapping the risks claims that under 1% of public web sites could help terrorists. FGDC promote access, restrict if necessary. He then discussed the ambiguities about copyright on geospatial data.
Immersive Media. This is a company that provides gear to Google. There were demos of the 360 degree camera at 30 fps amazing control over movies with stop action and reverse. they can integrate this imagery into mapping applications. It was quite stunning to see the scope and high resolution of what it could capture.
Michael Jones, CTO of Google. This was one of the better presentations. A mix of witty and pointed slides combined with his assertion that the geospatial information is meant to complement the rest of the information that Google provides. He said that if there were a geo-spatial celebrity it might be Angelina Jolie who has just tatooed the coordinates of the birth places of her four adopted children.
Mor Naaman of Yahoo research showed some interesting applications like tagmaps where locations can be tagged with photos taken there. Here is one for San Francisco: Another app is zurfer which downloads lots of flickr photos to your phone, so they recommend you have an unlimited account with your carrier.Yahoo! Research projects includes a wide range of advanced technology investigations that look fascinating.
BrightEarth is a project using GIS to make humanitarian issues "come alive" and Michael Graham, Humanitarian GIS Program Coordinator, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum did a demo of the Darfur overlays in Google Earth. These show the destruction of villages in the region. They also have one on real time humanitarian information sharing.
Mikel Maron gave a great talk on research around the past and future of Weaver House, an isolated former tenement house in London where a rail line was going to pass nearby. Besides researching online he went to the local neighborhood archives which "really kicked google's ass" in terms of information available. This drew a laugh, but throughout the conference nobody had ever alluded to all the geospatial information still in paper form. He showed a timeline of maps where the Weaver House would be located. These showed the changing face of London and its ghettos. A terrific talk.
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Janet Abrams. University of Minnesota Design Institute and author of else/where: mapping new cartographies of networks and territories. She had some interesting things to say, but unfortunately she read most of her paper, something nobody else did during the past two days. She wrapped up the conference, and I biked to the main San Jose Library a few blocks away and found her book. It looks to be a good analysis of the digital cartography as of two years ago. She admits that a lot has happened since it was published.
Presentations from the conference are located here
Hey, I recently added a news widget from http://www.widgetmate.com to my blog. It shows the latest news, and just took a copy and paste to implement. Might interest you too.
Posted by: Mark Vane | June 22, 2007 at 02:52 AM