Geo-ify Your Web Site (10.30am - 12)

Mikel Maron is up after the coffee break to talk about Illuminated Hacks.

However, my battery reckons it has 14 minutes of life left and I appear to be sitting far away from any potential power supply... damn and oops.

...We're back with power.

An interesting talk from Mikel on a number of different hacks involving maps, location data and content.

On of these was the BBC Bangladesh River Journey - something that was particularly close to home for me (the BBC that is, not Bangladesh).

There was also some interesting stuff with Flickr - utilising the power of crowd sourcing the 65 million photos on Flickr to define locations across the world.

A brief mention of the Headmap manifesto and searching for sadness in New York.

In a lucky coincidence, he talked about the usefulness of machine tags and how Flickr can automatically connect with Upcoming as on one of my photo uploads to indicate that the image was taken at the Where2.0 2008 event.

Geo-ify Your Web Site (8.30am - 10am)

Monday morning and I'm signed up for a session called Geo-ify your web site.

What does this mean? Good question. Some interesting stuff from Andrew Turner about microformats and embedding location tagging within the html of web content.

Then onto Mapstraction and its use in providing efficient and effective access to a variety of mapping providers, rather than being tied into the restrictions of one service.

Lots of very interesting library calls to provide functionality around image overlays, time sliders, data filtering and so on.

OpenSearch also gets a brief mention.

To highlight the increasing use of location information and web mapping we are told that " something like 60% of all mash-ups include the use of a mapping API".

Most of the questions revolve around Mapstraction, in particular on how the product is developing, in terms of speed and direction. This seems particularly relevant for a product that is supposed to allow you effective access 9 separate mapping providers - some of which are developing fairly quickly themselves, and not necessarily in the same direction.

Steve Coast (from Cloud Made) then stands up to talk about OpenStreetMap.

They are aiming to solve the problems caused by the fact that "Geodata isn't free, open, or current." and provide mapping/location data on a free license to anyone that wants to access and use this information.

There are currently 35,000 users of OpenStreetMap and this is growing by 2,500 per month.
3,000 users are currently editing maps every month which seems like a fairly decent percentage of the current user base, although I sense this will need to keep increasing at a decent rate to keep up with demands of the growing user base.

Lots of techie stuff about how OSM works - most of which can be found on here.

"It's the community, stupid!" - Steve points out that "OSM is not a technology project, tech standards don't matter (discuss?), and that simple (tools, API, workflow) is good".

"OSM is a community project... convincing people to do this for free on a Sunday is quite difficult".

Mailing lists in different languages, the project wiki, mapping parties (the first was in the Isle of Wight in 2006) and other methods are used to encourage the community to keep building.

Then a very interesting point about how some commercial map providers (none named) deliberately add erroneous streets on their products purely to try and trap people who might breach copyright.