This Wednesday, I will be giving the GISDay plenary talk at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. My talk, “Neogeography: from Tower to Town Hall” will discuss how the movement to broad, public engagement and collaboration, particularly around geographic contexts through web maps, mobile devices, and open data can build stronger communities, improved research, representative government and better livelihoods of people. (link to the UVA Calendar)

Around Washington, DC you can join the OpenStreetMapping party in Bethesda, MD on Saturday, or you can check out the large list other activities at GISVirginia. Whatever you do, spread the word and encourage people to go out and map something.

What we realized was that these criticisms are reflections that GIS itself is facing:

• lack of metadata,
• amateurs doing analysis, and
• the loss of cartography

However because web maps are more public and involve feedback mechanism such as comments or blog posts, then they are much more visible and loudly critiqued.

Therefore, there is value in considering where this public discourse has more quickly evolved solutions and examples that GIS can incorporate. For example, standard user experience design around forms and input requests as well as feedback and user reward for supplying metadata. Sites like Yelp! make use of quite onerous metadata such as open hours, cuisine type, average cost – that the user is willingly supplying because it provides utility. They can then search, filter, and share this information.

Beyond the common criticisms, I identified three primary areas that neogeography is going beyond traditional GIS focus. Usability, Interoperability, and Participation are all aspects that GIS has struggled with, and in fact any inwardly focused domain has difficulty achieving. By incorporating innovative and external solutions that have emerged, GIS has the ability to take advantage and excel in applying these lessons to achieving their own needs.

I believe the presentation was well received, and definitely touched upon many points raised in other presentations both in recognizing the positive aspects of innovative GIS applications as well as common problems that are faced exposing complex data and capabilities to citizens. I’m definitely interested in any additional feedback or thoughts. I’ll be speaking and discussing in several panels at the American Association of Geographers meeting in Las Vegas next month – a group with similar criticisms and potential points of collaboration.

As part of the talk I’ll be showcasing the evolution of user-contributed content via mobile devices from VoteReport to the upcoming InaugurationReport and NavigatingWashington sites, and how developers and designers can integrate these ideas, and tools into their web applications.

Of course – as I mentioned the other day there are 2 other geo-meetups that evening, depending on your flavor of mapping you’re looking for:

• Washington Map Society – Buccaneer’s Atlas
• Geosemantic Web Meetup

And on Monday evening, the 19th, we’re having a Disaster Tech/Geo meetup courtesy of @williamv. Probably at Tryst, in Admas Morgan – but stay tuned for more details. Just to add a little craziness to your inauguration week.

So if you want to ask anything about new and upcoming GeoWeb technologies, communities using geospatial technology, or businesses that are growing in the various spaces of geodata, locative mobile, or even just cool hacks then definitely register!

My apologies to people in timezones that makes this occur on your Friday evening. Since it’s participate at home, you can enjoy it over a nice beverage or meal.

Last week I was fortunate to speak at the much lauded Future of Web Apps London (FOWA). Ryan Carson and his team put on a well-crafted conference with a great line-up of speakers such as Blaine, Kevin, Matt and more.

I was the only geo related talk, with quite a broad title “Beyond GoogleMaps”. The space is quite broad and is evolving quickly. Especially coming from a series of conferences at Web2.0 Expo New York and FOSS4G in Cape Town, in addition to the work we’re doing on GeoCommons, there was a bevy of new concepts and technologies that we worth highlighting.

As for the title, I actually didn’t pick it (or at least don’t remember choosing it). In fact, I think Google has done tremendous strides in pushing web mapping through their own toolkits and applications. GoogleMaps has some advanced capabilities such as interface styling, alternate tilesets, encoded and simplified geometries, and flash interface. However, a strident claims gain interest and again the purpose was to engage developers to look beyond just slapping a map up on a site and calling it done. They really need to consider the usability, accessibility, and design of their cartographic interface as much as any other component.

My goal with the talk was to inspire developers and designers to play with new tools, and for managers to realize what is possible and appropriate and spur their teams into creating compelling applications with geospatial capabilities. The actual implementation of this desk was 201 slides in less than 40 minutes. One attendee commented afterwards that it was like “watching a del.icio.us stream.” The 178 slides in the uploaded deck have the “Nonline” and AtomPub slides removed. I did not give proper coverage of these major issues and in the end felt they were best left out of this deck.

I concur that overall the presentation is was quite fast. I hope it was inspiring and enjoyable and that people walked away eager to find out more about the possibilities of web mapping. Fortunately you can get the full video and highlights and watch at half or quarter speed. You can also get the slide deck.

I actually have some plans for this presentation to expand out into a better and discoverable walk-through of mapping technologies. Stay tuned. And thanks Carsonified and the FOWA team!

I think overall it went very well – and lots of interest in the processes and successes and how it can be applied elsewhere.

Many thanks to those involved in making the work a reality. Especially to Francine Stock, Alan Gutierrez, and Karen Gadbois who provided much of the material in the presentation.

Looking at the current landscape of the Where2.0 space, you can see that it is essentially the broad acceptance of the concepts of the locative media crowd from 8-10 years ago. Therefore it’s easy to imagine that the current experiments and creations of geohackers are the leading edge.

Update: Mikel and my slides are spotlighted on the SlideShare front page and the Web20Expo section.

It is readily apparent the increased penetration of mobile devices on everyone’s lives. In the United States the iPhone has revolutionized how people daily interact with online information – using Wikipedia to investigate local history and marine reports to understand the freshness of fish at the market. In Asia they’ve long had the capability to find nearby friends or potential mates, point at buildings to query reality, and instantly send live media to one another. In Africa mobile devices serve as the primary infrastructure for communications, payment systems, and even voting.

With people continually carrying both a personal sensor and data device it’s possible to glean powerful insights into behavior, desire, and action. Users are actively seeking to better engage with their surroundings and community.

The question is, how can we access this latent information in order to understand the individuals and offer them appropriate, and appropriately delivered, information depending on context. It is important to know if a user is currently traveling in a car to not interrupt them but provide information that is localized based on their mode of transit and trajectory.

A restaurant search is more valuable when it shows relevant suggestions 2 or 3 miles ahead then perhaps any restaurant that is 0.5 miles behind the car. Similarly, a pedestrian has no use for a search result that is over a mile away, but is willing to patronize within several blocks – but also depending on perceived safety and familiarity with the various regions.

The lecture was a survey of both the abstract concepts of mobile geolocation, proximity, trajectory and data mining, as well as examples of emergent technological and anthropological solutions. Flickr serves as a very coherent example of providing a hoard of information on user behaviors (time, content), lifestyle (pictures of children, parties, travel, business), and obviously location.

Services could identify young fathers of children that travel often and afford expensive cameras to offer child-care services, luxury family sedans, or maybe even high-end strollers (I’m looking at you Bugaboo).

And the techniques don’t apply to purely marketing needs. It would also be possible to use contextual relevance and behavior to understand the flow of a city for better planning. Of course, I could imagine more nefarious purposes as well as governments seek to track and prevent dissident movements.

The utilization and integration of mobile devices, or more generally ubiquitous computing, has yet to mature – but the platforms for experimentation and demonstration are now common and the general public is becoming more comfortable with at least the understanding of location-contextual relevance.

The slides are available on SlideShare, but it’s mostly just pictures of the various projects. It’s better to go directly to the bookmark list: http://del.icio.us/tags/BeyondGPS.

Tags: presentation, geo, neogeography, datacollection, foss4g2007, foss4g, victoria, canada, hobu,

The interviewer was in New York City, I am in Michigan, and the broadcast area is Phoenix, Arizona. So if you weren’t in the area you probably missed it. Fortunately, they finally put up the archive just a week or so ago, so you can listen for free.

Download the show here.

I haven’t listened to the whole thing myself. It’s that typical “my voice sounds weird” that makes it difficult to just sit back and enjoy. But I hope you do. Please let me know what you think.

Tags: radio, neogeography, oreilly, mapping, interview, imitechtalk,

Web2.0 – Neogeography (10MB, pdf). Measures at 86 slides.

I was bad and used some animations for changing images and showing examples. This doesn’t work so well in PDF format. The links and primary material is still there. If something is unclear, just drop me a line and I can explain it, point to the source, or otherwise clarify.

This is just a small sample of what is discussed in the actual Neogeography Shortcut, so I of course still recommend picking that up at the low-low price of $7.99. Much cheaper than the Web2.0 Expo was.

Tags: web2expo, presentation, neogeography, andrewturner, pdf

Check out the presentation here: Ruby & Hardware.

I’ll be talking about them at the November AnnArbor.rb/RubyMI meeting if you want to come by.

Tags: ruby, gadgets, hardware, presentation, nokia, slimserver, squeezebox, nabaztag, roomba, michigan