I will be moving on from Multimap to Expedia. I am finishing up at Multimap next week and starting up at Expedia the week after. Its an interesting time for me to making the change given the promise of some exciting work thats around the corner for the team here at Multimap. I am sad to leave a very talented and interesting bunch of guys behind. I am sure our paths will cross again in the future, I only hope its not too far away.

Looking forward to starting at Expedia as it will provide the opportunity to return to doing Java Development on the server side as well a whole host of design and architecture work which I have been craving for. The project I will be working on is potentially game changing for Expedia, but more on that in a few weeks time.

In between the two jobs I am headed out to Limerick, Ireland for the SOTM conference organised by OSM group. If you are coming along please do drop by and say hello.

Multimap (and Microsoft) are partners of the BBC Hack Weekend called ‘Mashed 08‘. For information about how to get tickets head on over to Multimap Blog.

Hope to see you all there.

Mapufacture’s take on Privacy about your current location is to stuff. Show what you want to show to who you want to show it to. Similar take to Fireeagle. Their take is to provide the user with the flexibility by providing a UI which lets the user choose what applications can do with their location.

We have such a large data footprint in this world. Many organisations have immense data about us. Hence, a question worth asking is do we really care about telling people where you are?

Fireeagle uses OAuth to control privacy around your location.

Seth putting publicaly share logging tool that you control. Control your location sharing at device level, service level, location level.

The privacy worry really stifles our industry and its creativity around building location ware applications. Dopplr is a prime example of this effect. People not only dont trust other people but also the government. There is a big anti government and self protection thing amongst the crowd.

One thing to remember tho is that the next gen folk, the real digital age, do not really care about all this. So is our argument around privacy dated. We are part of the public, even tho not part of GenNext, we should tackle this issue as a we and not a us vs them.

Nathan Eagle’s relationship mining - ContextAware - mobile users don’t really have opt-out, carriers already storing this information. Regulatory frameworks already exist in some countries around this information.

What is the social good vs social bad balance ? UK has many thousands of CCTV cameras. Technology for face recognition in videos is already existing. So where’s privacy ?

Impact of relationships with privacy is inferral due to proximity. Is it about explicit approval or disapproval? This is definitely a hard problem and a very hard social problem. As the definition of privacy is not only different across cities and states, but also across countries and religious cultures.

Does Geo Data Privacy really matter. Are we kidding ourselves by thinking we can protect data about ourselves. Don’t we need location tracking and sharing for our industry to prosper. Its like saying shopping malls can’t track what I do when I enter a mall, when I buy things using a credit card they should not do consumer behavior modeling, spending patterns etc are all used to provide consumers a better shopping experience.

We as GeoApplication builders need sharing and tracking to really build location aware applications. If people start faking where they are then the information we can deliver to them is also going to be fake.

GeoRSS

So micro formats, pico formats, kml 3, georss 2.0 etc etc. Whats the future of micro/pico formats? How can we as a community contribute to OGC and their developement of community standards.

Multiple locations and reference is a problem in geocoding and also when representing that in GeoRSS. Styling is also another unsolved question. How can we CSS with KML. Size of these formats is prohibitive for small tasks and quick tasks. How can we add features such as those in KML and GeoRSS into micro and pico formats?

GeoRSS introduces many new types which parsers then have to implement so that can actually render the feeds out correctly. How can we do points in feeds and their association with the title or the comment in micro format way ?

When using geo locations with stories the problem is that stories are not for single points, they are for multiple points and GeoRSS does not seem to have a way to link multiple points forming a polygon or a line back into a story title.

We should also be talking about what we want the GeoRSS readers to look like, features they should/can provide.

Micro and Pico Formats GeoHash

A GeoHash provides basic translation between addresses and a single string identify bounding boxes. This can provide very strong search facility as it would only be a string comparison on a MySQL table.

Quote from Wikipedia

“Geohash is a latitude/longitude geocode system invented by Gustavo Niemeyer when writing the web service at geohash.org, and put into the public domain.

Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision, similar prefixes for nearby positions, and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision).”

Link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

GeoTude

Sounds like a quad tree algorithm thats used for naming tiles applied to finding points on a map. Kinda cool. Need to read their doco and add more information here.

Do we need 3D? Are we wasting our time ? What are the main scenarios of monetisation? Aren’t we just back to where we were in the early nineties with Virtual Reality games and all the investment that went into that technology.

3D immersive environments are being prepared to provide a rich user experience and interactio. Thus allowing application developers of the future to build rich applications. I can think of a few use case scenarios in city planning, crime heat map patterns thru time, pollution heat maps thru time (hmm, sounds like I may have already said this before).

Thats about all I can think of as potential applications at this point in time, but that is no reason to not build a data set that can open up the doors for developers to build applications that we today have not even thought off.

I should also add, like many others I do not completely buy into the 3d vision just yet. But its damn cool to work on and the potential is amazing. Lets see where this road takes us…

We all have a path in life. This path crosses with those paths of other people and events. We all have unique paths but they intersect with other people.

How do you visualise this? xrosspath.com is working on visualisation of this data task. This product is now available to be used.

The main challenge is how does one visualise location in the context of time.

Organize the world’s geo-reference information and make it useful and accessible. Google has indexed various GeoRSS and GeoTagged data available on the web allowing users to search for more then just addresses from the maps interface. This includes all Google MyMaps created by users.

So the GeoIndex API is both AJAX and RESTful. It is the same as the local search API with a geo context.

AJAX local search allows you to do everything from maps.google.com. The API allows users to indicate what type of results you want returned. There are a few types of results you can ask for.

Any content that Google indexes which contains a Geo Context, I guess either via lat,lon or placenames is now available via this API.

Also another thing they have released is a new type of SiteMaps. Something called a GeoSitemap. If you have geo content on yourwebsite then you need to put a geo sitemap in your website and then it gets indexed. How to create such a sitemap is documented on the Google Code KML documentation page.

Search ranking algorithm is a question that Google is not providing detail on yet. They are saying that this is not a solved problem, implying results may not always be accurate and relevant.

Search queries used in examples seem to always have ‘near’ and ‘in’. Sounds like these are keywords and are used as intelligence parameters in the backend.

GeoServer has started an attempt at combining the various GData APIs with the GeoIndex API. (http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Exposing+to+Geo+Search)

What tools are people using to find out about events based on location?

upcoming.yahoo.net is one big tool that everyone in this room seems to use. It’s ‘I am Watching’ list versus ‘I am attending’ list is very interesting in what information about the event, and its interestingness to you, that you are conveying to others looking at the even and your friends who have your list of events in their list.

Andrew Turner is advertising Mapufacture and its location based event aggregator.

One thing thats interesting plazes is that you can look into the past and future and actually track your movements over time. Where was person X last month, where will they be next week etc etc.

Seems like there are many many tools to do this one thing. Question in my mind is how to get an aggregated service working around all this location based community event data being captured on the web?

I think its time to check out one of the other sessions…

Where camp has kicked off. Discussing Time as the added dimension to visualize geo-spatial data in. Some interesting ideas being presented and discussed by the crowd.

Discussion is along the line off what Google has done with the time slider in Google Earth where you can view aerial imagery (??) changes thru time.

Assembly time line is not very intuitive but very powerful. How best to present visualization of data on map over a time scale.

Lots of thoughts around users are not that dumb and they will learn once we show them how. For example people learned about the dragging of maps with advent of ajax maps, they got used to smooth zooming, the growth of Mac’s market share is also another example of UI paradigm changes being possible and doable.

Counter thought that no people are not that open. How long did it to take for people to move from VCR’s to DVD players etc ?? First mover advantage is also counter argument to introduce radically new controls or expecting teaching people.

How do we capture lat,lon values with their metadata and its delta over time? Things like Harare, Zimbabwe used to XYZ,Rhodesia. I was born in place X but as time has passed X has grown due to urban sprawl, about 100 years ago the place that is called ABC today was DEF. Genealogists and family tree tracking folk are very interesting in this dimension of capturing location information.

So I think Freebase will provide a great way to capture as data about a place and metdata about a place changes over time. It’s very easy (already, and Freebase is very very new) to add records to Freebase about place’s, poi’s etc with a historical context. Just like people have birth and death dates, place records have opening date and closing date and geo location. So we, the users, can add such records and someone can come along and say “i know that there use to be this other restaurant in this place 10 years ago” etc.

I know thats a trivial example, but i think it’s easy to see how that be expanded to apply to other records.

One question I have (which I do not think I will have time to ask) is what type of geo data are we interested in really modeling over time. I mean sure bounding boxes change over time, but at the end of the day these are superficial. Are we interesting in such things or more the metadata around it. Things like population demographic changes, city growth rates, crime heat maps over time.

For example census data visualization would really be about the metadata about location and not really the location itself….