I met Jim Stogdill at FooCamp and we had quite a few discussions about the use of new and web technologies in the government, military and other large organizations. He was also carrying a really great Crown Graphic, bellows camera that captured authentic looking aged photographs, albeit on discontinued and hard to find Polaroid film

He’s putting together BarCampMil, a barcamp for the Defense, IC, Government, and Humanitarian communities. It is on August 8th, from 8AM until 5PM or later at Mercury Federal Systems offices in Crystal City, VA next to the Metro. (via Limn This). So if you can be in the DC area next Friday, you should definitely come by.

And really, where’s the logo Jim?

As a member of NACIS, North American Cartographic Information Society, I get issues of the quarterly magazine Cartographic Perspectives. Typically it is filled with articles on how to make pirate maps with ArcMap, the history of projections, or other subjects interesting to cartographers.

I was much amused to see that the Winter 2008 issue carried an opinion piece by Michael Peterson titled “Maps and the Internet: What a Mess It Is and How to Fix It”. It apparently is a response to a keynote given at the International Cartography Conference that discussed the disparity between map-making tools and the lack of knowledge required to use these tools.

Personally, I found the opinion in Cartographic Perspectives to be short-sighted and lacked understanding of the trends occurring in digital web-mapping. Generally the article is a doomsday scenario about how the lack of net neutrality, internet addiction, government restrictions on access, Google Map, system administration and open-source software is harming mapping and cartography.

The last point is perhaps the most humorous, where Peterson complains that open-source software is difficult to maintain and has less than appealing interfaces. What he fails to mention is how powerful and compelling these tools are now when used appropriately, particularly OpenLayers - which is essentially a drop-in replacement for other mapping libraries. Map servers are getting easier to setup and maintain, geo-hosting sites are showing up, and user-interfaces are getting better.

In fact, he runs the gamut of naysaying the current mapping solutions on the web without actually providing any suggestions or solutions. His only real suggestion on “How to Fix It” is to say:

“…organizations like NACIS and the International Cartographic Association (ICA) have a major role to play in defining the function and form of Internet Maps.”

I do agree with some of his overall sentiments. Modern mapping as it is largely represented at this moment has achieved putting maps online and digitized. It has not, however, truly pushed into becoming a new type of medium and utilizing the capabilities of dynamic data and queryable, modifiable interfaces. You can begin to see the emergence of these now, and I believe that the next 6 months will see a whole new round of mapping paradigms. I also think that cartographers and geographers have a wealth of experience and knowledge to share and help guide this {re,e}olution, but that it also won’t be entirely in their control.

A couple of weeks ago, Bjørn Sandvik pushed out his thematic mapping engine: http://thematicmapping.org/engine/. It’s a nice and simple tool for classifying and visualizing the freely available United Nations OneStop Data.

Unlike most other theming engines, it also handles time very well. I generated a time-history thematic map of internet users around the world and temporally visualized in GoogleEarth:

Internet users per 100 Population - Temporal Earth from mapufacture on Vimeo.

Check out his other tutorials and information in the blog about using GeoJSON, KML, databases, proportional symbols and more.

Bjørn is continuing to tweak the engine and is in discussions on the OSGeo mailing lists about the appropriate open-source license under which to release the engine.

It’s great to see some really compelling next-generation web-based and usable geospatial tools emerging.

A *Camp reward yet again with the ability to completely inspire as well as reveal interesting cross-domain synergies.

I had an interesting discussion with Michael Shiloh on both the attempt, and inherent difficulty, in choosing sessions that you would not typically go to. At a meetup like FooCamp there are more than twelve parallel sessions in addition to the numerous breezeway (no hallways here) tracks and pulling yourself away from someone like Noel Gorelick talking about huge scientific datasets from satellites to instead go to Linda Stone’s discussion of attention hacking through breathing is both arduous and surprisingly rewarding.

Curated vs. Crowd-Sourced

Last year I wrote that “Humans are behind the machine”, and after this year I think the trend has already flipped. Humans are great for augmenting data creation and retrieval, but there is still a key need to develop methods for supporting human input and proper human-based requests for mixture of user- and machine-generated data.

The first, and one of the most crowded, sessions was led by Esther Dyson and talked about user metadata, or data exhaust. The implicit information users’ create as they move through a system. PMOG uses this as a game but there are larger concerns on the privacy implications of data users are leaving behind in systems or even in the assumedly lost information in historic and public records that are now being shared online.

The specific session on Curation vs. Crowd-Sourcing of content was, what I thought, one of my ‘give-in’ moments of attending a session I’m already very involved in. Fortunately, it was an entirely worthwhile indulgement as the discussion had interesting tones of a variety of perspectives on sourcing, creation, aggregation, curation, and collection.

Some of the better points were on the importance of the aspect Crowd-Sourced, as in a way to get the data. This same discussion came up at CIFoo on the difference between collaboration and collection. Flickr has done interesting demonstration of the capability of Crowd-Curation via their interestingness algorithm. The role of the curator then takes on many aspects. It can be as a guiding persona where their values influence the contribution of community members - or it can be for encouragement.

Another key aspect that Ze Frank made was the importance of the crowd to be loosely affiliated. Digg, SlashDot and similar sites definitely cater and serve a specific community that limits its total effectiveness in finding truly divergent and interesting news.

And there is the question of over-crowd-sourcing. The fascination arises out of the rebound from tightly controlled media and the empowerment publishing and digital tools have on allowing and sharing user-generated content. Through both the use of algorithms as well as limited-contributor sites like FFFFound! are an answer that lie in between.

Unlike last year, I won’t be heading to Hawaii afterwards, but instead caught a very packed and tiring red-eye back to DC.

Thank you for another great year O’Reilly Team!

This is a cross-post from the Mapufacture Blog, but I wanted to point out an article published in Business Week: Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes that discusses the role of collaborative mapping in emergency response situations. In particular it highlights the work of GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and Mapufacture, open geodata, and easy to use tools. Read the Mapufacture post for more thoughts on the article.

There is quite an underlying question here about the importance of both crowd-sourcing as well as curated, or expert data and tools. I believe moving forward there will be a lot of effort mixing the differences as well as applications that allow for the proper use and understanding of the data and published maps.

One minor point that is disappointing about Business Week’s site is the lack of external links to the organizations or tools. The only links are to Business Week’s own internal listing for businesses. In fact, besides the Digg & del.icio.us taggings, I don’t think there is a single link on the article’s page that isn’t either an internal link to Business Week, or through one of their advertisements.