I’ve created a page with geospatial semantic web links. I hope readers of this blog will find these bookmarks to be useful.
http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/bookmarks/
If you have other links to suggest, please let me know — email me or add comments to the page.
I came across an article that talks about the use of folksonomy in geospatial applications. It reminded me of a post that I have written. Today folksonomy is in the roots of many interesting web applications, e.g., flickr and technorati. I agree with the authors on that future geospatial applications could explore similar ideas. For example,
Few other thoughts that come to my mind.
Since Google has conquered the mapping of the Earth, it’s working on the mapping of Lunar surface. Google Moon is a project that maps the landing sites of our first travel to the moon on July 20, 1969.
What’s more? Google’s Copernicus Center is hiring.
During this holiday season, while people are busy with holiday shopping and travels, companies and government agencies are busy with new geospatial applications for the everyday people. For example, both Google Earth and NORAD provide interactive map services that track the journey of Santa Claus.
This is a healthy sign that shows geospatial technology is not only valuable to the secretive government agencies but also to the everyday people.
Quick links:
People love Google Earth, but their governments may not. New York Times reports that the growing popularity of Goolge Earth has many governments worried. For example,
India, whose laws sharply restrict satellite and aerial photography, has been particularly outspoken. “It could severely compromise a country’s security,” V. S. Ramamurthy, secretary in India’s federal Department of Science and Technology, said of Google Earth. And India’s surveyor general, Maj. Gen. M. Gopal Rao, said, “They ought to have asked us.”
I believe in the free use of information, including geospatial data. Should new technology enables everyday people to become GIS specialists, that would be great. If geospatial technology can solve many of our everyday problems, there is no reason to keep them behind the closed doors.
Should new technology threaten national security, we will develop new solutions to overcome this problem. That’s how we as a society has advanced in the past, and I believe that’s how we will continue to do so in the future.
Mobile computing is a big market for GPS navigation. According to this IHT article, as the price of powerful mobile devices descreses, the demand for GPS-enabled mobile devices will increase.
Signal loss is a major problem for the existing GPS devices. In cities, tall buildings sometimes can break the links between the mobile devices and the satellies.
TeleNav is working on a new technology to solve this problem.
Hassan Wahla, senior director of business development at TeleNav, said
the system calculates where a user is and then - based on speed, as
determined by an internal accelerometer - indicates where the user is
likely to be whenever satellite signals are interrupted.“If you lose signal while traveling under a bridge or because of a tall
building, you keep navigating,” Wahla said. “The entire trip is
downloaded in the first minute of a trip and is stored on your phone or
BlackBerry as you’re driving. If the GPS goes off line, you will
continue to be given guidance. It knows your last known location and
speed.”
Sometimes the easiest way to solve a network connection problem is by caching.
Prof. Max Egenhofer has written a short paper, “Toward the Semantic Geospatial Web“, which discusses key issues in building a new Web that can exploit geospatial semantics. He believes that in order for Semantic Geospatial Web (or geospatial semantic web as I call it) to take off, it will require the development of standard geospatial ontologies for representing data and standard query languages for accessing data.
I believe standard ontologies and query languages only solve part of the problem. In real world geospatial applications, building standard vocabularies and queries langugaes are the easy part of the tasks. The hard part of the problem is how to integrate mass amount of geospatial data that already exists.
In the past, when the term “geospatial” is mentioned, people immediately think digitial maps. Today most people think Google Maps and Google Earth when the same term is mentioned. To me, seeing mapping technology as the sole component of geospatial technology is a nearsighted vision.
Geospatial technology is more than just pretty maps. A recent IDC study shows that the spatial information management industry is undergoing radical technology changes, which is likely to impact many IT ecosystems.
Fundamental shifts in the spatial information management industry
include basic changes in the nature of geospatial work, and transitions
in the broad IT environment toward easier integration and support for
business processes.The study finds that geospatial data, and not the map, has
become the raw resource for creating location-specific information.
Therefore, efforts to convert paper maps to digital data have been
replaced as geospatial data is used to generate new maps, decisions,
and automated processes.
Let me take things one step further. I think a wide adoption of geospatial technology in IT is only the begnning. Some of the most exiciting applications in the future will be the ones that exploit geospatial semantics, not just geospatial data.