WhereCamp: Second day of notes
Just published my roundup of the first day. Found it pretty difficult as I hadn’t taken any notes yesterday so I’ll try taking some today I think. I’m going to try something a little different today. I’ll publish this article in the morning then keep typing in it during the day, unfortunately WordPress doesn’t seem to be autosaving but I’ll click “Save” from time to time. I’ll also put something at the end of the article to mark it finished.
Micro, Nano, Pico formats Talking about marking up the various formats with geo information: KML, GeoRSS, Atom. Formats are too big, they need to be smaller. Need to be able to store multiple locations and time information potentially. Discussing the best ways of linking to multiple locations, whether to place them as separate entries within Atom (which in old viewers will show the locations as separate entries), also whether we should insert links within text, or have separate links. Do those links link within a file, or to separate files? Probably the best place to look for updates on this part of the session is Andrew Turner’s blog.
Geohash from geohash.org, simple way of giving bounding boxes or lat/lon coordinates. Easy to search within a bounding box though will have issues as it’s based on predefined tiles - actually apparently not, this does not use tiling.
Guy from xrosspath is talking about “Geotudes” but they do seem rather similar to basic tiling mechanisms, quad-tree indexing and morton numbers.
Is geo privacy shit? Mapufacture has enabled fire eagle to generate an RSS/KML feed. Andrew Turner thinks lots of people will decide “screw privacy”, Fire Eagle think that’s fine, so long as it’s a choice.
Keys to allow specific people to get access.
Privacy issues stifle innovation, caused issues with Dopplr. Can we trust the government? Being near a criminal offence might cause you to become a suspect (or witness). Location black lists. Nathan Eagle relationship mining - ContextAware. Regulatory frameworks. Infer location through friends. Went through the six de bono hats method. Here’s the notes that Andrew Turner took during the discussion.
Lightning Talks
- Platial - some maps that people have done.
- State of the Map
- Earthscape
- www.gotalift.com
- Geocoding news (at the source)
- NNDB Mapper
- Fixables
- Home-brew 360-degree display
- Quantum Nanotechnocracy?
- Neigborhood map project
- Image recognition game - Imagewiki
- Abaqus
Winners of the talks were: 8, 6, 1 (in that order)
Google AppEngine GeoStore This was mainly a roundup of the geo features available within the Google AppEngine.
Are Google and Microsoft killing the ecosystem? Much discussion on the topic, are Google et al killing the “mom and pop” size businesses? They are getting so big that noone can even start to compete with them because you can’t get near them. It was mentioned though that there wouldn’t have been the innovation there was so far without Google releasing the free maps API in the first place. There was also a small discussion at the end about whether Google could release data - India data and map edits - that they have collected themselves. Unfortunately not much information was known about those but the Googlers did seem open to doing something.
Well that’s the whole thing over, it was a great conference, I’m really glad I made it over. Some interesting discussions. As I mentioned above I kinda launched something, I’m going to get the tidying up sorted then post something further on that later.