digitalcommons

Where 2.0 Wednesday

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

Road to Lagos

The Road to Lagos

In late summer of 1966, Abe Waldstein, a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, and I  had finished a short teaching assignment in Ouagadougou, Upper Volta. From there we flew to Niamey, Niger and then eastward to the edge of the Sahara. We entered the office of the Nigerian consulate in Zinder, Niger, a regional capital near the border with its larger neighbor to the south, and after a short wait and no need to dash (bribe) the official, we had our visas and set out by passenger truck for Kano, Nigeria.

Kano is the main city in the predominantly muslim north. Forty years ago it was a market center for the region's peanut production, and one of the most visible sites were large pyramids of sacked groundnuts. We arrived shortly after the July 1966 massacre of Nigerians by other Nigerians. In this case, the Hausa and Fulani northerners searched for the Ibo merchants and business people and killed them in the market place. A black Peace Corps Volunteer in Kano whose western dress caused the killers to take her for an Ibo from the southeastern part of the country, was saved by her own students who told the machete-wielding rioters that she was American.

Abe and I left Kano by hitch hiking from the outskirts of the city in the direction of Kaduna and points south. After a short while two VW bugs stopped together and we spit up. The drivers were both wearing bu-bus, the long flowing gown so common with Hausa men. Both were soap salesmen heading back to Ibo country, and to pass through road blocks they dressed as northerners and as an extra precaution, picked up two white American boys who might be good ju-ju on the dangerous drive south. My driver asked me all sorts of questions, and when I told him I had an older sister, he proposed to her on the spot. I was supposed to communicate his good intentions upon my return the the U.S.

In Kaduna we stayed in a hostel where stories of more killing and much unrest were fresh enough to be frightening and confusing because everyone seemed gracious and daily life went on. A heavy equipment operator from Italy told us about being wakened in the night and forced to dig a mass grave to bury recently slaughtered Ibo.

Our next ride as we approached the River Niger bridge was in a large black Mercedes with Hausa elders as passengers and a chauffeur in front. They spoke little English. At the bridge soldiers were stopping all traffic because they feared sabotage, but these men had influence enough to pass across the river, and by early morning we were in the outskirts of Ibadan where my uncle was serving as an agronomist with USAID.  He had lived through years of peace and civil unrest in countries as diverse as Ethiopia, Vietnam in the early 60's, Ghana, and now Nigeria which had seen coups in the past and was now headed for civil war.

After a few days rest in my uncle's large house and peaceful grounds, we caught a ride with a U.S. embassy courier whose official station wagon held four Americans, some diplomatic mailbags, and the Nigerian driver. Normally Ibadan is a few hours drive from the city limits of Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria and even in 1966 it was known for horrendous traffic jams. Added to this was the increased military presence in the form of security checkpoints. Diplomatic cars are supposed to be exempt from searches, but we were stopped and a young solider, his eyes bloodshot from drink or hash, asserted his narrow authority by demanding that the embassy staff  turn over the mail pouches for his inspection.  The American refused, and this enraged the Nigerian who grabbed a hand grenade and stuck it through the window. I remember thinking, "Give him the damn bag" but very quickly an older non-commissioned officer at the roadblock intervened and called off the sentry. We proceeded to Lagos without any further incident.

Our flight back to Togo where we both taught was short, and in the months that followed more massacres took place, Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967 and Nigeria launched war against the breakaway state. I never returned to that part of Africa.

Biafra lives in electronic form. Registered with Network Solutions in Virginia, this site includes a huge amount of material including the history of the months before and after our trip.

Lake Alpine, California

Alpine County is the least populated in California. It is home to some of the most beautiful mountain scenery in the state, as well as good ski resorts, and the wonderful mountain Lake Alpine that is just a few feet from the state Highway 4. I went there with my Advanced Elements inflatable kayak to relax, paddle around the islands, and camp in a national forest. Only a few motorcycles and cars passed by each hour.

There was still a great deal of snow in this area which lies at more than 7000 feet.
The weather was warm, and fishermen had congregated near a rushing stream fed by the melting snow. Speed painters from Bear Valley whipped out lake scenes on small canvases one morning and then left by noon. I had to descend a thousand feet to find a camp site that was open, and I was the only one staying there. From the San Francisco Bay Area it is a three hour drive to Lake Alpine. These shots were taken from a hill above the lake, from the kayak, and the bald eagle was sited from the shore. I believe that is a raven perched above the eagle.