Its great to see the big guys on the GeoWeb and GIS respectively working together to bring more data to the masses. While there was a nice canned demo showing ArcGIS 9.3 interacting with Google Earth, it will be interesting to see how it works in the wild and how it scales. My one concern is that is seemed from the demo that the model is still based around the public being passive viewers of GIS professionals work.Adena Schutzberg, in her All Points Blog, has a detailed, plain-English review of the idea:
This is a huge step forward for geography (neo, paleo, and all the rest). It does indeed bring the hidden data and emerging Web services from the huge ESRI community out into the light of day.Theron Hatch, at The GeoJobe Blog, builds on Adena's analysis with some thoughts about where we go next:
It seems that costs should come down for budget conscious agencies looking to maximize the ingestion of free data available throughout the Where 2.0 map world, while at the same time managing only those internal datasets that are either required by law, security-focused, or otherwise need to be handled locally. This leaves a plethora of free data that someone else can manage and make available. This news means combining these disparate datasets is now easier and more seamless than ever. “Why can’t we all just get along” just flew out the window.Finally, Sue, posting yesterday on Very Spatial, suggested the "old meet new" idea:
...for those of us GIS old timers, it was kinda symbolic to see the old and new guard coming together.Things are getting interesting. Yet again.
Well, I would have liked to have written a post about each speaker today...but there just wasn't much to yap about. In my opinion, there were really only two compelling talks so far this morning. The first was from Mikal Maron of Mapufacture and Jesse Robbins of O'Reilly Radar. They gave a really great talk about crowd sourcing data for disaster response and recovery. They showed some great examples of where this has been very effective (Myanmar Cyclone, China Earthquake, SoCal Wildfires) and some where it hasn't been so great (Steve Fossett search). But overall, I think this has some great application for doing really good and important things with crowd sourced data.
The other good talk came from Jennifer Kilian of Frog Design. She talked about the importance of design not so much from the traditional "form follows function" point of view, but from the "form follows emotion" point of view. She presented a very compelling case study about Merian GPS (a Euro product) that, in my opinion, showcased a product that exhibited near perfect design. And the most important part: It wasn't design for design sake. It really fully considered the user experience and was built around that. I think that the world of "paleo" GIS can really take a lesson from this. We seem to always design from a function point of view with very little consideration of design. Whether we want to believe it or not, design matters. In the new world of Web 2.0 (well, new to the GIS community) design considerations will be just as important as functional considerations.
So, design and disaster...two words that could have described the rest of the morning session. Lack of design consideration was evident in most of the other presentations this morning...and well, I won't say anything about the disasters. (Oh and the wireless has been very spotty today, so sorry if my updates aren't as frequent as yesterday).
There are already some videos about Where 2.0 conference online. To view these go to: http://where.blip.tv
One very interesting talk is from Adrian Holovaty, who was talking about: “Everyblock: A Newsfeed for your Block”.
In the end of his presentation he encuraged the audience: “Roll your own maps”. With standard maps like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps you get a lot of stuff but maybe you don’t really need this for your own map application. Additional you have no contol over:
of your maps. If you publishing a website you maybe use templates but you want to have full control to design you own cooperative identity. Why do we accept ‘no control’ for our maps? Personalisation become increasingly importance - also for maps. Therefore I thik this will change.
Further details on this topic: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/takecontrolofyourmaps
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Today Yahoo! Maps releases an expansion to our real-time traffic offering, increasing both coverage and comprehensiveness.
In terms of coverage, we’ve expanded to a bunch of new markets from Bakersfield, CA to Rochester, ME, and improved some markets such as New York, where we previously only had incident data.
For more comprehensive coverage, we’ve expanded beyond just freeways to major thoroughfares as well. Now roads such as East 14th in New York, or Van Ness in San Francisco will show up with real-time traffic flow information.
Together with our drag-and-drop routing, now you can avoid those traffic hotspots.
Happy Motoring,
Michael Lawless
Sr. Product Manager - Yahoo! Maps
From Oliver: FORMOSAT-2, the first and only high-resolution satellite with a daily revisit capability, overcomes this obstacle to provide a new response to your surveillance needs. FORMOSAT-2’s spatial resolution is 2 m in panchromatic (black and white) and 8 m in multispectral (color) mode.
Kudos to Chris Spagnuolo, who has been ‘on fuego’ with his blog posts on Where. Be sure to check out his posts to get a good idea of each session. I’m pressed for time, but here’s my take on day two. (more…)
If you were unable to make it to Where 2.0 in San Francisco, lots of the talks have been recorded and are available on Blip.tv. If you want to check out the videos, cruise over to http://where.blip.tv/.
While at the Where 2.0 conference, I’ve had the opportunity to play with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle a little more.
I’ve now got Navizon updating my Fire Eagle position every 15 seconds (which certainly drains my phone’s battery pretty nicely!)
The nice thing about Navizon is that I get 3 ways of obtaining my position:
So now, Fire Eagle is sitting in the cloud, knowing where I am at any given moment (or at least every 15 moments.)
So I started thinking - if one Yahoo app knows where I am - couldn’t another Yahoo app use that information for something useful?
What if when I went to update my Flickr photo sets Flickr read the EXIF header in the image, found out when the shot was taken, and then queried Fire Eagle to figure out where I was at that time, and apply the Fire Eagle position to the photo??
I currently do this offline using GPicSync, but it would be incredibly useful to do not have to do it myself but rather let the cloud handle that for me…
One potential snag - even though the Yahoo developer I spoke to yesterday told me that Fire Eagle kept a history, according to the Fire Eagle Help it does not keep such a log.
Does Fire Eagle keep a record of my past whereabouts?
Fire Eagle keeps only the most recent piece of location information it has received for each of the major levels it understands: Exact Location, Neighborhood, City, State, Country etc. If a new piece of “Exact Location” information comes in, then we throw away the old one. No historical record is kept of your location
Maybe this feature could be re-worked by the Fire Eagle developers? Allowing historical positions to be stored?

Yesterday was the first full day of sessions at Where 2.0 2008. Of course, I already blogged the Google keynote by Director of Google Geo John Hanke (I've added a video of his presentation to the post). Also, note there are other videos of some of the presentations at Where available at where.blip.tv. I'm not going to have time to write summaries of all the talks from yesterday right now. So, here are a few notable summaries which I found most interesting from a Google Earth perspective.
I'll try to update this post with other observations from Day 2 later. But, I need to go prepare for today's sessions. I also want to mention a few things I observed in the booths and at the Where Fair.
See video:
Scientists with the Vulcan Project at Purdue University have created a high resolution CO2 emissions data set with models based upon previously captured data.Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
Picked up portions of this from All Points Blog today. Where 2.0 is a conference dedicated to “neographers”, that new breed of mappers that are using free and open source map technology to develop some fairly advanced and easy to use maps (for the most part). No longer a fringe group, neogeographers are becoming part of the mainstream of GIS. This week is the annual conference pulling in some pretty big names in the GIS and neogeographer arena. Many familiar names and a few that are not as common to the traditional map user.
So the big news for the ESRI user base is how Google and ESRI are going to work together at least in the technical sharing of data sense. From a keynote address, the following highlights show a glimpse of how this will play out (from APB).
ArcGIS Server 9.3 (available in about 4 weeks, per Dangermond) will make its metadata service “scrapable” into KML and thus findable via Google’s geographic search (once known as KML search). Further, ArcGIS Server will be able to publish not only that data as streaming KML (and GeoRSS) but also related services. Dangermond showed finding data from a Portland, Oregon service, visualizing it and then performing analysis, all from Google Earth. Said another way, all data and services served by ArcGIS Server could potentially be findable and usable in any Google mashup. Further, the resultant KML can be used in app that supports the OGC standard.
ESRI has enhanced the API for ArcGIS Server 9.3 (JavaScript/Flash) to make it more conducive to plugging into other Web mapping properties in mashups.
Google is making its geographic search available in its various APIs. To date it was only available via Google Maps and Google Earth applications. Now any Google developers will be able to do “local search” on explicitly tagged data (KML built via MyMaps or 3rd party apps like Platial and Flckr or your GIS!).
According to APB:
These announcements have some important implications for the geospatial marketplace:
1) the use of and demand for ArcGIS Server should rise
2) any geo data or services provider who wants to play on the Web needs to look at how it will provide findability and usability of its data and services in this way
3) geodata-finding portals may, in time, become extinct - if the KML vision for search and distribution becomes a de facto one as well
4) the technology may be available, but the institutional barriers to data sharing may still be blocking the path (as noted in a question at the end of the session)
It seems that costs should come down for budget conscious agencies looking to maximize the ingestion of free data available throughout the Where 2.0 map world, while at the same time managing only those internal datasets that are either required by law, security-focused, or otherwise need to be handled locally. This leaves a plethora of free data that someone else can manage and make available. This news means combining these disparate datasets is now easier and more seamless than ever. “Why can’t we all just get along” just flew out the window.
I’m off to Wherecamp tomorrow. I’ll be in town and have no plans yet as of Friday, and I’ll be at wherecamp all weekend, planning to spend the night hacking at the Googleplex.
Who’s going to be there? Anyone interested in meeting up on Friday, or doing any hacking ahead of time or during?
Hanke wasn't referring just to ESRI silos, but also to the data stuck behind WMS and GetFeatureInfo(), WFS and GetFeature().
"The Commission found that the merged company would be unlikely to pursue these strategies because its ability to restrict access to digital maps ... would be limited by the presence of an upstream competitor, Navteq," it said.
The new company "would have no incentive to restrict access to digital maps because the sales of digital maps lost by Tele Atlas would not be compensated by additional sales of personal navigation devices," it said.
Phew! After more than a year in development and two years deep in Umibot’s RAM, today we unveil a grand plan: normalized mass transit data for (today) 53 public transportation systems in the US, Canada and UK. To get here we had to develop other pieces–a data intake platform and a schema. Some more info on all of these:
Web-based Mass Transit Data Intake Platform (no acronym yet) Umibot believes the greatest cost in data collection is identifying and purging the system of dirty data. By auto-validating data at point of input, we’re able to significantly reduce this cost. UMI’s proprietary web-based platform is flexible and captures the vast collection of spatial and attribute data we manage. This includes things like routes, station footprints, exits (you can’t generally exit at a ‘station’), hours of operation, handicap accessibility, elevator location, amenities (retail, bathroom, telephone, etc…) and a great deal more. We then associate this attribute data with the ‘spine’ of spatial data and then compute a graph network, making the data ‘routing ready’ across a variety of platforms.
Transit agencies can take advantage of this platform by using UMI’s infrastructure as a platform to inventory their own data. It’s a well-known fact that transit agencies face bureaucratic, technical and legal challenges to releasing data, and this platform is one more reason for transit agencies to partner with industry to increase data distribution and support increased ridership by driving awareness.
Normalized schema Before we began data collection, a uniform schema that recognizes transit nuances and complexities needed to be developed. For example, scheduling for the London Tube operates on a headway, meaning trains depart every Xish minutes. New York’s MTA operates on a tabular schedule, with scheduled departure times. Sounds like a detail, and it that’s exactly what it is–multiply this nuance 100 times and there’s a great deal of data definition that matters. What we’ve developed is internal to UMI and offers tremendous flexibility to add new mode types (ferry, funicular, etc). It has nothing to do with the output customers receive, and we’ll have more news about that soon.
Coverage The map below reflects current US coverage. Across the 53 transit systems, UMI has defined over 14,000 individual stations and over 100,000 data attributes. Stay tuned for increased coverage, attributes, service delivery and partnerships!

And some fun transit statistics for current coverage:
22% of transit stations have bathrooms (they may not be operable/accessible, but they exist)
35% of transit stations have dedicated parking
FYI: Wire release
Continuing my recent discussion about OpenID and considering OpenID usage for authenticating to OSGeo services, I wanted to make a short review of its disadvantages. The OpenID advantages are well-known and can be described with a short statement:
open, decentralized, free framework, which allows Internet users to control their digital life with single identity
Stefan Brand collected number of opinions about OpenID and compiled a very interesting post on his blog about problem(s) with OpenID. Stefan’s blog entry is pretty long, so to understand his findings easier, I decided to abstract key thoughts on that matter.
Stefan summarized main problems and sources of OpenID criticism as follows:
OpenID is highly vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, creates insurmountable privacy problems, is not a trust system, suffers from usability problems, and makes it unappealing to become an OpenID consumer.
Next, complaints about the OpenID framework are presented in a few categories, which I’m going to summarize below.
Google has updated some imagery in Google Earth, and once again they’re revealing it in the form of a quiz. Frank Taylor has already posted a few answers, so I’ll add those to our list. If you know any others, post your response in the comments and we’ll try to get them all figured out.
None of these answers have been verified yet, so some might be wrong. Remember that Google Maps still has the old imagery, so if you think something is new in Google Earth, compare it to Google Maps to find out for sure.
1) This city is home to over 300 museums. Its flower is the bird of paradise and its tree is the coral tree.
Los Angeles
2) An historic landmark, this all wood luxury hotel was built in 1888.
Coronado Island near San Diego
3) This city’s namesake was the Governor of Tennessee.
Houston, Texas
4) Many believe the Greek King Ulysses founded this modern day capitol city.
Lisbon, Portugal
5) Towering above many, this city is the 2nd highest capital on its continent.
Madrid, Spain
6) Considered the fashion capitol of the world, you can now visit this city with high-res imagery.
Milan, Italy
7) This is the city where Vegemite was invented and is now exclusively produced.
Melbourne, Australia
The cruise ship capitol of the world has gotten a fresh set of pixels.
Miami, Florida
9) The currency of this island is known as Manx.
Isle of Man
Other updated areas:
Derry, Ireland
[UPDATED 14-May 0930 ET]
Google has released new imagery today for Google Earth. As usual, they are not revealing the locations yet - instead we get some hints of locations in the form of some riddles. I've been busy with attending the Where 2.0 conference, and haven't had time yet to check out the imagery myself.
Here's the answers to some of the riddles (thanks to help from some comments below): 1) Los Angeles, 2) Coronado Island near San Diego, 3) Houston, Tx, 4) Lisbon, Portugal, 5) Madrid, Spain; 6) Milan, Italy, 7) Melbourne, Australia, 8) Miami, Florida, 9) Isle of Man
Also, thanks to GEB readers I've added some other imagery updates found. Note: I haven't had time to verify these, but you can verify by comparing to Google Maps' satellite photos (just click the "View in Google Maps" button in GE). Google Maps doesn't show the new imagery yet. Here's the list so far (not including the ones from the riddle above).
Pat
McDevitt, TeleAtlas. Navigating the
Future: Mapping in the Long Tail
All navigation is local. Where is RELATIVE. It seems the big companies don't map smaller, localized "where". Why not? They're hit based, it's too expensive to map the niches. Pat explained it as hit based vs. niche based mapping. Who's who in the mapping playground:
The niche based mapping effort is being done by...you guessed it...YOU. How is this happening? It's all part of the map creation long tail.
The Long Tail of Map Creation
The enabling and compiling steps allow micro-interest mapping. That means my 70 year old Dad could add content that is relevant to him thanks to steps 2 and 3. So, where is long tail going?
In the long tail, filtering technologies will be very important in the future. This brought up the whole Paleogeography v. Neogeography debate (man...I hate those two words...but that's another topic for another post). Really, the debate is about collaboration or competition in creating map data/content. I think it should be collaborative and so did Pat. He showed a great quadrant figure to describe how can all work together (read as: Can't we all just get along?). In Pat's words, Paleo should focus on protocol based visible and verifiable data. Neo focuses on low protocol low visible/verifiable. Low protocol/high verifiable/visible data will be created through customer feedback to paleo companies. If all of these areas come together, paleo and neo can come together and produce really great, unique content and geography for a very long tail in the map creation playground. I'm not sure I entirely agree with this assessment, but it's a good start.
POST SCRIPT: I really wanted to do a post on Jeremy Bartley's talk on ESRI's ArcGIS 9.3 but he totally got robbed. He got 5 minutes and barely got a demo in. He talked quickly (very quickly) about ESRI's REST and JavaScript API's, showed a quick demo of Google Maps and VE integrations....and he was off the stage. I felt really bad for him. If you go the ESRI User Conference this year or the Dev Summit next year, connect with Jeremy. He's a great guy and has some awesome ideas.
Vincent
Tao, Director of Microsoft's Live and Local Search and Virtual Earth gave an absolutely
awesome presentation this afternoon. First he spoke about Where is the "where?".
Essentially, he see's location as nothing but an index to information. As such,
he said that we need to move from organizing spatial information to organizing information
spatially. Next, he discussed how people look for information indexed by location?
Here's his lowdown:
First look: Entry points to location data? (Or where is the "where?") Specifically, he was talking about location based services vs. location powered services. So, what does that mean and what's the difference: People come to social network sites for socializing, not for location information. The location component is value-added. In general, most location services are powering today's hot social sites. This is not location based services...this is powered by location services. Big differences...and most people are using location powered services, not location based services. So, the where is not so much at "mapping" sites as it is at sites we use every day.
Devices (what do people use to get their location data): PC queries at 71% represent the largest slice of pie. Cell phones are 5% of the pie, phone data (i.e. mobile browsers) is at 2% but with a growth rate of a projected 71% in the next year, in vehicle navigation is at 1% with a 20% projected growth rate next year, and the remainder is still from print (you remember...those paper map thingies?).
Next, Vincent moved to show all of the way cool stuff coming (or just released) in Virtual Earth. Microsoft views VE as an enabling platform. As Vincent said, "We don't want one earth...we want you to create an ecosystem of millions of earths." So here's the coolness of VE on it's way or here already:
Thought some Kelly bloggers might enjoy this video, I believe Brian shows up to Geolunches once and a while.
“Googler Mano Marks demonstrates techniques for using view based refresh (VBR), and other dynamic querying techniques in KML. He show how it works in Google Earth and Google Maps, and talks about server-side coding techniques for generating the KML. And geo developer Brian Hamlin demonstrates a specific application of Dynamic KML, using PostGIS with Google Earth.
This talk is very useful for developers who want to use servers to store data, and show subsets to their users based on what is displayed in their viewport or browser.”
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
A little while ago, I was passed a couple of utilities that I wanted to share with the community.
1) CSF2ASCII.exe - This tool will read any .csf file and write out the contents (projection information out to a a ASCII text file or an HTML file. This is also available in the download widget on the left hand side of the screen.
2) Database Inventory - This will analyze any warehouse connection and provide a complete list of the GeoMedia objects that are available in the connection. I found this one a bit hard to use…but it could definitely be useful if you needed to get a better feel for the contents of a new connection…especially a database. Great for documentation and learning. This too can be downloaded from the widget on the left hand side of the screen.

If I detect a trend it’s a good one: Google and Yahoo are both opening up access to their geodatabases. Dan Catt’s been explaining how you can now query Yahoo’s database for a landmark or location and get all manner of related geodata back. (James Fee likes it.) John Hanke’s announcement doesn’t sweat the details, but more news about Google’s GeoSearch API is apparently forthcoming soon.
ISIS (a nuclear-non proliferation watchdog that has already been much sourced on Ogle Earth) has just released a detailed report on the alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria bombed by Israel in September 2007. If like me you can’t get enough of the way in which civilians have had a front-row seat for seeing the available evidence analysed, then this report is well worth a read.
The report contains an interesting revelation: Unlike previous media reports that the site had been under satellite surveillance since 2001, it now appears that it wasn’t discovered until 2005, and that its purpose was a mystery until 2007, when Israel presented the CIA with evidence we recently saw in the CIA video presentation. Nut graphs:
According to U.S. government experts, U.S. intelligence had determined in 2005 that Syria and North Korea were involved in a project in the province Dayr az Zawr. However, the nature of the cooperation and the location of the site remained unknown. However, suspicions based on earlier obtained information, pointed to some type of nuclear activity taking place in this province.
The 2005 assessment led to an intensified imagery search, which resulted in the discovery of a large unidentified building near the town of Al Kibar. According to a U.S. government expert, it was “odd and in the middle of nowhere,” but analysts could not ascribe the building with a nuclear character, and U.S. intelligence labeled it an “enigma facility.” In the spring of 2007, the building was determined to be the covert nuclear reactor based on photos acquired by U.S. intelligence, reportedly from Israel, that showed the inside and outside of the building. [...]
Because of its late detection of the Al Kibar reactor, Israel felt compelled to strike the site militarily.
What’s interesting is that given the late discovery of this building, it would have been entirely possible for a Google Earth user to have found the unusual construction first and annotated it in Google Earth Community, were it not for the fact that Google Earth’s imagery of the region happened to be low resolution until late 2007.
I only recently blogged on this but want to just quickly remind everyone to register for TOMORROW'S webinar:
Microsoft Virtual Earth partner IDV Solutions is offering free 2 day training for customers interested in building mapping applications using the Virtual Earth platform and IDV's Visual Fusion offering. The offer provides personal training for up to 6 attendees at IDV's office and enables attendees who successfully complete the training to build and maintain an application within just a few hours.
The offer, valued at $12,500, will be fully explained in a webinar that IDV will host May 14, 2008, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM ((GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)). The webinar will also provide participants with a better understanding of the applicability of Virtual Earth and Visual Fusion to address public sector customer's needs for enhanced clarity and collaboration around critical business data.
The registration for the webinar can found on IDV's web site here: http://www.idvsolutions.com/federaloffer2008.aspx

Thanks to Google Earth's StreetView layer, I noticed some of the new StreetView images released today have some night-time views of Times Square. See it here in Google Maps:
In Google Earth (v4.3 only), if you turn on the StreetView layer and zoom down to near street level, you'll see miniature spheres showing the images in place of the icons. That's how I quickly noticed the different set of images. See more about StreetView in the video demonstration of Google Earth 4.3 here (the last half of the video shows it).
The Times Square area is a particularly good area to check out the new face blurring technique Google is using to help reduce privacy concerns about StreetView imagery. They have face detection software to help with the blurring process.
It’s been a few months since the more paranoid elements in India’s government have acted regarding Google's mapping services, so it’s about time that we get another volley, this time aimed at sites that use the Google Maps API, like Wikimapia. An article by India’s Times Now manages to get this news across, together with some hilarious mixed metaphors:
The government is worried over several websites that give detailed, high resolution images of some of the country's top secret nuclear installations. In a country that has suffered series of terror attacks, high resolution pictures of sensitive installations on the website implies a glaring security loophole, which cannot be ignored. In a bid to unplug the security loophole, various ministries are likely to meet with intelligence agencies on Tuesday (May 13).
[...] For example, the website -- www.wikimapia.com -- gives you a high resolution bird's-eye-view of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) -- and on clicking zoom in, you can see everything right from the nuclear reactor to the radiological laboratory.
Pakistan’s Daily Times, reporting the same news, seems to be under the impression that while Google Earth has censored some imagery of India as a result of requests by India’s government, sites like Wikimapia are taking Google’s place by continuing to make sensitive information available. This is wrong on two counts. Google has not degraded any imagery over India (that false meme borne from wishful thinking in India’s media was debunked back in 2006), and since wikimapia.com uses the Google Maps API, it has the exact same base layer as Google Earth.

The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre is indeed annotated in Wikimapia, but it’s also immediately visible by doing a search for it in Google Earth. With the results of crowdsourced intelligence gathering now being distributed across multiple sites (not just Google Earth Community anymore) it is high time that India’s security services learn to operate under the assumption that there are satellites watching overhead (just like everybody else’s security services do) rather than futilely trying to constrain information already out in the public domain.
Years
ago, I worked on a project that attempted to integrate GIS data into the heads up
displays of U.S. Army helicopter pilots. The technology has come a long way.
Tom Chruchill from EarthData demoed some
killer apps for augmented reality for the Denver Police Department helicopter pilots.
We're talked fully annotated, vector-feature enhanced heads up displays. He's
also putting together some killer geobrowsers. Check out his stuff at http://www.earthscape.com/.
Johann
showed some very cool hardware from GeoTate that
will automate the geotagging of photos via small GPS devices in cameras...they fit
in phones, watches, credit cards and other small stuff too. They have some simple
hardware components for hardware manufacturers to embed in their solutions.
Definitely keep an eye on these guys...this is going places. Johann predicts
that with GPS enabled cameras, geotagging in Flickr can grow from the current 6.5
million manually geotagged photos to over 50 million automatically geotagged photos...that's
huge!!!
What FireEagle does:
FireEagle works like a brokerage. It bridges the people getting location and the people using location. It allows users to control how much information is stored and shared. Tom demoed how Dopplr integrates with FireEagle and controls privacy and access to user entered data. Essentially, they are using OAuth to manage security for FireEagle. Here are some cool things people have been using FireEagle for:
The morning session of Where 2.0 was very interesting. I had a great speaking slot right after Nokia and right before Google. We launched GeoCommons Finder! and made it through the demo even with a bit of a slow connection. You can join the demo at http://finder.geocommons.com and if you would like a entry key drop me an email at sean@fortiusone.com and I’ll pass one along.
We spent a good bit of time talking about making big geodata sets available in the web browser and having the content available for GIS and GeoWeb users - even spreadsheet jockeys. This is a horn we’ve been blowing for a while, and the great thing about the morning session was the Google presentation following us. Their presentation had a small surprise with Jack Dangermond joining them on stage talking about the interconnection of Google Earth/Maps and ESRI. John Hanke had a nice set up talking about the dark web of GIS data that needs to be exposed to the GeoWeb and how they are working with ESRI to do it.
Its great to see the big guys on the GeoWeb and GIS respectively working together to bring more data to the masses. While there was a nice canned demo showing ArcGIS 9.3 interacting with Google Earth, it will be interesting to see how it works in the wild and how it scales. My one concern is that is seemed from the demo that the model is still based around the public being passive viewers of GIS professionals work. We can see the output but can we access the data and add our own nuances and perspective to it. Have to wait and see it actually rolls out, but I think democratizing both the data and ability to answer questions with it are still necessary steps for great progress to reach its potential.
Check out Duncan Davidson's live photostream from Where 2.0 on Flickr. You can even see the back of my head and Dave Bouwman's head as we pound through the Open GeoStack workshop (hmmm...why are we not in focus?).
Since there many other people are blogging the details of Where, I'm just going to take notes about the ideas that resonate with me...
Make your maps permalink friendly: Everyblock.com has a Uri hierarchy (RESTy?) that makes sense, and allows deep-linking and deep-search.
Need to do more than points: deal with "areas" - neighborhoods, routes etc. Especially relevant for geo-locating events/stories, where push-pins over simplify. The situation.
Roll your own maps: make the map relevant for your users. Don't show what you don't need. Control the look & feel of the cartography and make it part of the site design.
Federated Geodata: (Sean Gorman) someone other than ESRI talking about breaking data out of the silos. Not much detail on the "how", or synchronizing updates, but maybe he'll post more details.
GOOG & ESRI: Enabling data sharing / deep indexing. Good demos of ArcGIS Server analysis fronted by a consumer UI experience - geoprocessing in Google Earth. The "real" application were a change of pace - not that "my friend recommends the calamari at this place" isn't useful, but real-time forest fire modeling / evacuation planning just has a little more "bite" to it.
Overall, an interesting morning. The John Hanke and Jack Dangermond session certainly got people talking - and that's always a good thing. Should be interesting to see how many groups open up their ArcGIS Server 9.3 systems to Google's indexing. Discovering data that's been walled off for so long could be really interesting.
More later...