where2.0 - Tue 13th May (9am - 10.15am)

Day one proper kicks off with brief opening remarks from Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.) - 'Where2.0 has now hit the mainstream'.

-----

Then Adrian Holovaty the creator of EveryBlock: A News Feed for Your Block.

It's all about finding news relevant to you because you live there - stories that a journalist would never devote the time and effort to covering.

'There's tonnes of stuff on the internet that's interesting to lots of people but they just don't know about it... EveryBlock works because it doesn't ask you for your data, it justs shows you what's out there'.

Holovaty states that 'The more local you get, the more effort it takes' but this is where the success lies.

There's also a lesson here about not simply mashing-up a map interface with local data. 'One question i like to ask myself is, would my site succeed without maps?'. Make the web page the object so that people can link to it, share it, it's permanent, accessible, and so on...

Not every news story is about a point, sometimes it's about a region, a polygon on a map. Simply using the central point of this area is not good enough. Or news articles that can be represented by a line (e.g. upgrade work on a particular street).

Some solutions to these problems include
- Limit the zoom level of the map
- Roll your own maps: You have no control over many aspects of off-the-shelf mapping applications (colours/fonts/styles/design/...).

Everyblock uses opensource tools such as mapnik, tilecache, and openlayers to allow the site to be designed as its' own service and not be forced to use the style/design of a map provider such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, ...

To cope with privacy issues, geo-coding only happens down to a block level and no names are ever used in crime data.

On the question of funding and what next? Currently funded by grants for two years and no idea of where the money will come from after that.

-----

Five minutes from Michael Halbherr on the future of Nokia Location Based Services.

It's all about cross-platform. "There is no mobile internet or PC-internet... just the one internet available on different devices".

-----

Next a talk titled 'From Data Chaos to Actionable Intelligence: How the Convergence of the GeoWeb and Semantic Web is Revolutionizing the Way We Process Information' by Sean Gorman (FortiusOne)

Once again the benefits of crowd-sourcing to deal with the data sets on the web. However, most crowd sourcing is dealing with the long tail. Need a different solution to deal with the other end of data.

So... Finder... I think they're officially launching this today although the guy's talking pretty quickly so keeping up is a task in itself!

From All Points Blog:

FortiusOne will officially launch of Finder!, the first application of FortiusOne’s GeoCommons Suite. Finder! aims to turn unorganized, unsearchable, and unusable data, thus inhibiting their ability into something useable, so that users can produce actionable geo-intelligence. And, apparently you can visualize the found useful data in a variety of products from ESRI, Google and Microsoft.

-----

John Hanke from Google on The State of the Geoweb.

The Google Geo Search API is launching today to provide better access to the vast array of content on the 'Geoweb'.

Then ESRI and how geospatial applications are growing on the web and lots of acronyms and techy stuff about servers, metadata, scripting, and so on.

I think it basically all means that everyone will be able to access this location tagged content in new and interesting (and accessible) ways on the web.

Full detail here on the new possibilities availble using ArcGIS9.3.

... and it's morning break, where's the coffee?