After coming across Freebase’s blog post about using their data for map generation I thought it would be fun to dig in a little deeper. According to the post Jamie Taylor of Freebase teamed up with Jonathan Lowe of GisWebsite. A very clever pairing and I’m interested to see the final results.

In the mean time a bit of hypothesizing. From the photo -

It looks like they are using Jonathan’s Giswebsite platform which looks to be a combination of UMN’s Mapserver and probably PostGIS. From the post all the data on the map comes from Freebase, so we can infer that Freebase is support polygons, points, and most likely polylines. This alone is great to see because it means that Freebase geo-support is for more than just lat/long features. A little digging on Freebase itself confirms this. On Jonathan’s data “types” page there are schemas for:

# FeatureCollection,
# Feature,
# GeometryCollection,
# Box,
# MultiPolygon,
# MultiLineString,
# MultiPoint,
# Polygon,
# LineString

Of these only “polygon” and “linestring” had descriptions and examples. For instance when you click on polygon you get a set of results for mostly commons and ponds in the UK, which look much like this result for “Eagle Pond“. Lots of possibilities in this framework, and we are beginning to see some simple and effective ones implemented already - like this mashup up buildings by famous architects pulled from Freebase. Look forward to learning more when it is presented at Where 2.0.

Popularity: 21% [?]

We came across a small blurb in the MIT news today about the release of “MIT GeoWeb“

“… a new interface to the MIT Geodata Repository, enables users to access Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, once accessible only in ArcGIS, through a standard web browser.”

The MIT GeoWeb provides a Google Maps interface to their extensive repository of geodata in shapefile format. In short you can search the MIT repository of data by geographic region, keyword or browse, then visualize the file that you find on Google Maps in the same browser. If you like what you find you can check out the metadata and/or download the shapefile. While the user interface is not the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen it looks to be effective with has a nice array of data you can browse. The quick visualization of lines, points and polygons is also a very nice feature.

On the downside you can’t click on the data rendered in Google Maps to see the information behind it. You also can’t download the data in a file format other than shapefile, so accessing the data is still restricted to GIS applications. Although the biggest kicker is to access to the application at all you have to be a MIT student or employee. That puts a bit of a damper on the whole thing, but still a clever implementation further pushing the frontier of open data access.

There is a nice screencast of the application here.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Chris Spagnuolo’s GeoScrum posts results from the 2008 Agile Adoption in GIS survey. The survey found that 32% of organizations had adopted agile practices, but 68% said they had not. This compares to 69% of the mainstream development world that has adopted agile practices according to Scott Ambler’s survey asking the same question in 2007.

Windows Vista does not like the idea of portable GIS, at least according to Jo Cook at Archaeogeek.

A recent article in FCW caught the eye of James Fee, who discusses the idea of “open GIS” for the U.S. Navy.

Remixing web maps as demonstrated by Into the Pudding.

Some “really cool news maps” are shown by Contentious.com, highlighting maps that mix storytelling and information from National Geographic and some local cities.

Platial News and Neogeography gives us the 2007 winners of Movement Mappers, an award designed to highlight users who use social tools to do important work and spread critical messages, making it easier for people to make life-changing decisions.

Popularity: 20% [?]

It is only fitting that the day after I posted “Moving Push Pins Off the Map” I saw the post on Ogle Earth about a new geotagging icon….which is?

A GIANT PUSH PIN!

With my interest peaked we did a little digging and found another geotagging icon:

ANOTHER GIANT PUSH PIN (actually when I dug into it this icon was a first version that evolved into the red one.)

I of course blame this all on the Google monolith for perpetuating push pin mania. Last time I saw Mike Jones he even had a push pin tie tack. Joking aside the reason for creating a geotagging icon itself is worth discussing.

The stated purpose on the GeoTagIcons.com website is “The Geotag Icon is intended as a web “standard” icon for identifying geotagged content to humans.” So, if a photo or blog post has been geotagged then there is an icon on it to let you know. The thought being many times geotags are hidden in microformats or the URL, thus not visible to the user.

This seems like a straight forward approach to the problem, but also seems to have overlap with existing icons such as KML and GeoRSS. The tutorial on GeoTagIcons has examples of using it for links to both KML and GeoRSS content. This could lead to some ambiguity and confusion for users.

One of the most interesting parts of the pitch for using the GeoTagIcon is, “Reason 4: It encourages development of the semantic web”. On first blush this got me excited, but reading a bit deeper realized they meant it acts as an advertisement for linked content that could help support an evolving semantic web. This is in and of itself is a worthy cause and advertising has been directed at far less useful goals.

The link between geotagging and the semantic web does bring up a good topic for debate. How will all these geotagged objects (KML, GeoRSS, geo-microformats, GPX, etc.) be tied together in a method that creates semantic meaning? What questions will the semantic technologies answer? The GeoTagIcon site provides an example of , “Show me a plot of other bloggers in my vicinity”, or “I’d like to see a map showing which of my friends have also visited Australia”, “Who else has photographed this location?”, etc.

While these are interesting I think the examples and the direction many folks are taking geotagging misses the real potential of the semantic web. The geotagging premise is based on doing increasingly sophisticated things with geo-coded annotations - 99% of the time taking the form of a pushpin. In each of the examples above users or a screen scraper and geo-coder (most likely) have added a latitude and longitude to a piece of unstructured data (bloggers, my friends, photos). While this all useful information it is often relegated to only answering trivial questions.

There is only so much you can do with a bit of unstructured text or html that has geographic coordinates. You can measure vicinity (bloggers nearby), intersection (friends that have visited Australia) and union (show me all photos from a location). There might be a few that I am missing but it is fairly small universe of questions that can be answered, and the semantic web is all about answering questions. Hopefully a very large universe of questions.

From my limited perspective the semantic web is all about bringing vast data resources to the web in an easy and intuitive way. While turning unstructured text into geocoded annotations already on the web is important I think the bigger challenge is blending existing structured data (largely in databases and not on directly on the page web) with organized unstructured data through the web in a seamless way like we have for text, pictures and video.

Metaweb has done some compelling work with Freebase. They have even been doing some interesting geo work with their database. To date Freebase has largely been working with conceptual data, but from the look of their GIS app could be getting into more quantitative data.

As you get into quantitative data the power and tools available for asking sophisticated questions increase exponentially. Unfortunately so do the technical challenges, both computational and creating an intuitive user experience for something not intuitive to most people - numbers, math, statistics, etc. Despite the challenges I think this is where some of the greatest potential awaits for the emerging semantic web. That said I do think the new icons are quite nice and serve a useful function - despite the push pin.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 43% [?]

During a late night epiphany we decided the blog had gotten a bit stale. So, to encourage a regular flow of content we figured a new look and pithy title would be just the trick. Welcome to the shiny-new, rebranded, USGS approved “Off the Map”. Now fortified with vitamins, minerals, insight, and elegant prose.

Why change the title to “Off the Map”? Well push pins seemed so 2005 and we needed another reason for an office contest. The winner you’ve now seen, but there were lots of other great entries such as:

1. Geo Me This
2. Plain to the Simple
3. MapRap (bling your map ????)
4. Map This (including middle finger to the man* graphic)
5. Libre la Data
6. The Lat and Long of It
7. Atlas Maximus
8. Adept and Disheveled

Why did we end up picking “Off the Map”. Well speaking for myself I just wanted to be able to use Kyle’s graphic with the dead push pin.

The next reason? As we’ve been developing the second generation of GeoCommons we found the big areas we were having to innovate had nothing to do with the map. The new ideas that were going to change the way people use maps - were literally “off the map”. Whether it was handling large datasets ridiculously quickly in a browser or structuring taxonomies and semantic relationships we were increasingly putting lots of resources into data management. Just so happened that data could be shown on a map.

Don’t get me wrong the map is still the single interface that ties all the data together, but increasingly I think what will make the GeoWeb matter has less to do with maps (including all sorts of crazy 3-D worlds) and more to do with delivering useful data to help people make better decisions. Which happens to be done through a map.

We should be getting a couple of posts up a week explaining this line of thought in more detail. Most likely with several side trips of randomness and entertainment. So, please stay tuned and we promise to keep a regular flurry of GeoWeb bits o’ knowledge.

* “The man” of course being all those evil cabals preventing easy public access to open data

Popularity: 23% [?]