Where 2.0: The State of the Geoweb
John Hanke
Fourth Where 2.0 I’ve been to.
At their best mapping and geography make the world seem like a slightly smaller place. Opportunity for all of us… we should keep that in mind.
The idea that is shared by a lot of people that geography is a really useful lens through which to look at data about the world, that geography and maps are a really useful way to organize information we’re looking at. That mapping data provides context for the information once we find it.
We’ve been talking about things like the idea of a geoweb, that would allow us to search and interact with this level of geographic data.
Would like to talk about progress, collectively, that we’ve made. Also talk about some of the challenges.
May 2007 - Showing a picture of geographic information that was available on the web a year ago to now, showing over 300% growth in the places and annotations that they’re aware of. Much more densely covered. Not just where you’d expect, but also into the long tail of the developing world.
More and more rich media, millions and millions of geocoded photos. Panoramio, Flickr, youtube, 8 hours of video every minute uploaded, can be geocoded.
Almost drowning in a sea of geodata, though that’s a good thing. A while ago turned on geo search in Google. KML files. Incorporated into google maps. Can search across user generated and geocontent in addition to yellow pages. Made it much broader and globally relevant. Recently added to google maps mobile. Can render KML on phone(!) Much richer portal to the world around us.
Product announcement
Geo Search API… Launching Today!
Search box on google api will now search this geo data on the web too.
Mentioning “donating” KML to the OGC. Happy to say that as of a month(ish) ago it was officially voted in as a standard. Now owned by the community, managed by OGC.
Giving props to MS for supporting KML.
Kind of a dark web of geodata - the world of GIS. Thousands of servers full of geodata that we don’t have easy access to.
Stamen did a mashup of Oakland crime data but it had to be removed as they screen-scraped the data.
Reached out to ESRI - “leader in GIS” - over a million seats installed in their software, 50,000 servers, 250,000 clients use their data.
Welcoming on stage Jack Dangermond founder ESRI.
Slide on context showing geospatial applications growing, going from research communities through GIS professionals and enterprise users to consumers/citizens.
Hundreds of thousands of organisations, billions of dollars of investment and content management, can be, should be leveraged into this geoweb environment. Haven’t seen the potential realised to leverage this power. The geoweb is evolving, going to make a big jump, ESRI are engineering the 9.0 version of their software to plug in and become a support mechanism to the geoweb, providing:
Open meta-directory services, meta-data can be pulled off and integrated into consumer mapping environments, opens up to JS and flex APIs. Users can plug in GIS services directly.
Every piece of data on that server is going to be exposed on a HTML page that can be found by Google.
[Live demos]
City of Portland, searching for the Portland map server. Can pop up a metadata page which has been scraped off of the metadata service in the server. Can zoom in and look at the HTML page that has been scraped with lots of layer information available. Zooming in finds neighbourhoods, parcel data, sewer and water data. Whatever an organisation chooses to serve. Distributed services in the form of models and analysis. Can calculate on distributed server the drive times from an address and retrieve the polygon in KML. Can merge them with demographics, generate a demographic report. Can search and discover not just content but can reach in and get the live data. Important note, this is all coming out as KML.
Second demo showing “heatmap” of climate change. Next hundred years, being animated (slowly) off the server. Mid-west getting warmer. 5-10 degrees increase. Mashup with JavaScript mashing up analytic server with google maps.
Great that you can get information on a single site, but having it accessible on the geoweb allows it to be blended into a sea of mashups. These kinds of data can get out to a bigger audience. Big step forward. Integrating the geographic science with a collaborative environment. Should change our behaviour, if we’re fortunate. Requires collaboration from everyone in this room. Greenmaps.
Fires in southern california, my map created by UGC. Data being pulled into google earth, mashed up with aerial imagery of the smoke/fires. Showing burn/fire line, model of where the fire will go, all displayed in google earth. Knowing where the fire was going was missing, but now possible? Mashing up consumer geo stuff with commercial GIS is great. Can find the evacuation routes, road closures, all being generated in real time. Allows the data to be served out in these open formats.
This is all part of 9.3 which is all launching in a few weeks.
Google very excited about this with ESRI pushing to make this happen. Huge opportunities. Further expansion of the geoweb.
Questions…
… how quickly do we/ESRI expect people to take up the software?
Not sure, but adoption rate on new releases is months to 6 months. Software adoption isn’t the only issue, also “do I export my data?” Some agencies will be very interested in providing this public service of their knowledge, others won’t be. As this evolves, there’ll be the role for outsourcing public data by private companies. Two decisions, technology adoption and “do I release the data”? It’s now “one click” for people who do want to give their data away.