I’m on the airplane en route back home after the UC and I just finished reading the entire August edition of WIRED, which features articles on the 10th Aniversary of Netscape going public in 1995.
I was a college freshman then, excited and intreguied by the Internet at school, and hashing out early HTML for fraternity and university websites. Anyway, that tapered off when I left school for “a more rewarding career” of driving the Short Bus. But now I’m back at it. A geographer and a technologist, in an exciting field, but nonetheless in a restrictive buracracy. I am frustrated and fueled at the same time. Standing up to “fight the good fight” and “to do the Lord’s work.”
Reading “We Are the Web” by Kevin Kelly here on the plane, my brain went into overdrive with thoughts of how the GeoWEB, hypergeography (a lame attempt to tag the evolution of geospatially enabled hypermedia), and us will emerge as what Kevin calls “The Machine” that will connect every sensor (RFID tags, people, etc) together to make a neural network more complex, more dynamic and grows more rapidly than the human brain.
Some crazy SkyNet stuff, is it not?
The web is growing and society is producing more information than it is consuming. The combination of The Machine learning and us as engineers and geographers giving it the ablity of spatial awareness and sight (combo of slippy map services and geospatially tagged Flickr images) we are creating a reflection of ourselves. This is probably why in the article people are hedging their bets that the Internet will be the first self-aware AI. Heck, it’s never off, we teach it to learn, to see, to feel, to touch, to talk, and to know where it is. It will be us and we will be it.
An interesting thought caught my mind though when Kevin talked about the future wen here the human/web will be embedded with one another. Imagine that we’re all linked to everything (yes, Borg-ish), but our children will have left their memories for their children. This future growth causes an exponential increase in our own neural development as a species and will allow us (and it) to learn from all of our mistakes.
Now, how spooky does that sound: instantaneous wisdom?
Anyway, I don’t think we have anything to fear as in The Terminator movies. We will still have our compassion and our reason. Hopefully, transferring those traits to The Machine, which will be all of us?
I know you’re reading this. Yes, you. Now pay attention. If that has been included in your budget?
JD O’Neill recently posted some comments on GIS and SOA’s such as “What Can I Do With An SOA? and “Access to ArcGIS Server as EIS.”
You should read these to get an idea of what an SOA is and how a GIS enabled SOA can be utilized as an Enterprise Information System (EIS). Note the idea of transforming the current situation to a service-based architecture, instead of living in the LN hell that we live in.
Note to self: Why didn’t I know about ArcWeb Services before?
It’s like Google Map construction on steroids with spatial data query and some useful geoprocessing.
I still like the Google Map cartography anyway, but I think that ArcWeb MapStudio would be a useful alternative to “our primary dissemination” platform to utilize all of the data my office holds.
Sorry Curious, you may have a cheaper alternative… Stop!
Crunkie: geotagged moblog app for your phone. Schweet!
Still, there’s a website that uses the crunkie.com address that comes up as StreetHive that looks like it uses ArcWeb Services.
Heads up: ArcWeb Services 2005 beta coming late August. Improved carto, speed, vector maps, new web learning site, custom map services, line/poly feature upload (GPS?) WiFi Location service (MSN VE?), enhanced geocoding, enhanced routing, NEW DATA!, and new access methods.
- New carto styles via Nat’l Geographic.
- Vector Mapping = Flash and SVG (AWESOME!) (Standard style sheets; multiple)
- New ArcWeb Services website w/ detailed info and tools. (Yeah, I need to get on this boat and check it out.)
- Federate an ArcIMS service using SOAP/REST to reference in an ArcWeb Service. Nice.
- Create custom services: add/delete info, easy full control of map services
- New tools for customization
- Uploadable lines and polygons. I wonder how this works with GPS info?
- WiFi location services equals waived rights for locating your mobile phone on ArcWeb Services to send SMS to the phones
- Good routing and traffic info integration along with drive time info
- Location of landlines in the U.S. and worldwide city level IP addresses (Where can I get this!?!) Uh-oh! The presenter is talking about tracking bloggers and outside visitors… Getting way too “Big Brother” on me. Gives me The Jibblies!
- Hi-Res commercial imagery services and weather data worldwide (58K weather station and stats going back 30 years) Uff da.
- New data. See above. (World 30M DEM info)
- REST API! REST API! REST API! KICK ASS! (Digi, move from SOAP to REST.)
- J2ME Toolkit
- OpenLS API… Good.
Demo time. Google News?!? Now they’re talking aobut reading news to identify places in ArcWeb Services… Interesting. Very interesting. If it can do this, then why ask for geoRSS?
“Riddle me that Batman.”
New services: the pretty “slippy map” stuffs for web and mobile apps.
Hmm… How can I create the killer app for the next two years and become independently wealthy?
ArcWeb Services 2005 hi-fi Map Viewer with Flash/SVG on the fly pre-created map tiles and a wicked awesome widget viewer. Also some features to re-0rientate the map in the direction you’re going. Excellent.
My ESRI rep was right, ESRI wanted to get the slippy map right when it went off into the IMS world. This is some good stuffs.
Ok, geeking out here. Going to get some coffee and power down.
Actually, my butt fell asleep.
Wednesday night I met up with the other geobloggers at the UC.
What a great bunch of guys! Smart as heck, know their stuff, and just fun to hang with. One of the highlights of the night was that I may have turned Redlands on to kickball?
If you don’t know already, the ESRI folk are mad bowlers and from what it sounds like they’re in need of a new fix. I know for a fact some of the ESRI peeps in DC are kickball players, but think of a Redlands division. We could have a UC kickball tourney next year. Of course, this is what will happen if we do:
- Trimble and Leica teams survey the field
- ESRI maps it
- MetaCarta will know where it is in the invite
- TeleAtlas liscenses the info where the field is
- The Google Lidar guys bring their sharks with “lay-zers”
- The SANZ guys bring the ducks and the drinks
- DigitalGlobe will be photographing the tournement
- Microsoft will hold their own kickball tournement on XBox
- And, I’ll probably end up umpiring
Anyway…. If you’re interested in kickball in your area check out the World Adult Kickball Association’s (WAKA) website.
Well, well, well… Looky what I caught on the way back to the hotel.
The San Diego Chargers Cheerleaders photographing the cover of their annual calandar.
Who needs the calander when you have The Planet to find goodies like this.
I really did make it to some workshops. Seriously, I did.
Wednesday was heavy on enterprise GIS and service orientated architectures (SOA). Amazingly, I knew what the heck all of these presenters were talking about. There was a lot of SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL slinging . Which is cool, but I think that some of the people in the room really didn’t understand the tech aspects that were focused on. Yet, I do belive that they did get the concept of SOA in an IT architecture and how all of an organization’s business processes and services can be integrated with the geographic services to provide a much more robust information distrobution network.
For those of you from work take note of this.
I think that when I return I will need to get with my peeps and re-evaluate our plans and ideas in how we want to transform. Also, how we need to become interoperable with our partners is key.
Well, that’s the wrap of the Wednesday.
I’m currently sitting in the ArcWeb Services introduction presentation. I think I’ll have to try out the public services and compare it to Google Maps. Right now it seems to be more robust for geogeeks, but not everyone is a geogeek. And I work with non-geogeeks.
Nonetheless, ArcWeb requires some evaluation.
Ok, kids. Time to strike your curiosity.
What kind of resources do you need to create the second part of the changing Internet?
Pssst. That’s the geo-enabled hypertext.
I wasn’t there for Where 2.0, but I really want to know what kind things strike your fancy as wave of the future stuff like… AM Radio.
Err… Geotagged RSS for placenames, addresses, and other “where’s”.
Because I deal in both the Geo-Space and the Info-Space I want to merge the two to be able to use the Earth as the search engine and the common link between people, places, things, and time.
I figure that GeoRSS is only as good as the gazetteer that you use, but that can be fixed. If you work in an interoperable environ, you should be able to use a tool like MetaCarta to read your hypertext to search for placenames, or you can manually enter them, and save your text in GeoRSS that can be read and aggrigated by a GeoRSS reader. Creating an output for ArcIMS/GIS, Google Earth, or whatever. Thus linking the text or multimedia to features on the Earth that will link you to other info near or about that place (and time.) I guess you would need to build a filter too?
Nonetheless, what the heck needs to be done? Do you want me to pitch this on the exhibit floor today? Because I can. And I know people who would be very interested.
If I do generate interest, we’ll move onto resources needed.
Just let me know. Please.
I’m all about interoperability. It may be because I have this appreiciation for interchangable working parts first pattened by Eli Whitney and one of the reasons why our country is such a rockin’ place.
The past couple months I have been reading and trying to understand “open source” and the proprietary “evils”. Well, I’m here at the UC and I hear OGC, WMS, WFS flying around as part of the GeoWeb. Ok, great. Getting the word out about compatable data is cool.
But… I have been also coming to the realization that as cool as “open source” sounds, who is going to make money off of it to grow the standards and formats?
I’m thinking like a capitalist pig.
If you look at the development of technology in our society, you see that tech becomes a reality to fill a human need. Not a want. And it most often a crisis or last minute thing. Unless, the open source community can develop a need for OGC standards, in the scope of the country or the world, they are going to have slow development cycle and/or a lack of resouces to keep up with some of the proprietary standards that sell because the address a specific need.
Please don’t hate me.
Anyway, if you can convince the guys with the resources (not the U.S. Govenrment) to invest in open source where there is a happy medium between profit, useablity, access, and innovation where they will invest in developers and programmers who can contribute and advance the technology for the common good. Open source could be off in the background.
On the other hand, it could very well be WAY out in front of everything.
I’m not a psychic, nor do I claim to be an expert. So, don’t you all go hatin’ on me now.
Yet, if organizations can scope their enterprise to be interoperable and work with service/software providers like ESRI, Google, Microsoft, and the Thales Twins, you could have your interoperable utopia.
If you can afford it.
And who said interoperablity has to be with everyone? I dunno, but I reckon that it is all relative to what an organization’s needs are.
With that I’m moving on to my next post.
AWESOME!
I passed this on the way to the Padres game last night.
Ah, every man’s early adolescent dream car.
Well, it’s either this or KIT.
On the exhibit floor of the UC, I came across this interesting Artifact.
An 1854 pull-down school map of the United States. The booth dude noted that it was his great-great-grandmother’s from when she was school teacher. For being that old, it’s in really good shape.
I may ask the owner if I should put him in contact with the Library of Congress Map & Geography Division. Hopefully, to arrange something that will preserve this wonderful piece of history.
