Where Conference
"It's beautiful science." Patrick Hogan, Program Manager at NASA Learning Technologies, describes World Wind, NASA's incredible free open source application that provides access to terabytes of imagery collected by NASA's satellites. It lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, and virtually travel to the moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and beyond. Because it's open source, World Wind is not merely a vehicle for extraordinary astral travel and armchair universe cruising, it is spawning plug-ins, add-ons, and development in both the private and public sectors.
While it is true that the last few years have seen an explosion of geo-related innovation, Chris Spurgeon reviews some of history's other geo hacks. He surveys some of humanity's cleverest solutions in its attempts to answer such basic questions as "where am I?" and "which way should I go?" He also offers a book list that details such topics as the history of mapping and other fascinating geo themes.
KML is a file format used to display geographic data in an Earth browser, such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Maps for mobile. KML uses a tag-based structure with nested elements and attributes and is based on the XML standard. Brian McClendon and Lars Rasmussen of Google give both a history and update on the format. They also review the latest enhancements to Google's lineup of map making and map data sharing tools.
Lauren Gelman of Stanford University explain aspects of current U.S. law that protect users' location and online privacy, and areas where the law fails and technology must step in. If the builders of geospatial tools fail to embrace privacy-promoting design, the potential of next-generation web applications may never be realized. Designing an architecture that protects user privacy, will pay off in the long run as people are more willing to embrace cool new tools knowing their privacy will be protected.
Imagine the power of turning locations in text documents into dots on a map. John Frank and Schuyler Erle from MetaCarta have been doing that for enterprise customers for a number of years; they're now ready to open up their georeference engine to the rest of the Internet. In this short and lively presentation from the 2006 O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, learn about the applications of georeferencing and MetaCarta's enhancement to current GIS offerings.
Since late 2005 we have seen an explosion in pushpin applications - consumer-facing web sites that let users mark, describe, and share places on a map. We don't yet know whether this is a fad like Friendster or a category killer like Wikipedia. In this session, Where 2.0 conference co-chair Nat Torkington puts the tough questions to Di-Ann Eisnor of Platial, Ben Nolan of Zopto.com, and Josh Peterson of 43places.com on money, viability, privacy, and growth. You'll learn who's doing what, why, and who has the best chances of succeeding.
The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) is a GIS that supports both raster and vector based image processing. Originally developed for Unix by the US Army Construction Engineering Research Laboaratory (USACERL), it is now an open source project supported by thousands of developers. In this technical presentation, UC Davis graduate student Dylan Beaudette discusses everything from GRASS data types and functions through to the data analysis packages used for planning a wilderness hiking adventure.
Zopto is a unique URL addressing scheme for identifying any physical location in the world down to the level of a house number. A Zopto address is represented as a URL that looks very much like the postal address of the place itself. In this presentation, Ben Nolan - technical director of startup Projectx - gives the audience a preview of Zopto and describes the technology in more detail.
The Google Earth project has the ambitious goal of creating a 3D model of the entire Earth. In recent years, advances in mapping have made this goal attainable within a reasonable period. John Hanke & Brad Schell - Product Directors for Google Earth - discuss and demonstrate Google Earth and Google SketchUp, both of which are now available on multiple platforms. Google Earth now offers high resolution imagery for well over 20 percent of the earth's land mass. Hanke and Schell are excited about the possibilities available as a result of continued collaboration and technology.
GeoRSS allows location information to be added to an RSS feed. This gives more context to a feed by allowing it to be searched based on location or to be used by a mapping API. Mikel Maron relates how GeoRSS evolved from the W3C's Geo vocabulary and how it continues to grow and change in the light of the more recent explosion of location-based development work. Maron also presents an overview of the ingenious ways in which GeoRSS can be used and describes a number of the more innovative projects exploiting its potential.
