Jim Stogdill and I had a conversation a week ago about the new iPhone 2.2 firmware that includes walking directions as well as similar projects in the space. In my Where2.0 Report I talked about the convergence of mobile devices and the effect on multi-modal routing: your phone changing from auto to walking to metro directions based on your context. However, I didn’t go in-depth on example projects and services.

Jim posted my notes of our discussion on O’Reilly Radar. So check them out there. It’s just an overview, but let me know if I missed an interesting project or story about open-data (or lack of).

It’s been mentioned elsewhere - but wanted to remind you to work on your Where2.0 proposals over the US Thanksgiving Holiday. They are due on Monday.

Each year Where2.0 has demonstrated the migration of location technology from the bleeding edge and locative media art to mainstream businesses and practices. Yet we have just begun to realize the potential. Where2.0 is the conference to hear the newest announcements, learn from experts in the industry, and meet and collaborate on new projects and ventures.

I know people out there are doing amazing work on bringing advanced climate change analysis coupled with user-contributed data to pinpoint carbon emissions or the changing migratory paths of endangered species, repurposing outdated mobile phones for biological sensors, application of geospatial tools to community building, humanitarian and disaster response and citizen media, immersive, augmented reality through wearable and interactive devices - and of course the holy grail, how to realize a viable business plan amongst all this great potential.

Submitting a proposal is easy to do and speaking at Where2.0 is incredibly rewarding. You’ll find it difficult to find such an absorbed and forward thinking crowd to share your work with.

A week ago the New York Times ran an interesting opinion article on the new NYC interactive map. I’m sure it’s been discussed elsewhere, but wanted to make sure and highlight some of the keen insights Mr. Klinkenborg offered. It echoes my feelings that we have done very well at putting static map images into digital interfaces, but are only just beginning to make these maps dynamic and linked - like any medium on the internet - explorable, annotated, and dynamic.

The map itself at first is not very impressive by modern digital mapping expectations. It has simple smooth panning or zoom, with an interface reminiscent of MapGuide style portals.

Where it becomes impressive is after turning on some of the layers of public safety, services, and infrastructure that simple markers that open on hover make it very easy to move around and discover information and links to other municipal databases such as census, architecture, neighborhoods, polling information, lot information, and much more - all without overloading the user. The impressive connection of so much data, especially in a city of the density of New York, is impressive.

The map is an example of simplicity, familiar interfaces, and rich data presentation that As Mr. Klinkenborg states,

There is a pleasing logic to this kind of organization, to layer after layer of data embedded within a scalable map. In a sense, it approximates how we tend to know the world… Think of returning to your neighborhood after a trip or driving to your parents’ house. You can almost feel the increasing depth of your knowledge as the terrain becomes more familiar. What you know isn’t just the superficial arrangement of streets and highways. You have a rich array of geographically organized information, some of it practical — how far to the good grocery store — and some of it emotional.

Obviously I would hope the underlying data is also made available. Imagine if the map existed as a feed of data sources that linked to one another - any queried point returned a GeoJSON item that linked to the Sanitation Collection Schedule in GeoRSS, Elected Officials as hCards, Building outline as a KML, and lot information as GML. The map portal is just a single, simple entry point into this information that the NYC.gov can guide and control. However, the data can and will be available via any number of interfaces that go beyond the device itself, but provide for a seamless integration of this information at our fingertips to query and drape over the very urban landscape as we navigate and interact with it.

Mr. Klinkenborg summarizes,

It’s easy to assume that the real revolution in mapping is the global positioning satellite and Google revolution… But the real revolution lies in the layering of data onto these already kinetic methods of viewing the world. In a very real sense, the virtual planet becomes our index to what we know about the actual planet.

I’m looking forward to future incarnations that include boundaries estimating daily resident happiness, suggesting cultural relevance, and heatmaps of amount of sunlight and sky-view.

In the OpenStreetMap community there is a known problem with the applicability of Creative Commons licensing to geographic data. The CC licenses are truly meant for creative works and not for the creation and aggregation of factual data.

To address this, the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board has pursued the development of a more applicable and friendly Open Database License, ODbL. The goal of this license would be to make it clear the legal protection of geographic data gathered and how it can be used with other data or derived from.

It is a sign of maturity that an open-data project like OpenStreetMap is dealing with the legal issues that surround the otherwise grassroots crowd-sourced community. Similar parallels occurred with the development of GPL and BSD with open-source software and the Creative Commons in user-generated media. Open-Data is following in the footsteps of open-source, from grassroots “hackers” to disrupting some industries and redirecting others.

You spilled your legal all over my data

However, one difference that has affected these two examples is a valuable guide with how the ODbL and other similar licenses should progress. Software licenses are currently a myriad of acronyms and terms: BSD, MIT, GPL, Affero, Apache, and more. SourceForge has a deprecated license guide and in fact offers at least 72 license options.

The result is a confusion to both software producers and consumers. What licenses enforce which restrictions and usages? How can I bring together software under different licenses and their miscibility. This is a question that even after a decade of mainstream open-source experts still ask for advice.

A working model

Creative Commons headed this off through some nice modularization of the most popular options. Through clear naming, definitions, and iconography users can understand the concepts encased in otherwise unapproachable legal contracts such as Non-commercial, Attribution, Share-Alike, and No-Derivatives with straight-forward choosing of which modules any user wants to apply to their work.

This results in easy, lightweight sharing - encouraging people to contribute to public repositories and also make use of these works. By having simple, well understood licenses, one example is Flickr’s simple search filter that makes it easy to find Creative Commons only images for use in third party materials and presentations. It’s even possible to visualize and determine how you can mix together content released under various modules.

The overall result is that the license has become popular and encourages both sharing and use of shared media - effectively ending the future of traditional stock photography.

Open Data Modules

My point of highlighting Creative Commons is to look at how simple mechanisms can promote effectiveness around licensing of information. The ODbL’s primary purpose is making it clear how to produce and use OpenStreetMap data, but in this action it is addressing the growing need to easily define how the true underlying strands of the web will be shared. You can read a draft version of the ODbL.

The opportunity is to lead the charge on clear, understandable data licenses that citizens can take to their governments to demand the data be released under these terms. There would not be the need for click-throughs of unique terms of service or agreements, but easily shareable data that magnifies the power of any available datasources.

One counter-point to the pre-defined modules is that users that want variations can “select, modify, or delete” sections as necessary. This is definitely not an option - as it will create unclear and probably invalid licenses. In addition, these variations and spin-offs will be unvetted and untrusted. By handling the majority of cases under one common umbrella, the validity and attractiveness of a standard license decreases the difficulty of any organization to claim it wouldn’t work for them.

I posited this question to the OpenStreetMap Legal mailing list hoping to spark a discussion with the various people currently involved with the license. So far the feedback has surprisingly been negative on the benefits of modular based licenses. OpenStreetMap has a long road ahead even after a new license in drafted in convincing the very large community to switch licenses - an effort I hope does not negatively impact the organization but instead illuminates the need for clear licenses from the start of any open data collection project.

With GeoCommons, we are spending a lot of resources gathering, annotating, and sharing out open data sources. Our metadata catalog is shared under a Creative Commons Attribute, Share-Alike license. And nominally all the data we bring in is somehow open, under different monikers. But right now it is very difficult to easily share out the terms of these licenses - so the onus is upon the user to properly use each dataset. With our goal of making geospatial data easy to use for non-experts, we have a very high interest in making geodata licenses as easy to understand as photographs or articles are under Creative Commons.

An open question to open data licenses

The question here is whether the module concept of Creative Commons is an effective mechanism that should be applied to the Open Data License. The goal is to make it so easy for anyone to share information that it would take more effort not to do so. That this type of easily shared information is highly preferential by consumers that other datasets under various and unclear licenses such that these other sources conform to best practices.

What do you think is the best path?

Excited about the GeoWeb? Want to help build the next generation social mapping tools and work on some really awesome technology?

The GeoCommons team is expanding and we’re looking for some cutting-edge developers and designers to join us. We’re using a wide range of technologies to build an easy-to-use and incredibly powerful geodata sharing, visualization, and collaboration platform that is being used in organizations from the government, to enterprise, to international NGO’s, to local communities and groups.

With GeoCommons, we’re integrating Neogeography with GIS to provide powerful tools to users: if you can make it fun on the web where users aren’t required to stay, then customers will love you. And by integrating with other tools that each user is comfortable with, whether it is Excel, Notepad, GoogleEarth, or ArcGIS Desktop and QGIS; we help bring GeoCommons to them rather than making them come to GeoCommons. We’re also pushing the next generation of GeoWeb standards: KML, GeoRSS, GeoJSON, and making them more powerful and supported. These are ideas we started with Mapufacture and are quickly integrating with Finder!, Maker! and the rest of the GeoCommons suite.

As a part of our team, you would investigate large-scale data sharing and linking, geospatial and data visualization mechanisms and tool development, web native API integration and community building. We’re working with many other groups in the open-source as well as GIS communities to help integrate data and tools to broadly disseminate all this quality data that has otherwise been inaccessible and make it easy to visualize and use in decision-making.

We’re looking for developers with real programming chops - you should be comfortable considering Mongrel and Nginx versus Passenger, know when to use unobtrusive Javascript or call ActionScript Flash hooks, have played with ActiveMQ and Stomp, beanstalkd, Starling or other queueing systems, read technology news and blogs and preferably have a site yourself where you share your experiences and code with the world. We’re looking for community members and developers that like working in teams, attending programming groups, and are comfortable sharing their ideas. We encourage you to have hobbies and side projects - we’ve built quite a few ‘lab’ tools ourselves such as context-free music and touchscreen whiteboards. And you don’t have to be an Apple user, but it helps.

Welcome to Washington, DC

FortiusOne is located in Arlington, VA - directly above the Courthouse Metro on the Orange line into DC, and a short walk into the district directly. The DC area is on an incredible spike of growing technology community. Where else can you live in a “metro area” that encompasses at least 3 states, all of which are metro accessible? The area is also renowned for it’s bike accessibility. The recent election has cast a spotlight on the future of technology in the government with President-Elect Obama’s Change.gov initiative. The upcoming inauguration is sure to be an incredibly historic event and you could be here to help map it.

As for the community, there are at least three Ruby-specific groups, a NOVALang where learning new programming languages is the prime objective, RefreshDC, TwinTech, and one of the most open governments to geodata standards and sharing. We’re also quite big fans of the local beer selection and hard to beat the food variety.

Let us know

So if this sounds exciting to you, and you’re interested in joining the team - please let us know! You can also check out the formal listing.