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Conference, Maps, Open-Source, Programming, Technology, Where2.0
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
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Conference, Programming, Technology, Web, Where2.0
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.
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Conference, Maps, Where2.0
The late morning of where is filled with lightning talks demoing social bookmarking web applications. Each presentation is limited to 5 minutes, which means they get to the point quickly and go for wow factor:
Lightning talks are great.
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Conference, Maps, Programming, Where2.0
Now begins the official Where conference. I spent the morning fixing up my demo for MapQuest (more on that later), grabbed some coffee (yay no Chicory ;), and now sitting in a huge room with lots of developers and very cool speakers.
I’ll try and post various thoughts on speakers and talks as I get a chance. Better than putting them all in a single post.
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Conference, Maps, Microsoft, Web, Where2.0
Stephen Lawler showed some really nice demonstrations of Microsoft Virtual Earth. They definitely have the “slickest” UI of all the web maps.
They’ve also baked in a lot of functionality that Google has left to mashupers (if that’s a noun) and developers. The “Collections” for building sets of spots and locations is a very Platial and Wayfaring.
What is *really* cool to see is their Streetside, which allows someone to virtually drive through a city and view the forward and side-views outside a car.
Microsoft has a lot of muscle and they’re really flexing it.
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