where2.0 - Wed 14th May (1.15pm - 3pm)

The internet is alive again and it's afternoon on Day 2.

Google Maps = Google on Maps
Lior Ron (Google, Inc.)

Apparently we are about to hear about 9 new launches in the next 9 minutes.

As the title suggests, the basic idea here is that Google Maps are all about everything you can do with Google on a map.

Announcement1 - A layer facility on Google Maps, initially allowing you to display photos /wikipedia entries on the map.

Announcement2 - An 'Explore this area' link on the left hand side to show popular searches in the area, as well as user photos and videos from the area.

OK, I'm getting lost in the numbers here... not sure if these are part of one announcement or 9 separate ones but the demo involves showing how photos, videos, wikipedia entries, web pages, popular searches, ... can all be displayed as layers on a Google Map.

Announcement X... ooh, "starting next week there will be a news layer on Google Earth allowing users to view news plotted on Google Earth map."
This includes news down to the "hyper-local, neighbourhood level".

Interesting stuff.

Something else coming along for next week is the aggregation of all data available around specific places - this includes all of the content mentioned above PLUS anything that can be found via web search such as upcoming events, flickr photos, UGC, ....

All of this will be available via the local search API to allow implementation - check Trail Registry for an example.

Apparently we've had 8 so far... this is announcement 9... "starting 1 hour ago, the API is available to implement maps in Flash."

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History's Best Geo-hacks (Part Deux)
Chris Spurgeon (The Walt Disney Company)

A brief history of Gerardus Mercator - a clever mathematician and cartographer who invented a map projection to allow sailors to navigate the globe by sailing in a fixed compass direction. Very clever.

John Harrison and The Great Longitude Prize. A clockmaker who solved the problem of defining longitude position while sailing on the ocean - but took a long time to get paid his prize money by the government.

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Venture Capital: What's Hot and What's Not on the Geoweb
Dev Khare (Venrock)

Slides of this presentation are available here.

We're talking money now, and how the geo/location world is impacting many traditional industries.

GeoMobile - GPS chip prices are dropping significantly which enables a whole new set of businesses to develop in this space.

GeoCar - "People spend 60 hours per month in their cars in the US, more than the time spent watching TV."

"In developing countries (india, south america, asia, ...) people are going straight to the mobile device and skipping the web/PC."

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Openlocation.org: Location Services for Web Developers
David Troy (Roundhouse Technologies, LLC)

The creator of Twittervision, Flickrvision, etc.

Most recently there have been local variations, e.g. Twittervision Local

"We need some way to rank search results based on the social graph - me, my friends, and everyone else."

Announcing openlocation.org - "A lot of web developers don't get Geo, there are lots of walled gardens and odd appraoches."

"What we don't want are attempts to lock up location data in an effort to become the Facebook of location based services."

"Sometimes maps are not the best way to deal with this type of information...". Hey, the second person to say that yes, "sometimes maps suck" and maybe, just maybe, they aren't always the answer to location based services.

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Earth-Browsing: Satellite Images, Global Events and Visual Literacy
Lisa Parks (University of California-Santa Barbara)

Some interesting questions about the use of satellite imagery and their impact on the real world.

For example, the Rwandan refugees (1996) and how satellite imagery was able to visualise the atrocity taking place on the other side of the world and catch people's attention.

There's something interesting in here about the role of Google Earth and how a satellite image used to be about scrutiny, investigation and would allow quite unique public deliberation, but, with the familiarity of Google Earth we are now becoming more accustomed to these views and the role of this imagery is changing.

I think that's the point anyway.

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Veriplace: Acquiring and Sharing Consumer Location
Scott Hotes (WaveMarket, Inc.)

Family Locator (allowing parents to track the location of their children) has given WaveMarket the experience to deal with sensitive and private location data.

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Digital Cities
Doug Eberhard (Autodesk)

Lots of 3D models of buildings and the benefits these provide architects and construction firms - and then how these relate to the benefits of being able to model cities.

"Autodesk is hard at work to define a new technology vision for digital cities."

A problem exists today in that business is still done on paper and "3D models are (currently) not 'legal' enough".

Some very pretty pictures and animations - the point of difference seems to be that the movement of cars, people etc within the model is based on "accurate and trustworthy" realistic modeling.

It's easy to see how these provide a more useful method of city planning and land use than the current paper-based plans.

Not exactly sure on the specifics though - how easy/cheap can it be to build one of these models? And what makes the modeling so trustworthy?



... and it's the afternoon break... I need several cans of cold diet pepsi, a plateful of cookies, a visit to the bathroom, and a new pair of eyes to replace the ones that have been ruined by sitting too close to the big screen... some fresh air wouldn't go amiss either.

where2.0 - Wed 14th May (11am - 12mid)

Going Places on Flickr: The Significance of Geographical Information in Photos
Dan Catt (Yahoo!, Inc. )

Dan outlines the challenge for Flickr around selecting location. How does Flickr take a lat/long coordinate pair and decide exactly where a photo has been taken?

This is about reverse geo-coding.

"Places have meaning... we (Flickr) should be able to give them (a user) back a sense of meaning about the place where they have taken their photograph."

A 'ladder of locality':
- 'neighborhood'
- locality
- county
- region
- country
- continent

Flickr starts at the bottom ('neighborhood') and works up the ladder until it finds a suitable match.

"What does this mean? It means there is a bias of interpretation... and... we are all working with imperfect data."

Lots of stuff about "bounding boxes" which are used to provide a contextual means of location around an area - it's about associating point data with these bounding boxes.

"Flickr is a photo sharing website... it's not about maps." - But, maps do help users get the geocoding correct.

Once again crowd sourcing is mentioned at the conference... this time it's about using the power of crowd sourcing to improve the set of location data to help correctly define where a photograph has been taken... and ultimately to improve our geographical knowledge of the world.

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LocationAware: Standardizing a Geolocation API in the Browser
Ryan Sarver (Skyhook Wireless)

Development thinking is focussed around "what does it mean when a device is location aware?".

"locationaware's goal is to help drive the standardisation of how a user's geolocation is exposed to the website through the browser."

GPS, Wi-Fi and IP are different technologies which require some interesting challenges.

Announced today: Skyhook are working with mozilla labs on a prototype extension to explore geolocation in the browser (available June).

Yelp will be the first 'user client' at the point of launch to help explore some of the particular challenges around making a useful service.

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Lessons Learned in Location-based Gaming
Jeremy Irish (Groundspeak)

Geochaching is a global community using GPS devices to hide and seek hidden "treasure". There are over 500,000 containers in the world."

Whereigo is the next generation of geocaching - "it's a toolset for creating media rich experiences in the real world using GPS and handheld devices - taking adventure games outdoors".

A recommendation for using User-Generated Content in this context. Take advantage of local experts to improve the context.

"Players are manic-depressive - educate, motivate and reward often."

More advice on creating successful games:
- keep games short... under 30 minutes is best
- serialize your game into chapters
- simplify, simplify, simplify
- encourage players to look up from screen

"Remember, you can't control the players, a player can and will go to any length to finish a game."

Finally, "Be aware of legally grey areas", whatever that means!

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Crawling the web for GeoData
Juan Gonzalez (PlanetEye Inc.)

Going behind the markers on a map to uncover the lat/long coordinates... but also gathering other types of location information contained in content on the web.

There is a problem however, current geocoding techniques struggle with the large variety of different types of location data used in the real world.

The solution is, apparently, 'low-resolution geocoding'.
OK, I get it, it basically means that sometimes we can only tag content with a wider area, rather than being able to tie everything down to a specific point.

"Sometimes you need to look beyond the location information" - Useful to spot commonalities in data (for example, different address styles but the same phone number) in gaining a better understanding of location information.

"Why are we doing all of this? - Planet Eye is trying to aggregate all travel information on the web"


...and we're off to early lunch thanks to the fact that the internet is dead (not all of the internet, just our little bit).

maps.google.com

Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines (Monday 1.30pm - 3pm)

Mano Marks and Lior Ron from Google Maps API team talking about geo search in this afternoon's session - Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines.

"43,566,346 geotagged photos on Flickr" - now that's precise! Although presumably it was also incorrect as soon as it had been typed. The point being that there is a huge amount of content on the web that has been geo-tagged in some form.

No information is forthcoming on how Google Maps ranks the search results to produce the most useful ordered list of results- for example, in the way Page Rank is used for the Google web search - but the suggestion is that site owners should "expose as much data as possible alongside geo-coded content".

Seems obvious - although maybe not desirable for a lot of people.

Lior made two new announcements:
1. Geo Server support - here's how
2. A new type of Google site map to allow webmasters to submit specific geo content

There is no moderation or checking procedure for geo-content collated and displayed via Google Maps. This is, of course, the same model used in web search. However, it is recognised that this could be more problematic for geo-content where users may be using the results to plan 'real world' activities such as driving to a particular location.

Mano starts to talk about some of the more technical aspects, including how you should decide between GeoRSS and KML formats.

The suggestion is that you should use GeoRSS if you:
- are already outputting RSS
- want to convey that 'updates' or 'most recent' items are contained within the data
- only ever represent point data

Use KML for everything else.

Oh, and Google "don't comment on future plans" in case you were wondering, which made for some fairly un-interesting answers to the questions from the audience.

Street View from Google

Thanks to the newest development from Google Maps and, one assumes, countless hours of people effort spent taking photographs across several of the biggest cities in the US, you can now stand outside of Macy's and look around Union Square, San Francisco from the comfort of your PC.

Take a look at the introductory video:


I couldn't agree more with Valleywag who points out that, in the battle for mapping supremacy between Microsoft and Google,

In most cases, Google's implementation is cleaner and more thoughtful (compare Street View's slick in-map photo views with Microsoft's silly car-based metaphor)...

Simply look at Google's Street View and Microsoft's Windows Live Local to see the difference.

However, this still feels very much like early days and there's plenty of distance yet to run in the location based, web mapping application/information journey.


Further details from The Map Room and Valleywag.