Where2.0 starts in one week, with the free and avant-garde WhereCamp the weekend after. I think the team pulled together a great program that captures many of the new companies and concepts of the morphing Geographic space.

Unfortunately not everyone that deserves the opportunity to speak got a slot. There are also very few returning speakers - we want to hear from new innovators. The conference is single track - which means we’re all part of the same conversation, and talks are already limited to 5-15 minutes so it’s a whirlwind of energy and ideas. That’s why WhereCamp is the perfect venue to really engage and still share your ideas with a broader community.

Mikel, Steve, and I are giving a workshop essentially talking about Neogeography and integrating geo-data and services into your web applications.

Monday night I’m giving a 20-by-20 (20 slides, 20-seconds per slide) lightning talk at Ignite titled “Building Customized Slices of the GeoWeb”. I’ll be sure to share the slides (once I’ve actually made them)

And I also have a couple of other things in the works that will be released as well that I’ll be able to talk about soon. Overall it’s going to be a really exciting, and crazy week. I’m thrilled looking forward to the inspirations and conversations that will happen at the conferences.

curl -u USERNAME:PASSWORD -d location="Arlington, VA" http://twitter.com/account/update_location.json

You can even use GET, which means bookmarkable location settings (similar to FireEagle)

http://username:password@twitter.com/account/update_location.xml?location=Paris,+France

There has been a number of GeoTwitter clients and applications show up. And a lot of discussion on alternate picoformats for location markup.

By extracting this away to Twitter proper, it means any application can set this information how they want, and have it updated in the user’s profile. One thing that is lost is the ‘home’ location of that user as their profile potentially becomes very temporal.

FireEagle as the central store is a good option, however it is just one location store and Twitter’s location will no doubt serve as the centralized location store for a number of new applications. As more social or personal applications gain location storing and sharing support, there is a question of how synchronization between these services will easily happen.

I don’t want to have to set my location in multiple services. This is the same problem that troubles social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and magnolia. This may become especially problematic if there were automatic updating services that detected a change in FireEagle and then updated your Twitter location, and vice versa - which then updates FireEagle from Twitter. Perhaps causing an implosion of the GeoWeb.

For a full recap of PodCampDC, being a media conference, there is a plethora of blog posts, photos, videos, and of course twitters.

The Un- of *Camps

Contrary to other *camps I’ve been too, PodCamp is more “face-forward” and less round-table discussion. The sessions and speakers were pre-arranged, and so had slide decks and specific messages they were conveying. The conference was still open in that there were open questions, and available rooms for new talks, but in general it had more of a traditional conference feel. I spoke with some at the conference about this, and they agreed and speculated on why PodCamp doesn’t exhibit the full un-conference style. Many of the speakers and attendees don’t have experience with unconferences, so may feel uncomfortable or unsure of how to act in that kind of setting - however, I think you can just have it happen and they can learn and the experienced ones can help mediate. I also have suspicions that not being Tech Central on the East Coast there is a general lack of prevalence of expecting everyone to be up on folksonomy, geotagging, twitter, and the like.

Expanded Insights

It’s great going to non-technical conferences. And not only that, but going to sessions that are outside my normal expertise or “things I do”. The reason I enjoy building things is addressing a variety of issues and users - and it is beneficial to understand broader concepts and use cases in order to build the right tools. In particular, I really enjoyed Whitney Hoffman’s “Education 2.0″ talk on using technology and interactive, new media for learning and cooperation between students, teachers, parents, and community. The talk was well attended by educators of all sorts, and I think very few “techies”, who were probably off learning details of lighting and sound capture. So when I spoke up to ask the question, “As a tool developer, what do you see is missing from the Education2.0 ecology” there was a flash of bright ideas and excited people.

Nii Simmonds also gave a great talk on Venture Capitalism and emerging markets in Africa. He specifically pointed to the Business Week article, Can Greed Save Africa, highlighting that businesses investing in, rather than giving to regions like Africa lead to better outcomes. I’m traveling this fall to South Africa for FOSS4G 2008 and hoping to also connect more into the African developer and entrepreneurial community.

Thanks to all the hard work that went into PodCampDC. It was terrific to become connected with members of the DC community.

There has been a lot of dialog. Sean discusses a lot of his thoughts about semantic interoperability and formats. There has also been a number of discussions on the design itself - everything from the color, to the pushpin being indicative of points only - maybe reinforcing the “red dot fever” that plagues many maps.

These are really minor quibbles. Overall I think it’s a decent design that gives some simple meaning to what the icon conveys. However, the problem I do have is the Usage guidelines & examples. Essentially, they are saying it should be used for all geospatial formats.

Example from the site:

Bruce defends this:

Whereas the Geotag Icon describes a general concept (”This item is geotagged”) the KML icon and GeoRSS favicon each proclaim a file format. This is analogous to the Feed Icon: can you imagine having a different orange icon for each web feed format? There’s no reason why the Geotag Icon can’t sit side-by-side with file format icons if that’s what folk wish to do. But a well-recognized Geotag Icon (in time!) adjacent to the text description “Download KML file (opens in Google Earth)” could well be more informative to the majority users than what is otherwise sure to be a growing set of vaguely-related file format icons with which to become familiar. The power of de facto standard icons is in instant recognition—and the fewer the merrier!

I disagree, he’s proposing this one icon should be used for a multitude of different formats that each have different capabilities and uses. It’s not like the difference between RSS and Atom, it’s the difference between HTML and RSS or CSS. Or a Video and a Photo. Sure, they’re both images, but they’re also very different in what they do.

He’s creating additional confusion by using the Geotag icon for GeoRSS. GeoRSS isn’t even a file format, it’s an extension to another file format: RSS / Atom, and they already have a recognizable icon that has meaning to users. I wouldn’t want to put yet another icon in front of them that meant something slightly different. And KML is a visualization format, similar to HTML + CSS. GPX is a very specific format that works for handheld GPS units and PND’s. I’m surprised the Geotag Icon wasn’t proposed to be used for Geo and Adr Microformats, since it matches this formula of all things geo.

This is the follie of the greater GIS community - assuming something is primarily geo first, and general information second. I’m surprised this is idea is also followed by people outside the GIS world.

So I only ask that the Usage guidelines of the Geotag icon be scaled back. It’s interesting that it’s been incorporated into Minimap Sidebar - good idea, but perhaps again confusing application with format? Using it in a photograph or video is nice because it’s clear to me that the format is a video (and I don’t care if it’s mov, fla, et al.) and useful to be alerted that it has geocoded content inside. I also think it could be useful as a link to a page of Geospatial formats. Why not even use it like the Share this on… on the Geotag project page itself?

GPX icon is from Garmin’s Communicator Plugin. You could optionally replace the format names (like KML) with suggestion applications, but I find this a little to vendor specific. Don’t you dislike it when people say things like “I opened the Internet Explorer page…”?

I think this set of links is how I would do it in GeoPress. But don’t suggest that Geotag Icon become the over-arching marker for other formats that happen to contain geo-data. Otherwise, I’ll be suggesting a family of icons like Timetag, and Titletag.

Having lived primarily in the suburbs or small towns that have a less diverse, or at least small scale distinctly diverse, culture to them, I could understand, but not relate, to this concept. From my background, one block was nominally the same as the next, there was little direct difference between them and granularity was limited to the “area of the city”.

But having lived the last month in San Francisco, and more directly, in the Tenderloin, I learned very intimately about this concept - but also think it falls short and is potentially too expansive in it’s area.

The Tenderloin has a reputation for being rough and tumble, or edgy. What this translates to is that the various streets and alleys are filled with vagrants and drug abusers. The Tenderloin purportedly gets it’s name from cops that worked the area and would take bribes for shady deals - and as a result they could afford better cuts of meat from the butcher.

The on the ground reality is that the Tenderloin looked at as a single entity has shady aspects. However, it very much depends on which street - and even which part of the street, side, and facing direction. From the apartment I lived in, one chose their routes based on time of day. Heading east and north were through safe streets, past hotels and restaurants - but south and west were past shady dealers, well frequented liquor stores, and generally unsafe situations.

Looking out from from my apartment I could see 270 degrees - to the north was a Hilton, the west was a church, and south were liquor stores and constant groups of impoverished and drug abusers. Across the street from the Hilton on the south side is a Cuban Restaurant and a shop selling X-rated videos, and to the west is a upper-end wine store and chic Vietnamese-Fusion restaurant.

This is just a single viewpoint in one area of the neighborhood, but summarizes the general topology of the Tenderloin.

View the entire Mapufacture Feed

A View of Two Services

This was most succinctly demonstrated right outside my window. I overlooked the Glide Memorial Church, on the corner of Taylor and Ellis - a gorgeous building that made my view one of the best in the area. Glide is renowned for it’s Sunday ‘Celebrations’ that are more like group concerts than church services.

The services are so well attended, a line starts 30 minutes before the doors open, lining up along Taylor heading north.

Glide also serves a vital service to the community in providing meals and shelter for vagrants. The line for people to line up to receive meal tickets, or to head in for the night, lines up along Ellis heading west.

So at 11AM on a Sunday morning I would look out my window and see from a single perspective two very different worlds, on one corner you had low, middle, and upper class families from the city, as well as tourists and visitors waiting to attend services - and on the other corner was a mirror reflection of low and impoverished people lining up for food.

Tenderloin National Forest

The Tenderloin was always full of surprises. One morning on an expedition from the east corner of the Tenderloin, to the far west end heading to the Scone Factory, Corrie and I were astonished to stumble across a true hidden gem: The Tenderloin National Forest, tucked into Copland alley.

While the various neighborhood projects are doing great work, as Steven Johnson points out it’s also difficult to provide a nationwide interface to what are very local issues and perspective. So local that if you geocode to the wrong side of the street or around a corner, you have completely changed the context of that information.

Fortunately, there is a project underway to enable the community map the neighborhood. In a small area that has such variety and required local knowledge, it is vital for them to mark viable business and residential areas in order to encourage development. I think projects like this are vital to fill-out the localized aggregation services and provide a truly super-hyper-local perspective.

SuperHyperLocal Tenderloin - a photoset on Flickr

libkml was originally “announced” about 6 months ago as part of the kick-off of the standardization of KML within the OGC.

libkml is interesting in several ways. KML itself is just an XML specification for geographic data. Nothing really special compared to other XML formats. However, as I’ve championed there is a big difference between types of developers that use and read schemas, and those that use libraries or simple examples and documentation to implement parsers or tools. This is justified in that developers (both consumers and producers as discussed here) are usually trying to solve some other problem and want to use a format like KML merely as a mechanism to publish and visualize their information. By providing a stable and full-featured library, developers are free to build tools around the library without having to deal with the intricacies and issues of the format itself.

Similarly to the effect of opening the standardization of KML to the OGC effected other organizations like Microsoft to embrace the format - an open-source library also encourages other implementations, or competitors, of KML applications. Google is primarily in the business of data organization and search - so the more tools that publish or utilize a format they can then index is a win.

Another implication of libkml is that a single library can grow with versions and features, again freeing the developer from having to track future versions or bug fixes to the format.

Lastly, libkml is written to be fast - which is essential for handling large KML documents, realtime visualization, and potentially even mobile/limited-resource clients. However, how small libkml can be made is left to be seen.

As Michael Ashbridge pointed out, this is a very “alpha release, not Beta in the Google sense”. In fact, in the documentation there is the very clear disclaimer: “THIS IS ALHPA SOFTWARE. Expect changes. We do not yet recommend use in production code.”

There are still a number of features that are not yet implemented that are forthcoming, or can be accomplished by the broader community. They’re looking for feedback from developers on the interface and functionality. The library is C++, with SWIG bindings currently in Ruby, Java, Python, Perl and PHP. There are examples for developers to get up and running quickly.

It’s released under the new BSD license. It is meant to be as open as possible for developers to use in both open-source and closed-source projects without worrying about interference with other licenses.

It’s great to see Google pushing on the open-{source,format} in geospatial. They’ve obviously done a lot to raise public awareness of placemarking and geospatial data with GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth - they’re now engaging the GIS community and helping them.

Hopefully people, at least developers and users in the know, can soon stop referring to KML strictly as “GoogleEarth format” or “GoogleEarth Layer”.

Dealing with Reality

An issue we commonly run into is the reality that there are a lot of KML and other data sources in the wild that are malformed. There is the common response “it works in GoogleMaps, why doesn’t it work elsewhere?”

libkml is able to handle, to some extext, ‘bad’ KML, but is very strict in outputting KML that is generated using the DOM API in the library. Hopefully this generally raises the quality of available KML.

lib{geo}

A potential extension to libkml that excites me would be the ability ingest a KML document and publish it out as other formats such as GeoRSS or GML. Especially if a higher-level interface was built onto libkml that abstracted away the specifics of KML and instead provided an interface for general geometry (and feature) creation and manipulation.

Unfortunately since my laptop hard drive died last week, I don’t have a development machine to build and play with this yet. But I expect to use this library in a number of projects.

Google Code Project: libkml.

As part of some continuing work with clients and heading to the OGC Technical Committee meeting to wrap up the OGC Web Services KML initiative (OWS-5 Agile Geography) - taking a very quick trip to Ann Arbor (2 days) and St. Louis for 3 days.

Stopping in Ann Arbor was really great. It’s the first city I’ve lived in long term that wasn’t attached to my attending school. When visiting my other alma maters I am primarily faced with nostalgia, but disconnect since all my acquaintances were transient like me and I know few people remaining in the town.

Ann Arbor, however, is like coming home. By contrast to my previous residences, as I wrote before I was fortunate to connect into a great community that is thriving here. Within an hour of sitting in a coffee shop I serendipitously connect with two great people - and had meetings, coffee, or hop tastings with many others. It’s great to be able to so quickly feel comfortable when traveling. I’ve understood one of the primary reasons of chains like Starbucks or Subway is to be familiar to travelers as they find themselves in otherwise unknown locales.

One goal of local search of user-generated is to give outsiders a view into the local life. However, they haven’t yet been able to breach the feeling of familiarity and reward that comes with visiting an old favorite restaurant or brew.

While our plans are still undecided for the future - it’s a great comfort to know I can stop into a great town like Ann Arbor and feel so welcome.

(via Google LatLong Blog)

When you register, you have to vote for at least 5 projects (to make sure people don’t just vote for their one personal favorite, but actually investigate other projects), and you can vote for up to 10 different projects.

I’ve personally been working with Alan Gutierrez of Think New Orleans on his incredible work in bringing awareness, and a stop to, the improper demolition of houses after Katrina. He is digitizing City Buiding permits, demolition plans, notifications, and incentive options to help citizens protect and rebuild their homes. He runs GIS coworking at Trinity church to educate local citizens on the use of GIS software for doing a lot of the heavy lifting - and we’ve been working with him to help bring all this together into the web to share and utilize by a broader community.

You can check out that project here: City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery

Another great project is Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya - where they’ve built a preliminary site to accept user-contributed information on violence outbreaks.

The projects are addressing real world issues with real solutions - so far they have had success on their own and are making a difference. Independently the projects will still be successful and important and their success will only be improved upon by support of the NetSquared community.

It can be daunting to hunt through the rest of the projects. It reminds me of going through conference submissions - I would recommend going through topical areas such as “Health”, “Community Improvement”, “Arts”, etc. to make it easier to compare all the great ideas and potentials.

Remember, voting is only open until this Monday, March 24, 2008 - so please register and vote!

There are several commonly encountered use cases. News reports typically mention several locations. Bloggers using GeoPress may tell a story about a trip and want to reference several spots along their trip - especially if they are documenting a tour that includes a path and sites along that path such as in EveryTrail. Dan Schultz talks about why “One Location Doesn’t Cut It”, citing other examples from news journalism.

Adrian and I recently sat down together to quickly brainstorm on what this may look like. The features we were looking to add were: multiple geometries, excerpt for that geometry, and toponym for that location (venue, city, etc.) Additionally, we didn’t want to break current compatibility.

Other services are already including multiple locations in different ways. Flickr outputs a single location in two different formats of GeoRSS: Simple, and some odd form of deprecated W3C. MetaCarta’s RSS-to-GeoRSS converted currently just dumps multiple locations into the entry, but without identifying if these are unique locations, or just variations in format type or hierarchy.

We wanted to call out that this is in fact a different type of geometry - a multi-geometry. Both KML and WKT support multi-geometry, but without being able to reference what the points are individually about. That’s useful if you are, say, marking all the holes in a field, but not for narratives.

Another feature we wanted to try and support was to be able to reference geometries stored elsewhere. Currently in GeoRSS feeds you’ll typically see references to a City or Country just include a point to the center of that geography. Not really indicative of what the article was about, or useful when trying to find all the geographic data about an area. So it’s important to include lines and areas as appropriate. However, including huge outlines of states or nations, potentially multiple times within a single feed, can have drastically bad consequences of increasing feed file size and complexity.

Here is a snippet of what we are proposing:

The first part to notice is that we wrapped the multiple geometries in a georss:collection. This allows current parsers to not be confused by encountering multiple georss elements unwrapped and being unclear if they are multiple representations of the same geometry, or different geometries.

We also included a excerpt attribute that allows you to include some text referencing what this location is specifically about. This can be text from the article itself, or some other useful information. One concept we had considered was using some reference to the text wrapped in the article itself, but this seemed burdensome and prone to problems using an attribute of one element to embedded text in another element.

The second element is a georss:polygon that includes a src reference to the geometry stored elsewhere. The rel tag specifies that it is the geometry of this element, and the type helps the tool know what the representation is of the stored geometry. This way a tool that is consuming the GeoRSS can go and fetch the geometry if it wants, or if it already has a cached version, say referenced elsewhere in this same feed, then it doesn’t have to request it again.

Of course, with a standards development, it is useful to consider how a user interface might provide for including multiple locations in an entry. Here is a mockup of how I imagine a simple interface would appear, and probably how we’d implement it in something like GeoPress:

Article: We went to visit downtown Cedarburg before the conference. Had some great sandwiches at Joe’s. If you haven’t been to Cedarburg, Wisconsin, then you haven’t really experienced the MidWest…

Locations:
- Excerpt: Went to visit downtown Cedarburg…
- Type: Point
- Geometry: 43.296700 -87.987500
- Name: Cedarburg, Wis.

To promote ideas and discussion around these and other proposals, I’ve created proposals at GeoRSS.org on multiple location and referencing external geometry. Please let us know what you think about the idea and format. We know that we can’t please everyone, but like the origins of GeoRSS, we’re just trying to address a real need with a simple format.

This year, they’ve decided to follow other industry giants and hold a full-on, pay-to-play, conference: Google I/O.

It’s an interesting move for Google, who’s tools are almost all open and free to use. The community has gotten large enough where there is a market for paying to attend their event and at least cover their cost of employees answering (often innane) questions about how to get more web traffic and AdSense revenues. By charging a fee it also limits attendance to something reasonable.

The agenda also includes what they are calling “lightning 20 minute ‘unconference’ sessions” - where attendees “vote” on topics they want to hear presented by other attendees. I think that sentence could have included a couple more buzz-words.

A couple of the highlights:

Chris Anderson’s Blimp Bots reminded me of the four years I spent developing high-altitude, autonomous airships, but instead Chris is trying to dramatically decrease the price and difficulty of building these internal vehicles for encouraging school kids to learn and experiment with robotics and hardware.

Kyle Machulis’ talk on “Really, Really Intimate Interfaces” was inspiring for ways other than the obvious. Kyle is a game developer but seems to have become fascinated with sex toys and intimate devices. His point is that too often with user experience and interface design we settle for “good enough”. But when it comes to designing interfaces that deal with some of our most precious, and private, body parts just good enough isn’t enough.

We should consider all concepts with the same care and precision that is appropriate for intimate devices. Also, there are some really interesting open-source projects and excellent business opportunities.

Ethan Zuckerman pointed out how LOLCats are indicators and devices of the activist movement. And Bre Pettis made me think what I need to do to prepare for the inevitably approaching apocalypse (summary, download Wikipedia).

While I didn’t get much sleep at ETech, fortunately I headed back up to SF to recover while less fortunate souls continued onto SXSW where they will deal with 4 more days of little sleep (but lots more inspiration to overload their minds).

There have been, and are, other location sharing systems. Most recently, Plazes, TwitterVision, my.loki, Loopt, Dodgeball, and more coming online soon. However these systems were either hampered by being too much, not providing good interfaces, unclear security and authorization, and worst of all, user lock-in or siloing. Those services have great purpose and use and communities, but they aren’t the cross-application interfaces they could be.

What’s incredibly exciting about FireEagle is that it does one thing really well - and provides excellent hooks for using this information. It’s a service about user-geolocation enabling other applications. Its one of those services that a user comes to for signing up, but after that never needs to come back to FireEagle at all. Applications build in authorization, publishing, and accessing their location into their own interfaces.

And even better, you can publish your location from one system, say a mobile device, and have other applications access this, say from a social network site.

This concept follows the concept of loosely coupled systems. Other location sharing systems typically required all potential users to be members of that particular service, using that interface. For example, I can’t view locations of my twitter contacts in Plazes, or from a single mobile app - where a combined interface has utmost importance.

I’ve recently updated my blog, and included in the header my current location from FireEagle. I can now set my location via Dopplr, mobile phone, dashboard widget, or whatever cool next generation shoe tracking service, and have my site automatically get this - or view in FaceBook.

FireEagle will do for geolocation what GoogleMaps did for online maps, or Twitter did for small messaging exchange: Provide an underlying framework that developers can innovate on top of.

I explained before why the iPhone doesn’t need a GPS, and FireEagle makes this especially true. In the end, I just want it to be easy for me to share locations with people and use this for finding things around me. I don’t really care how that happens, I just want it to happen. And loosely coupled systems like FireEagle abstract away the geolocation method from the geolocation-sharing.

Unfortunately the blog is agog so far today with numerous posts by misunderstanding newszines that see it useful to bash FireEagle and comment on “lack of apps”, or “user base”. They’re not understanding the concept that FireEagle is a tool, not an endpoint.

I hope FireEagle doesn’t get feature-itis. Users and devs are asking for social networks, stored location names, and other features that each have their uses, in specific application spaces. But FireEagle is powerful for just the reason that it doesn’t do all these things. It’s like saying Amazon’s S3 needs to have “Friending”. External applications should be innovative with how they use and extend FireEagle.

You’re already seeing applications add integration. Dopplr will set your location once per day based on your trips, PresenceRouter helps join FireEagle into the other geolocation services. Dangerday is a Twitter bot that will allow you to publish to FireEagle from the plethora of Twitter applications and sites out there. FireWidget is a Mac OS X dashboard widget, and FireWrench is a GreaseMonkey script for polling your location in Firefox. There are a couple of other really exciting applications and interfaces to FireEagle that can be found with some lurking around (I leave this as an exercise to you the reader until the apps officially announce themself).

We’ve also built in FireEagle support into Mapufacture and will soon be showing off some of the really interesting things FireEagle lets us do for our users.

Jesse Newland has a very good ruby library, and I believe the Yahoo Developer Network will be putting up libraries for PHP, Python, Javascript, Java, Objective-C, and C#.

FireEagle is also using the new OAuth specification - one of the first large scale service to do so. Along the way they’ll have to do a lot of developer education on how to use OAuth, but it’s a leap in the right direction. Using OAuth it makes it simple to connect to multiple services without having to cater to as many unique authentication mechanisms. The pain is early in development but pays off in the end.

So developers - this is a call to you, go out and build cool stuff with FireEagle!

As my global network of contacts grow, it’s always great to meetup with people that I’ve digitally conversed with often. Jeffrey Johnson,aka Ortelius, is going to meet up and show off some of his very cool Aerial Imaging with RC Airplanes, part of the Open Aerial Map project.

The first day I’ll be sitting in on a part of Marc’s Food Hacking Workshop - though this past Thursday I got a very in-depth tutorial on proper cooking concepts and culinary design.

So if you’re at the conference, make sure and find me. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader on figuring out how to do that.

Please let me know if you run into any issues. There had been numerous bugs in the beta - and I think most of these have been ironed out. I also updated the KML to use KML 2.2 and some simple atom links to your blog and post authors.

Also, the geopress_map function has some nice functionality for being embeddeable in Archive, Category, and Search pages. Right now the function signature is a little long, but if you want to have all your markers for a category or search show up in the map, you use the following in your template (assuming you want your map to be (200px high, 400px wide)

<?php echo geopress_map(200, 400, -1, true, true); ?>

This will embed the map with unlimited (-1) locations from the category (unless you have lots of geo-posts in a single view). Check out my conference blog post archive.

There have been numerous requests for per-item and categorical styling. This shouldn’t be too hard to add. And also per-post zoom and map types. Also I will be updated GeoPress/MovableType to converge on the same feature-set.

Also - if you have any updates/patches/suggestions for GeoPress - chime in (and contribute code

From what I gathered at the conference, it is very early stages for the web crowd on discussing these ideas. The fact that there was a very small representation of sociologist or anthropologists that no doubt have a greater understanding of the general concept is indicative of typical technologists having difficulty engaging traditional experts and gathering experience being applied to new techniques. There was an interesting mix of business/market analysis, developers, designers, and technophiles. Because of this broad representational range there was a difficulty in having a common conversation since the taxonomy of collective intelligence is not well understood.

I’ll go into this more in follow-up posts, especially as applied to Geo, but there are many varied aspects of CI: collaboration, collection, explicit and implicit, superlinear vs. mechanical turk. Each has incredible power and capability, but it’s ineffective to apply a broad brush stroke of design and understanding across the entire gamut.

Kim Rachmeler, VP Customer Service at Amazon, Inc., summarized it best in her “award-winning” quote:

The network knows what the nodes do not.

There were a number of notable projects, a few summarized here:

Beth Noveck showed the very excellent Peer-to-Patent review system that is leveraging public analysis of patents in order to help alleviate the mess the USPTO is currently in. Blaise Aguera y Arcas had an excellent demo of SeaDragon, scaleless image zooming - and hoping that we can do something similar with OpenStreetMap. More CI based, Eric Horvitz had interesting concepts on selective sharing of user-gps tracks for route and traffic prediction building. Humans as sensors.

There was also discussion about “reputation”, which really is like saying Collective² Int. - identifying experts and then using their intellingence to solve problems or make suggestions. Which gets to more underlying questions about whether a “crowd” can really be smart, or if it is just extra power behind a few smart kernels.

I did find it particularly humorous of the potential the underlying purpose of the conference on “Collective Intelligence” was in fact to get together a number of intelligence people to garnish their ideas.

Corrie and I moved to the Detroit for her to attend the University of Michigan to get her Master’s degree and for me to work at Realtime Technologies building high-fidelity, immersive vehicle simulation software. Due to the university being in Ann Arbor, and RTI in Royal Oak, we lived in the very quaint, though quiet, town of Northville.

However, along the way things changed. Corrie and I became married, she decided to stay on for her Doctorate, and I left RTI to do geospatial consulting and eventually incorporate Mapufacture with Mikel. No longer needing to commute an hour each morning and afternoon, we moved to Ann Arbor to enjoy the small, but high-energy town.

Ann Arbor held many surprises - a thriving tech community, though struggling tech industry. Google has set up an office, but primarily offering AdSense sales and support. Organizations like Spark are working to encourage small businesses and development, but I never connected in a way that was helped me.

The best thing that happened in Ann Arbor was the serendipity that proximity offered through being introduced to Ed Vielmetti, a veritable hurricane of ideas, energy, and connections with the tech circle throughout the world. The cadre of entrepreneurs, innovators, and generally swell people that belong to this small, but quickly growing collective are a model of what any community should be. Not to mention meeting up at Eastern Accents for a2b3.

However, Ann Arbor has the ardruous task of continuing to build, and maintain, this germination in the light of the difficulty that affects the Detroit region with economic downturn and general lack of benefits that other urban centers offer. There is no mass transit outside downtown Ann Arbor. Detroit continues to have problems with government, infrastructure, and corporations. Commuting is both the expectation (Motor City), but also the bane of creating a vibrant “young” population.

It’s not clear where I’ll end up (geographically). Corrie is a newly minted Dr., and is weighing her various potentials for how she’ll save the world (or at least make it a greener place) and also where it makes sense for both of us to be for a couple of years. I know I’ll maintain the great connections I’ve forged with Arborites and Michiganders, and know I’ll be back to visit soon.

Any one know a good tech community that needs a curler?

I approached the course as a technologist looking to expand my knowledge of application and techniques of GIS and web mapping for addressing social and environmental issues. It was an interesting experience due to the fact that the rest of the class was primarily education and middle-east studies students, with very little technical capability.

Throughout the course we discussed what Arlinghaus and Evans are calling a “Geomat”, a geographic matrix that formulates a standard ‘recipe’ for building a hypermedia visualization of anthropological issues. This includes both pertinent data: climate, demographics, terrain, resources, economic and social institutions, individual actors, and policy; as well as multiple interface elements: maps, calendrical timelines, individual events of interest, biographies, source documents, and organizational reports.

Overall, this is an excellent concept for how to design an informational and exploration site to document and educate on an issue. Too often a site is full of text that is typically opaque to understanding by the average reader, or simple pretty graphics that are too easy to tell the single-side of a story or mislead and under-represent. Together all of these elements can serve to provide the user with a multifaceted understanding of an issue - from technical to anthropological perspectives, and provide a better analysis capability in which to frame future discussion.

The culmination of the course as building a project around a specific event or issue in the middle east. Inspired by Corrie’s work, I chose to investigate and map the consumer water issues and in general hydrological capabilities and rights that has underpinned most conflicts and discussions between Israel, Palestine, and other countries in the region like Jordan and Egypt.

http://mapsomething.com/demo/waterusage/

The Data

Gathering the data for this project proved to be particularly difficult. After a lot of searching I did start to find some very good static maps generated by the UN and some of the Israeli Agencies. None of these provided the underlying data and as such did not provide a mechanism for investigation or combining with other data.

This actually illustrates part of the problem why there is such conflict over water in the region. Maps tend to be limited in the data they show - either being hydrological maps, or infrastructure maps, or political boundary maps. However, the situation is more complicated and inter-dependent. Issues over security fences and borders typically move boundaries several miles for no apparent reason. When you bring in well locations and other infrastructure, the reasons become very apparent as the fence may be moved to provide access to a small number of wells to one side or the other.

A larger, more prevalent issue is the actual location of the aquifers and the effect that inhabitation and construction has on affecting the quantity and quality of water of residents much further away. All the water from the West Bank (Eastern side of Israel) flows towards the Mediterranean and affects the coastal aquifer. Therefore Palestinian usage and maintenance of this water source affects Israelis, a situation that has obvious unsettled many in Israel and underpins negotations.

Finally I was able to get some very useful data from the Executive Action Team (EXACT) Multilateral Working Group on Water Resources, which is tasked with gathering data and providing analysis and sources for this very issue. In addition, networking with David Katz of the University of Michigan and Michael Eyal of the Hydrological Service of Israel got me better aquifer and stream data. These and more resources are listed on the site here and I’ve also included the converted data formats and uploaded them to Mapufacture.

The Technical

Being a technologist, I wanted to build a ’slick’ way to generate my Geomat with dynamic content from a common data store. It’s been a very long time since I created a “static” site that wasn’t generated from some form of a database.

For the Israel & Palestine Water site I chose to store all the information in KML. The richness of KML allowed me to specify styling, temporal, and other attributes such as actor (country) and category (water, conflict, meeting, individual).

I then built a simple PHP page that parses the KML and populates the map and two timelines. The two timelines has drawn some criticism, but I wanted a way to show both major events for quick navigation - kind of like a shortcut menu, and then a more complete timeline that showed all events on a very fine timescale.

The underlying tools used also included Mapstraction, which made the overlay of markers and polygons for watersheds very easy, and Simile Timeline, which has excellent support for time visualization. Tying the two together was straight-forward and my Javascript was inspired by this Earthquake Map/TImeline demo.

At the end of the project I added a Mapufacture map at the bottom of the page that brings in dynamic and up-to-date news of the region pulled from a variety of sources including news agencies, blogs, and media sharing sites. Ultimately, I would like to overlay this dynamic information onto the primary map, but there are definite issues to be addressed with usability with so much data and making it usable and understandable.

That last part really summarizes the entire issue that Geomats and other design patterns are attempting to resolve. How do you provide for a very rich, and deep, map interface without overwhelming the user and providing mechanisms for exploration and investigation. There is some utilization of the timeline to filter the viewed events, and being able to select markers either geographically or temporally, and have the alternate display centered also aids in guiding the user in connecting the entire set of complex issues.

Also check out the other Maps & Timelines projects, especially Esmaeel Dadashzadeh’s analysis of the efforts to data and investigation of the currently proposed solutions when analyzed using this Geomat multifaceted approach.

The common piece of information cited by people when talking about China is the sheer number of people. This is a fact and well covered. What isn’t easily conveyed is the affect the density and volume of this number of people has on the behaviors, mentality, and lives of the citizens of China. This is a country where there really are a hundred people behind you ready to take your job, or even several of them to do your one job. Individuals have to be tenacious and you have to get what you want. And this isn’t in a malicious or bad way. I wonder if it’s almost necessary for such a dense population to function.

It’s an organized chaos. The streets are very similar to what a westerner would expect, however there are probably 2-4 times as many vehicles and pedestrians on this street. That means that drivers abiding lanes, waiting to turn, and semblence of nominal laws would completely clog the system. Instead, vehicles are really only restricted by the curbs (mostly) and not hitting one another. In fact, in 3 weeks I didn’t see a single accident, which I found amazing. Crossing the road is like playing a game of Frogger, except that you’re the frog.

The pollution also has a deep impact on the populace. I didn’t have trouble breathing, but that was a common complaint by others. Instead, I felt pangs of light deficiency. For 3 weeks we never had a clear view of the horizon. Looking up the sky would be poking through with blue, and the sun would be a bright, but very discernable, disk - signaling a “clear” day. However, even flying over areas of the country there was rarely a break in the smog to see the landscape. This is also attributable to the extremely dry weather they’ve had that would otherwise “wash” the air. An obvious demonstration of why they’re working hard on making rain before the Olympics this summer.

Going out the the country-side was an amazing trip. 10 minutes on a bicycle and you go from “small town” of 600,000 people to farmlands and rice-fields bordering the beautiful Yulong river. You can walk through villages that probably haven’t changed in hundreds of years, except perhaps to get television. There are landmarks scattered around that would be entire theme parks in the United States, but in China served their original purposes to the local people today. The Dragon Bridge from 1400 AD that is still the only crossing for miles - or the Tang wall that guarded against armies about 1500 years ago and now just serves to separate some fields.

Hello, Bamboo?

I didn’t know what the term “hawking” really meant, and felt like, until I came to China. Combine the large population of available, cheap, workers, with the acquired knowledge and capability to manufacture, and people in cities looking for jobs and money, and you have an insanely overwhelming market of goods available at every corner. You’re constantly bombarded with shop owners, stalls, men on the street luring you into tailors, bags, and whatnot to sell. From these people you are a walking wallet and our favorite phrase became “Bu yao!” (don’t want)

Imagine if email spam were people. That is what it is like. At one market I was looking at a pair of shoes, but decided that though the price was right (approx. $4) I didn’t really like them. As I turned to walk away there were 8 other vendors behind me holding out either the exact same shoe for 1/2 the price, or a comparable shoe. If you show the slightest interest in something, it immediately turns into a bargaining game. They may even cry, throw a tantrum, complain that they are going out of business - but you can expect to pay 1/10th (yes, 10%) of what the original price was. They’ll seem incredibly hurt, but when you hand over the money, they immediately smile again and ask “do you want some scrolls?”

The pervasiveness of the market was succinctly demonstrated as I was biking along the Yulong river. The popular thing to do along the river is to hire a bamboo boat and a local to pole you up and down the river. Being the winter, tourist low season, there were swarms of boat owners and locals trying to sell a boat ride. They know they can get your attention by saying “Hello!” very clearly and then whatever it is they are selling.

So when leaving the village I rode past a small group of childen who were laughing and skipping past me, and upon seeing me shouted “Hello! Bamboo?” and then continuing to run and skip along down the next street - the phrase perfectly mimicking their parents offers of a ride, but in this case it was the only english words these children knew and to them it was a common greeting. (though I imagine their parents had very clearly explained about us westerners)

When in 中国…

Corrie and I took some mandarin classes and plastered various bits of our apartment with signs denoting the Mandarin (and Pinyin for pronunciation) words for the items or ideas. I think knowing a little bit of mandarin made a big difference on our trip. In the cities, you can pass with English, especially cities like Beijing that are recommending 400 words and phrases that every cab driver should know for preparing for Olympic tourists - but even then English isn’t strong or prevalent. China, I imagine, has the same problem that American’s do - it’s such a big country that there rarely is an opportunity to practice a foreign language. So while you may learn English in school for years, they will probably not have ever, or not often, spoken with a native English speaker. There were many times that our Mandarin was as good or better than the English of the person we were talking with.

Also, knowing some Mandarin just made the entire experience a lot more fun. Our pronunciation definitely needs a lot of work, but the people were typically very understanding, and were excited that we knew and spoke some of the language. My vocabulary doubled in the 3 weeks I was there and we’re definitely planning on maintaing and extending our knowledge of the language. Just need to find a local culture group.

China is a country that is outgrowing itself and trying to figure out how to live in a modern world. They produce 3-million engineers a year (compared to the US’s 100,000 engineers a year) but it’s a commonly accepted fact that the currently common Confucian style learning system promotes memorization over analysis and interpretation, so the workforce typically lacks ingenuity. There are more people than jobs, and businesses are required to hire a number of employees based on the square footage of their buildings. This leads to idle workers who have little more responsibility than greeting or looking busy.

I’m looking forward to more trips to China - I will have to increase my Mandarin skills so not to get teased by my pronunciations. Thanks to my old friend Sam (and to Facebook for letting me know that she lived where I was traveling to) for 3 days of “local life” in Nanjing. I passed on the turtle soup and duck brains.

Mapufacture Map of my trip