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).