• Where 2.0: LocationAware: Standardizing a Geolocation API in the Browser

    Ryan Sarvar

    locationaware.org

    We were here last time doing a BoF session. Now here we are on stage presenting. Making an announcement which will hopefully show some good progress.

    Started 2 years ago when I started at SkyHook. Wanted to think about what it means to be location aware. How can we enrich the web with a lot of that information. We launched loki toolbar to make these location enabled channels.

    Changed this so that sites can call an API to get location to drive relevant content. Basic API to call the toolbar and do something meaningful with the location information.

    This type of information and spec belongs a spec for browser vendors. Want the same experience everywhere, laptop or mobile phone.

    We’re hoping that people will be able to write an application with HTML and JS rather than, for instance Objective C on iPhone.

    “LocationAware’s goal is to help drive the standardization of how a user’s geolocation is exposed to a website through the browser”

    Handles privacy and other issues. Brokers information, they get back an accuracy level, latitude and longitude.

    We propose to expose this through the DOM. May also do it in HTTP headers. Also different ways of specifying “air meters”.

    API looks very simple. 4 lines of JS to get location with a callback. Polling also available, more useful for mobile devices.

    Announcement is that we’re working with Mozilla Labs to create a prototype extension. Available in June. We want to work with how we can do this. How do we ask the user what they want to make available and how do we make it available? Also working with W3C to make a charter for this type of thing.

    Really important part is that Yelp will also be implementing the API so that there’s a real user of it available. Hopefully other sites will join too.

    locationaware.org

    LocationAware: Standardizing a Geolocation API in the Browser

    Technorati tags: locationaware, geolocate, where, where2.0, where2008

  • Where 2.0: Going Places on Flickr

    Catt (with Cope)

    Talking about going places on Flickr. One specific problem. Want to be able to say where photos are taken. We have this “where on earth” database that has lots of places in it. Really good because people may search for places by different names even if the named areas overlap a lot. It’s not so good for reverse geocoding as you might end up saying the wrong thing. This is really hard. Reverse geocoding gets a lot fewer results from a google search..

    At ETech in 2007, photos taken would be said they were at San Diego County Jail.

    If people are going to take photos and go to the trouble to geotag them, we should be able to describe the places better.

    Reverse Geocoding

    “Nearest linear object”

    We tried to reduce the type of places to a base set of commonalities. First assume at street level, then go to neighborhood, then locality, county, region, country. About a year and a half into this we’ve decided to go with street, locality and airports, “metro”, …

    FireEagle uses something very similar. FE have adjusted their model for privacy regions (if you’re in a tiny town, you’re obvious).

    Dopplr has a different model. They go by the distance between San Francisco and San Jose. This is all they need.

    Geonames, great, gets it wrong sometimes too.

    “What’s going on?”

    “Imperfectly transmitted code”

    People have different ideas of what things mean.

    We work with bounding boxes.

    I geotagged a photo in Millerton state park, it said it was in “Inverness” which is on the other side of the water.

    Showing a slide with bounding boxes. They intersect. Do lots of iterations to filter them out. We should end up seeing that milerton is local and inverness less so. We adjust the measurements on other parameters, but this one was just wrong. We geocoded Petaluma and fixed it.

    We take 78 steps to go through and figure out where this could be.

    We have a responsibility to do useful things with our users data. So we’re asking for help. In a few weeks time we’re going to ask “Is this right? If not let us know.”

    If people keep telling us that things are not where we thought they were, we can take that data back in and start fixing things. This will hopefully roll back into the system and give us more precise data. Like a beach gives us an idea where the coastlines are.

    We’ve spent huge amount of effort trying to get this right.

    Going Places on Flickr

    Technorati tags: flickr, geocoding, reverse-geocoding, where, where2.0, where2008

  • Where 2.0: The Future = Location

    George Filley, NAVTEQ

    Incredible being here to see the innovative things coming from us the development company.

    NAVTEQ have always been about “Where”. We’ve always been looking to create a single specification that can improve what you’re doing.

    Want to talk about the advent to allow location based services to truely come into their own..

    We believe we’re in the middle of an information revolution. Where information is accessible to anyone, anywhere, any time. Provides a unique opportunity for developers. The convergence of this information with location and mobility. Will give the next form of the Internet.

    “The future’s here”

    43% of all downloadable applications were about LBS in Q1 2008. That’s real money and real opportunity.

    How do you monetise this? Difficult to do in a subscrition environment. As these applications grow, the expectations of users grows.

    [Graph]

    [Chart]

    [Graph]

    Consumers are ok with ads if it’s relevant to context.

    Networks and devices are improving, allowing for the ability to create robust reliable solutions driven by advertising. Advertisers are realising this is a viable market place.

    Mobile advertising on WAP and some on games.

    Our role? We’re an enabler. We deliver unique visuals, landmarks, junction views, stuff, realtime traffic, weather. Gas prices. Changing the nature of what a map is. Individual can walk into a neighborhood and have as much knowledge or more than a native.

    2003: Launched LBS Challege for Developers in North America

    Have launched similar problems in recent years, will be launching one in Singapore for Asia.

    www.navteq.com/developer - gives you access to our content and the ability for you to update our data. Providing developer guides, webinars, forums, 1-1 technical assistance. Optimise your utilisation of the content and map products we support around the world.

    NAVTEQ has always been about Where, we understand the value of location and now understand the use of flexible business models. We want to help you.

    Please take a moment to come to our website.

    The Future = Location

    Technorati tags: navteq, where, where2.0, where2008

  • Where 2.0: Your Car Gets an API

    Chris Butler, Dash

    Your car gets an API (Your content in the car)

    Dash is the first two-way internet connected device in your car. Normally provide crowd-sourced traffic but also Yahoo! search from in your car.

    Last year we talked about getting GeoRSS and KML into the device. We delivered it in March.

    Today we’re announcing Dynamic Search API. Anyone can create search APIs that can be used with your Dash. We also have 5 new partners:

    • WeatherBug - shows weather locally.
    • myFUNAMBOL - Calendar syncing service - can easily route to appointments.
    • BakTrax radio button gives a list of radio stations that you might be listening to, you can then select the station and find out the song they just player.
    • Trapstr - shows places where you might find speed cameras and suchlike. Shows them as you’re driving around but you can also upload them too.
    • Coldwell Banker - Property information

    Your Car Gets an API

    Technorati tags: dash, weatherbug, myfunambol, baktrax, coldwell, where, where2.0, where2008

  • Where 2.0: GeoDjango: Web Applications for (Neo)Geographers with Deadlines

    Justin Bronn, CartoAnalytics

    Geodjango for rapidly creating online applications. Going to discuss:

    1. Why
    2. Commoditization
    3. Abstraction
    4. Rapid Development

    “Why” “80% of enterprise data has a spatial component” Even if it’s 20%, there’s a lot of spatial data out there. Tends to be highly self-correlated. “near things are more related than distant things” - [missing citation].

    In law school, created “Houston Crime Maps”, using django. Wanted to put hacks into cohesive package for putting geo-data online.

    “Commoditization” Server operating systems - Solaris, HP-ux, SGI, SCO, AIXL - siloed, but faded into the background as Linux has been adopted in the mainstream.

    Similarly databases, big names have been replaced by PostgreSQL and MySQL.

    “Abstraction” Django revolves around “MTV”:

    • Models - roughly correspond to DB tables, GeoDjango allows geo specific fields.
    • Templates - presentation layers, HTML & JavaScript
    • Views - Business logic, simple pyhon functions

    GeoDjango sits on top of spatial database (PostGIS, Oracle spatial and MySQL spatial) Python ctypes library interacts with GDAL, GEOS, PROJ.4 and provides high level interfaces to make accessing them easily. ctypes gives wide cross-platform compatability.

    On top of that are a layer of standards, can export to KML, GML, WKT, GeoJSON, GeoRSS. Can then leverage OpenLayers or other mapping APIs to create complete geo stack.

    1. Rapid Development

    Example of spatial query using geodjango, 2 fairly simple lines. Shows the SQL for it, 7 large and complicated lines of SQL .

    Allows you to harness the power of spatial data.

    [Demo]

    Django has automatic admin interface. Available for all of the models that you’ve defined. You can specify fields to use for search. Demo shows searching for San Francisco and returning neighborhoods within it. Selecting “Downtown”. Can access the basic fields: Name, State, City, Country. Can also have a geographic admin. OpenLayers with OSM base layer, the neighborhood is highlighted as a polygon. Can be manipulated live in the database by dragging polygons.

    GeoDjango: Web Applications for (Neo)Geographers with Deadlines

    Technorati tags: geodjango, django, where, where2.0, where2008

  • Where 2.0: Merian Case Study

    Jennifer Kilan

    Litle bit about “Frog”. Industrial design company recently a digital design company.

    Today talking about “Form Follows Function” we’ve adopted to “Form Follows Emotion”.

    Form Follows Function - made famous by a sculpture. Really important when designing objects, with single focus. Three key areas for wayfinding. Landmarks, routes, maps.

    “Form Follows Function”

    Landmarks - photo of golden “Landmarks are distinctive and should be easily viewable from a distance”

    Routes “Routes are abstract and point to point, with the journey internalized and not easily communicable.”

    Maps “Maps reveal overall spatial orientation and the general relationships of one place to another.”

    “Form Follows Emotion”

    Being a Harley owner is all about the entire experience. You not just going somewhere, it’s the journey.

    Merian Scout Case Study

    This is what I want to share with you today.

    Merian is a European brand making tour guides and maazines providing prmium content. They wanted to create a GPS that did the same thing. They came to frog and we talked to them about “form follows emotion”.

    We wanted the user to not only be able to program their journey but have the story unfold along the way.

    Showing a button that will give you alternatives in the case of needing a plan B, showing you nearby alternatives.

    Umbrella icon is a tour guide. Allows the user to feel like they have a trusted advisor. Also allows for mult-faceted search parameters to be used.

    Emotional connections - large sense of making memories, photo, how important those are. Saved and suggested images can prompt ideas for a new route.

    Wanted to think about personalisation for end-users. “The packaging reflects that sense of the experience being about your trip and your happines.” Tries to detect what user likes and suggest relavent things in the future(?)

    Physical design - similar size to a blackberry. Shiny, blue highlights. Make the user feel that this product is something to be trusted. Something to provide a rich experience.

    Product launched last year in Germany and won a “red dot” award. frog worked on software design as well as the packaging.

    Looking at design of interface. Leveraging as much imagery as possible. Photos. Also nice UI touches. Showing nearby things and the direction and distance of them to give you the chance to flit about and see other things. Make sure there’s a sense of exploration and the user can get cues from the physical world and the POIs.

    Merian Case Study

    Technorati tags: frog, gps, merian, where, where2.0, where2008

  • Where 2.0: Your Memories: Here, There and Everywhere

    Jef Holove, Eye-Fi

    Talking about digital memories of plain old consumers. Their frustrations with managing them. Why they don’t geotag and how to make it mainstream.

    The Eye-Fi card has a wifi card inside a standard SD card. It runs an OS that allows it to do all this. The card goes inside your camera and automatically uploads photos through the Eye-Fi service where they can be passed on to places you want to save and share your photos.

    We anounced earlier this week the product “Eye-Fi Explorer” that has new features: Hotspot Access, upload on the go; Geotagging.

    Limitations create simplicity:

    • Camera unaware
    • No interface - you have no keyboard or whatever to interact with it.
    • Network mucst authenticate Card automatically for uploads to Eye-Fi service
    • Card enabled at manufacturing and managed at service level
    • Connectivity, upload status

    Resulted in:

    • Integration with Wayport
    • 10,000 hotspots across the US at restaurants, hotels, airports… as easy as finding a McDonald’s
    • Automatic authentication and uploads. Simply turn on the camera.
    • No laptop or log-in
    • No separate account or billing
    • Notification via Email or SMS

    Geotagging:

    The mainstream world still uses geotagging and thinks it’s “an onerous chore”, “until now, a pain”. Average mainstream consumer doesn’t like this.

    • Time-consumer and manual
    • Cumbersome, expensive, slow, limited. Need:
    • Automatic, and “Instant”
    • No Connection Required at Capture
    • Integrated and Power Efficient

    Needs to be simple, no user interaction, no long wait, indoors and in cities. We made the data collection separate from processing.

    Processing is pushed to the network.

    Card is inside camera, detects and stores the nearby wifi networks. Doesn’t need to be authenticated, just see them. Then when you get home or to a network it uploads the data where SkyHook cross references the information and delivers the information to photo sharing websites or your computer.

    Got to appreciate the the mainstream doesn’t have the time or the patience. Aiming to automate this for most images most of the time.

    Your Memories: Here, There and Everywhere

    Technorati tags: eye-fi, geotag, where, where2.0, where2008

  • Where 2.0: Disaster Tech

    Jesse Robbins, Mikel Maron

    We’re going to talk about how to innovate and how innovation in the disaster tech and how that can save lives. It’s really hard to innovate at times, the more experiences you are, the more resistant you are to take ideas from people with lots of passion but no experience. Geeks tend to think “We’re going ot think “We will save everybody with our great new teh!” but experienced people will say “You fools! you’re going to kill everyone!”

    It is difficult to innovate, but there is a way to do it. We’ve spotted a pattern:

    1. Disaster
    2. Ad-Hoc Adaptation
    3. Championship
    4. Iterative Improvement

    Please keep this in mind today.

    “my story” (Jesse)

    Katrina

    • 1800+ Dead
    • Millions Displaced

    I was a taskforce leader, we built and gave shelters. Used my american red cross, helped to serve 10s of thousands of people. Getting around was hard because signs had blown dodn. There was an adaptation of old GPS technology + Google Maps. Worked for everyone with Internet Access. Couple of small problems. I90 bridge had fallen in.

    Mikel:

    The problem is timeliness, it’s not a specific problem with the data providers, more a problem with updating and getting updates out. Here we’re talking years of delay with web maps updating. A year ago I pointed out that the bridge was still showing up. I blogged and it got media exposure and it was finally updated. A few weeks later the bridge was opened and again the web sites were out of data.

    Champion: OpenStreetMap (OSM - updated are immediately available to everyone else.

    Tweaks to the model if we don’t want to rely on the crowd for disasters. Perhaps take a branch of the map tahta only certain people will update.

    Iteration: UN considering OSM

    • UNJLC Interagency Humanitarian Common Service
    • Starting to explore collaborative mapping
    • (still a long way to go)

    We’ve done some experimenting and found some useful tweaks but the UN is slow moving and busy (with other disasters).

    Showing a map of Burma. Has a small box on the bottom right saying “we need your help updating this map”.

    Anti-pattern What if the technology isn’t championed and isn’t improved. Expectations can be let down and the lack of a champion can hinder a response.

    Slide of Jim Grey - tragically went missing at sea. His friends used every innovative means to look for him. Digital Globe retrieved images, processed by Google, Amazon Mechanical Turk was used to coordinate searching. Unfortunately he was not found.

    No champion. Public now believes that this is easily repeatable.

    Iteration: Steve Fossett Search

    • Inadequate training for volunteer.
    • Many false positives.
    • People called SAR teams directly which hindered search. Lessons weren’t learnt from previously. There was no wasy to compae old imagery with new imagery. Volunteers weren’t given feedback.

    Quote from Maj. Cynthia Ryan - see slides.

    San Diego Wildfires: Nate Ritter twittered. Red Cross followed suit. InSTEDD released a service called SMS GeoChat, they were a champion. They also iterated it as InSTEDD + Humanlink to create a localized and specific kind of twitter using GeoChat for the reponse in Burma that may also be used in China.

    So to review the bulletpoints. Someone needs to emerge as a champion and then it needs to be improved iteratively. The message is “Be Champions”

    Disaster Tech

    Technorati tags: disaster, where, where2.0, where2008

  • Where 2.0: AfricaMap

    This is a “Birds of a Feather” - more of a discussion on a subject:

    Ben Lewis, Infrastructure for Collaboration

    Ben provides consulting services to researchers, professors,. research and focus areas. Been working with bunch of professors interested in Africa. Lack of data is a big problem. came to the job with a lot of interest and background in building web-based systems that serve up a lot of data and easy to access. Good fit for this academic environment because these systems tend to be inter-disciplinary orientated, webbased systems tend to be easy to use. Humanitarians, historians, social sciences.

    The idea was to build a web-based system to bring together best available data for Africa, make it easy to find by making it visible, make it map layers. As we started thinking, we realised there’s basically no base-map. It’s a big place, it’s the US, Soviet Union and India combined. There hasn’t been commercial interest the way there has been for western europe and the US. You go to Google and it’s a big blank. We wanted to try to remedy that, we have a vast collection of maps in the Harvard map library, like 300 map drawers full of all kinds of stuff. The key stuff being map series data at 1:5,000,000 scale down to 1:1,000 scale. From 1980 to 1880, by the Russians, French. So there is quite a bit of data for the continent and we came up with this approach to provide a base map.

    Will all be tilecache, open layers, open source stuff and creative commons. The problem isn’t that there’s a lot of data, it’s just impossible to get to. Instead of building years to get something useful we can do it in a matter of months, by fall 2008.

    This is largely about historical GIS, it will be a historical basemap. Most recently 1980, large amounts 1950s (JMCK: crown copyright limits?). Everything we can bring in as web services will be a no brainer.

    Also have lots of researchers who study Africa, then finish their research and the data “disappears”. It’s a particular problem for Africa where resources are tight. People can end up reinventing the wheel. Permanent data source for Africa projects.

    Internal funding only so far. Build this thing then go after additional funds.

    Suzanne Blier and Peter Bol mane investigators.

    Data can be hard to find because if it’s in digital form it’s buried on one server somewhere. Encourage replication, make it easy for people to download and make available. Text based search of contents - “Google-type text search”. Throw all data, text, vector, etc. into PostGIS and “see what we get back”.

    Place name gazetteer, starting with the data from geonames.org, as you combine gazetteer with old data, new entries will show up and these will need feeding back into geonames.org. Gazetteer becomes useful for unstructured texts to be geocoded. Decentralized architecture - we’ll be serving up some of these data layers. Would like to share tile caches. As data is brought out into the light of the web, would be good if it didn’t all need to sit on Harvard’s servers. Other interested parties could host their own. Have multiple sources of “hybrid” as backdrops. Interesting possibilities, historic basemaps, 1950s for Ghana for example. Combined with Google’s satellite from 2006 you can see where new roads are and all kinds of change. Quite practical change analysis that can be done by anyone with simple tools. Multiple scales, key datalayer will be US as the licensing is very simple - public domain - down to 500K in some areas. Russian mapping at few scales. Several countries and cities will go down to 1:50k. Working out the process but it’s more efficient than we expected. Country in Africa can do it inexpensively “Mad Mappers” in South Africa. Countries in this country have already digitised and are eager to work with us. Will let us bring a whole lot of data out quickly that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Concurrent layer viewing, ability to view data in 3 dimensions. Data in web client exported to Google Earth via superoverlays (allows smoother zooming). Google Earth will require it in Plate Carré. Ben is a huge huge enemy of slow web systems. Lots of ideas for other datasets. David Rumsey will be contributing his Africa maps. Ethnographic data form Murdoch. Socio-cultural-political-economic data. Lots of collections at Harvard are going geographical. Harvard museum has millions of specimens taken from Africa that could be georeferenced.

    Building the base, showing Google for Africa and some data they have for the area.

    [Showing coverage maps]

    Geonomy map, query of large vector dataset in WMS on top of google map. Africa map will be an openlayers client.

    Q: What software are you using from scanning/georeferencing?

    A: In some cases we buy them already done. It will be creative commons in some form. Depends partly on the source.

    Languages, cultures, currently from commercial data but could perhaps be user generated.

    Q: Are you mainly looking to put this data out or looking for collaboration from users to develop it?

    A: The basic goal is to prime the pump. There’s not much data for Africa and it’s difficult to get hold of, it’s paper maps buried away. Bringing out key strategic data layers out of the map bins and putting it onto the web with some simple collaboration tools

    Key concept is a projects layer, researchers working on a particular part of Africa can draw a polygon and advertise that they’re working on a project/topic and give contact details. General purpose, very simple place where people can coordinate across departments and disciplines.

    Q: Africa’s a big place, could you perhaps be looking too broad?

    A: It would be easy to spin-off smaller views of this. We could be focussed on a city. One very obvious enhancement would be to be able to create a login and create a “my Africa map”. Specify an area of interest and be able to load in your own data layers, photos, documents, other digital artifacts and save and organise those. We’re opening this up to all disciplines who might want to work on Africa based projects.

    We’re working on these various parts of the projects, tilecache, WMS, gazetteer and we’ll see how things develop, some parts may be more useful and will be developed specifically.

    [discussion about geonames being owned by Google/Teleatlas, GNS being a cleaner alternative]

    Q: What do you see your audience being?

    A: We have a steering committee. They have to be impressed, and the Harvard community. They are, however, not isolated, they’ll be professors, researchers. If they say this is valuable, that will be important. In reality we’re building an OpenLayers client with historic base layers. That doesn’t exist for Africa.

    africamap.harvard.edu

    Technorati tags: africamap, map, africa, where, where2.0, where2008

  • Where 2.0: Live Blogging Update

    So I’ve been live blogging the talks all day. Has been pretty difficult at times and also a little stressful. I was wondering whether I should bother continuing but after seeing references to them on Slashgeo and Ed Parsons’ blog I think I will continue.

    If you haven’t liked my notes you might like Chris Spagnuolo’s alternative. You can also see things on O’Reilly’s Radar but they’re lagging slightly, there’s also live video feeds that I can’t find links for right now, and an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net in #where2008, say “Hi” to mcknut if you’re on there!

    Technorati tags: where, where2.0, where2008

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