I’m now at my third conference in half-as-many weeks.
EuroOSCON 2006 kicked off today, and the oddest thing so far is the Geo-centric nature of many of the presentations.

Schuyler Earle showed off the MetaCarta Gutenkarte and GeoParsing API’s and cool things you can do with historical mapping. Steve Coast of OpenStreetMap and Adrian Holovaty of Django and ChicagoCrime Map (and some small, non-mashup called the WSJ) talked about producing web maps for journalism and public benefit.

Right now Scott Davis is showing how to build your own “Slippy Map” (think GoogleMap interface) in 200 lines of Javascript, using your own images, or even higher fidelity OGC services. His demonstration is an excellent tutorial to mapping, tiling, and simple Ajax. Using his example, it would be very easy to build up a House map, a slippy-image viewer, or anything that you need to view a large area in a small window.

What we need to develop is a better Geo-stack:
Creation -> Aggregation -> Propogation -> Display -> Export

More on that in a follow-up post.

iCalico is a really slick RoR application for conference attendees. I create an account and then can select the talks I’m interested in, see who’s going, get a schedule, etc. In the future, I hope that with something like a universal ID I can share this information amongst my other data and calendars to embed notes, who I met, get that back and mix it in with my chats & emails.