Where2.0 2006 is over, and people now disperse back to their origins, their heads full of sugar plum fairies, and mapping ideas. As with any conference, there was a lot of good brainstorming, and dialogues that should spark some interesting projects. It would be neat to see a list of all the projects and companies that are spawned at the previous Where, and next year to see what was formed at this Where.

Bring out your geeks. Bring out your geeks…

I was actually surprised there weren’t more useful hacks for the conference itself. There was no SketchUp and GoogleEarth model of the hotel and various locations that users could walk through an annotate. There wasn’t a demonstration of Imity’s technology or another bluetooth/social software that users could install on their Symbian/Mobile phones for sharing contact information and localized information. There was no central GeoRSS feed of speakers, where they’re from, local events and sites in the San Jose area.

I would think with a very specific, and technical, group of people that such hacks and demonstrations would be emminently useful and cool to see. I am as responsible of this lack as anyone else. My time was restricted getting SpeedLimit up and going, and then being over in Europe for several weeks before hand. If I get to attend the next Where2.0, or if I can attend Web2.0 or another conference, I promise to bring my alpha-geekhood and demo the kind of tech they’re talking about at the conference.

Shazzam!

There were several sets of “Lightning Talks”, where 3 presenters each had 5 minutes to present some topic. I thought these were very well done. They forced the presenter to get directly to the point of their topic, allowed more people to present, and also broke up the longer 15 minute presentations. Each set of Lightning Talks was centered around a topic such as: mobile games, social mapping sites, or open-source GIS applications.

The Next Big Thing

Obviously, the end of the conference wrapped up with the question of: “What is the next big thing?” What will we be talking about and presenting at next year’s Where2.0?

So far it seems like better incorporation of large-scale, commercial grade tools into the Open-Source and consumer-level community as supported by groups like the OSGeo, and popularized by Google Earth and NASA WorldWind.

Mobile presence and location-aware applications had a shimmering here from people like Socialight, Mo’Blast, and Imity. The next breakthrough will be when major mobile providers (Sprint, Cingular, T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone, et al.) open up the location information that already exists on mobile phones to developers and users.

Overall, Where2.0 was a terrific experience. A lot was crammed into 2 days (plus a day at Google) and I hope I can get to another one in the future!

Coordinates:

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2006, where2con

ESRI, one of the big names in GIS, presented some of their open services (as they were wont to use the word). These are many web tools for obtaining, viewing, and manipulating geographic data and were very impressive.

The first was an SVG Map Viewer, which is a really cool utility for viewing maps in a browser. By using SVG, it can quickly reorganize the actual data such as changing map projection on the fly. You can also reorient, add/remove layers and other cool stuff.

The second was National Geographic’s map machine where you can investigate various layers of science and climatological data.

The next presentation was by a company Inrix, which showed off some of the new technologies and techniques in traffic monitoring, traffic history, and traffic prediction. So their system would show you the current congestions, as well as the predicted future conditions based on historical conditions and also planned events (sports, concerts, etc.)

They’re using the “Inrix Dust Network”, which consists of sensored delivery trucks, service vehicles, and toll pass devices. Therefore they’re constantly, almostly for free, gathering large sets of data.

Of course, not all these sensors and such are good. By use of toll sensors, they will know where you are. Now is the time to start putting in place and defining geo-privacy standards.

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2006, where2con

There was a quick presentation by Kevin Slavin of the 6 major constraints and problems of mobile-locative games:

1. Complexity
2. Revenue
Communication is the revenue generation. SMS inter-team communication
3. Dirtbags
Dangerous because people can be tracked. How to cloak and hide identity or location while still playing the game?
4. Seams
Boundaries of Wifi cloud are part of the game. But how in general to deal loss of connection and location?
5. Adaptable Field
6. Accuracy
How to deal with the constaints of the location technology?

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2006, where2con

Metacarta is a really cool technology that parses natural language documents for geographic locations. Think searching documents and webpages for words like:

“Today in Royal Oak a new business…”

where Metacarta can then pull out Royal Oak and try and continue searching the documentation for more location pertinent information that Royal Oak may be in Michigan, or Florida, or Australia, or wherever.

The examples use the OpenLayers, mapping agnostic, webmap tool.

For a great example of all these technologies, check out Gutenkarte, which maps the locations for any book found in the Project Gutenberg library. I wonder how it deals with imaginary places, and mixtures of real and imaginary places (like Nowhereville, NY)

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2con

ZoomIn, an on-line street maps for New Zealand, has developed a really neat URL scheme for locations, called Zopto.

The idea is that naming a location by Lat/Lon is not really human readable, easily indexable, or understandable. Instead, locations should have a good URL friendly schema for accessing sites, posting to blogs, people easily getting to data on a site, etc.

So, for example, to find information for Michigan I would do:

/us/mi/wayne/northville/-highearthorbit+office

or for the Whitehouse perhaps:

/us/dc/Pennsylvania+Ave/1600/-White+House/-Oval+Office

As brought up in the discussion at Where2.0, there were some concerns regarding splits across municipalities (Lake Superior is in both the US and Canada), and countries like Japan which doesn’t use street addresses.

I like the push to human-readable, but semantically useful, data references and metadata.

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2con