WhereCamp EU 2001 was held in Berlin, Germany May 27-28 and was attended by an internaitonal audience that including a wide range of individuals involved in business, education and government geo-application development. Following previous WhereCamp approaches, the diverse and wide ranging topics for presentation were arranged and decided upon by attendees during each morning. The presentations and subsequent interesting question and discussion periods helped to provide interaction for testing new ideas, products and thoughts and served to instill new ideas for all who attended.
As with other WhereCamp events, this one shared the similar approach of providing a bare schedule with time slots that individuals could fill with their topic of discussion and what they wished to present – formality in organisation was out, with self-organisation replacing it. The schedule quickly filled up, obviously a reflection of the varied and numerous topics that the attendees to the event wished to focus upon.
Self Organizing Schedule WhereCamp EUWhile WhereCamp suggests that less formal corporate presence occurs, my observation was that it remained present and included almost in every presentation – as probably might be expected. That aside, Ed Parsons of Google launched the first presentation asking the audience about their thoughts surrounding government data availablility “as a means for developing new Google Services” and “for working with new EU wide legislation being considered.”
Parsons indicated that many of us know about the value of government data, but sometimes we are unsure about the benefits. The audience offered up several examples of government data that they would like to gain more access to including, soils data, satellite imagery, bike data and transport data.
One of the key issues described in Parsons presentation surrounded the issue of formats and inability to use government data because of difficult and sometimes peculiar data storage formats – the data could not be ingested easily for use in common geo-applications. The point was raised that greater use equated to more healthy businesses and therefore improved tax contributions, something governments ought to consider. It was noted that Denmark now makes available addressing data. Additional issues included licensing difficulties to government data.
Zsomar Szabo presented his Maps+ product. Based on Google Maps the service supports international use and includes the ability to buffer areas, create edits and to track and edit routes. Gary Gale of Nokia presented on the topic of ‘A Sense of Place’. He described the historical perspectives of maps and their use, “which often showed territory and ownership”. Early maps were often built and created by cartographers he said, without others participating in the map creation directly – unlike today where many people collaborate using smartphones to deliver maps and mark them up. “Over time maps became more ubiquitous,” he said. “The addition of GPS supported the notion of time,” and internet maps were more directly associated to print or hardcopy mapping, requiring a desktop to see and use them. Conversely, the mobile phone put the map into the hands of people, increasing participation and increasing interaction.7
Gary Gale – Director, Places Registry & NokiaGale said that newer social media tools supporting applications like FourSquare and Factual, served as a means to enhance discoverability, increase transparency and created multiple sources of authoritative data. I found myself querying this, because authoritative in my mind links to qualitative aspects of data – it’s direct high-value usability – whereas simply having access to data does not mean it is authoritative data.
“There will never be a single authoritative source of map data, instead, we are likely to see many sources of information,” he said. Consequently, the notion of having Open Databases rings true, supporting the idea of interoperable data exchange, without the issues of licensing that seem to be on the rise, and which are throwing up barriers to exchange.
New approaches to licensing are needed. Gale asked, “what is a point of interest, what is a location, what is a landmark?” The definition for each of these changes as perceptions and cultural aspects begin to enter into descriptions with new tools.
A presentation by OpenStreetMap described issues related to the creation of 3rd party products and their legality. Can OpenStreetMap derivative products be freely distributed, when they combine that data with others? For example, if I combine Google data with OpenStreetMap data into a single new map, that appears to be against OpenStreetMap policy.
The argument is that, “then the whole OpenStreetMap database could be scraped and stored along with other Google data.” However, if the two data sources are kept separate, then that is fine.
Other issues with OpenStreetMap that were discussed included the fact users now must directly approve of their data being used within OpenStreetMap, acknowledging it’s free use and the fact that licenses might or can change over time. For example, assuming you put data into OpenStreetMap today, then the licenses change over time, how is your data to be handled – it is already floating around the world in many previous versions.
It was mentioned that the organisation is attempting to keep everyone on the same license. In general, OpenStreetMap data is highly valuable off-road, in place where there are no cars since it contains pathways, bike routes and so on, making it highly useful for routing applications.
Peter Batty – myWorld – UbisenseOne could not miss Peter Batty of UbiSense at this event, as he was walking around with a new myWorld application on a iPad on his chest, the LED brightly led and showing location data on the clear display. myWorld is “built on the idea that simple is better” and it includes utility or other data together with social media gathered information.
“It includes a series of Base Maps atop consumer information,” he said. Batty suggested that different kinds of technologies out to be used in different places, depending on the needs. Other applications were now beginning to include augmented reality and sound.
“The benefits of having video-conferencing onsite during a utility call are important,” Batty mentioned. myWorld “cost about 13 cents to develop in terms of data he said and it was built on Google App Engine.
He summarised the benefits of open source as free availability,flexible terms of use, access ot the code and their longevity. The later point was mentioned in other discussions where developers are interested to have access to support over long periods of time.
In a second presentation Batty discussed his work at Ubisense, where products are being developed to track a wide range of objects for customers manufacturing airplanes, tracking buses, managing utility networks and other asset tracking needs. That product includes setting ultra-wideband (UWB) technologies that can show where assets are moving within structures. “It is sometimes odd to know that we can tracking things in space, but have difficulty in tracking things inside of buildings,” he said. The results of his presentation were impressive, and noticed by a long list of company’s.
Uberblick of Berlin spoke about their Doppleganger API that enables users to integrate different streams of data from different platforms. Using the technology, applications could be developed without regard to any one standard, and users could effectively integrate mobility data cross-platform wise.
Google + Nokia talked about a new Google Places API / Nokia Location Adressing App that appears similar to each organisation. It includes two aspects including a Webservice and the associated libraries to support it. In Google’s case this involved search functionality like type-ahead and locating places within defined regions. The results could be ranked and users would be able to track anaonymously. Alternatively, Nokia’s Ovi Map API is focued on place as part of the business core and would include the creation of a ‘Location Family’ with harmonization of APIs. “Nokia is waiting with GIS for broader adoption,” based on OGC standards.
Other applications included those involving the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This application is based on the concept of a place changing names dependent upon the kind of festival being presented. Often places change names, based upon short and temporary needs, thus giving rise to the need for creating databases whose placenames can frequently change.
Skobbler is an address based game that requires users to photograph places in return for gaining points, and realising the benefits of an improved icon through social media software. Locating and photographing a place results in the building of maps for Romanian cities and places.
Shoaib Burq presented on his work involving the realisation that many people were asking for OpenStreetMap applications to be built over and over again. He saw that many of these applications involved similar steps for developers and he wanted a standard way to initiate and build a project. As a result he developed a solution whose ingredients included raw data, data structures, routing algorithms and client logic. This product immediately allowed for OpenStreetMap data to be used in a routable way.
Oliver O’Brien – CASA Labs‘Traveling, Ticking, Tales & Tweets’ was the title of the presentation from Oliver O’Brien, a research associate at the University of London CASA Lab, That lab is interested in the modeling, analysis and visualisation of spatial data and geographic data and is doing many interesting things (I did not see anyone from a Berlin education program present at this event).
O’Brien ran through one after another of the many applications available on the CASA site including MapTube, Urban Diary, New York City Landscapes, Map of London Tweets, SurveyMapper, QRater, Rank Clocks, BikeShare, UniTales of Things and other crowd behavior applications. A new project involving 18 groups from different institutions named ENFOLDing includes the migraiton of people using complex data sources. It would model global flow dynamics. Steven Gray of CASA also presented and he showed some of the work involving Twitter among other applications. It was interesting see people using Twitter on the runways of Heathrow as planes landed and take-off! He did mention that only 1-2% of all tweets can be used for applications because most people do not turn on their tracking feature.
University of Nottingham is working on applications that can be sued for crisis mapping and emergency relief applications. One of the key issues arising has to do with the authenticity of the tweets and other information during these events and quality for use. This effort seeks to understand how these kinds of data could be integrated with higher value for use and accuracy.
Adam Rae, Vanessa Murdoch and associates from Yahoo talked about Point of Interest Discovery. That group, based in Spain, has divided the world in different sized grids and is searching for associated news and content items with distinct regional areas. This leads to different ways fro describing places based upon location. “How can we judge quality?” he asked. “Using extracts from articles titles we are trying to link data together.” The idea of modeling information from online formal sources of data and real-world, chaotic sources of data is posing challenges that Yahoo is attemtping to handle with the development of new applications. It is expected that Yahoo will announce a voice driven map search application in a few weeks.
All in all WhereCamp EU 2011 provided a wide range of interesting applications for discussion. Issues of data quality are now dominating many dicussions as well as issues relating to licensing. I found myself wondering at times if we have moved from “silos to licensed silos” now. So much of the data being generated in real-time through live social media applications cannot be integrated readily with other data for license restrictions. This gives rise to the idea that a business model could better succeed by creating data in some cases, and licensing it, without ever developing any application.
The growing number of users around the globe are actively engaging each other, sometimes close and sometimes from great distances, on topics they share and are interested in. As people markup, make notes in digital formats and create content, they are stimulating the development of new ways for aggregating spatial data and understanding what the word ‘place’ means. At this point, it is difficult to define a ‘place’ and the change that occurs at any given place can change.
One of the things I really enjoyed about this event is question periods. They were long, varied and included a wide range of people. This is something that more formalised meetings fail at – and which defines the benefit of WhereCamp so obviously.
