In geospatial information systems (GIS), data integration is often a problem. Different systems may use different vocabularies to represent the same abstract concept, and different systems may express data values in different unit of measure (UOM). This problem may be of interest to the Semantic Web community because it’s a different kind of semantic interoperability problem.
The Web is changing. It’s moving toward a social web, a place where people can social and share knowledge. Central to this new Web is the idea of tagging — the ability to annotate Web resources with keywords. One question that many people ask is “what’s next?” Where will we go from here? What’s role for the Semantic Web in the social web and tagging?
geoGreeting is a web service that all geospatial technologists can appreciate. It’s an e-greeting service. Unlike the typical services that compose message in plain English text, it composes greeting messages in satellite images that shape like English alphabets.
Here is a “Hello World!” message from GSWB:
See the full version of an animated geoGreeting message.
Blutooth MediaServer is a location-based system that distributes advertising via Bluetooth. Access Points of the Bluetooth MediaServer are typically placed in high-traffic locations such as restaurants, movie theaters and shopping malls. Upon entering the vicinity of these Access Points, customers who carry active Bluetooth devices (e.g., cellphones and PDA) will automatically receive targeted advertising messages.
Nova Spivack has some interesting thoughts on the Semantic Web future. His company Radar Network, a software company funded by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, is developing a new semantic platform and online service for group communications and collaboration.
In his essay Minding the Planet: the Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web, Spivack discusses important issues that surround the present Semantic Web development and the future Web.
But what is the Semantic Web, and why does it matter, and how does it enable collective intelligence? And where is this all headed? And what is the long-term fa future going to be like? Is the global mind just science fiction? Will a world that has a global mind be good place to live in, or will it be some kind of technological nightmare?
As digital maps and navigation systems increasing become an important part of our everyday lives, companies that bet on location-based services are aggressively expanding their GIS database. NAVTEQ announced the acquisition of Traffic.com, a leading provider of traffic information and technology to deliver it.
There are two reasons why GIS data is important to the success of a company like NAVTEQ. First, without sufficient amount of and diverse types of GIS data, the feature capability of NAVTEQ’s prorducts will be limited. No matter how sophisticated a product is, without data, it’s useless to the customers.
Second, being a GIS data provider is a “sticky” business — once you became the leader, it’s hard to replace you. Building cutting-edge GIS applications such as Yahoo! Maps and Google Earth requires a great deal of software design and engineering effort. Every data customers of NAVTEQ probably have spent sufficient amount of time and effort to get their data aligned, fix streaming performance issues and simply get things to work. Once NAVTEQ became the data provider of a successful application, it’ll be difficult to convince developers to switch to another provider.
Though the stock price of NAVTEQ is not edging up north as fast as Google, but it’s growth prospective does seem very positive. As the king of GIS data, it will be easy for the company to convince others like Verizon, Spring Nextel, Google and MapQuest to partner and build their next generation map services and location-based services on NAVTEQ’s products and services.
November 7th, 2006 is the day for the U.S. mid-term election. On this day, people across the country will exercise their rights to vote and choose their representatives. With advanced GIS technology, this year you can view election competitions on digital maps.
Additional election coverage can be found on CNN and the U.S. Depeartment of State websites.
BTW, people have dreamed about an election mash-ups a year before. From Copia in Oct. 2005,
With all the talk of Web mash-ups, I wonder whether anyone has any sort of site or tool for overlaying elections district information over mapping services. I suppose one big problem is that there isn’t much commercial prospect for such a service, but surely this would be a prime candidate civic service mashups, funded by government or philanthropies. Another question is whether districting information is available in computer-readable form regular enough for inexpensive implementation of such overlays.
I come across an interesting web application called InstaCalc. It allows users to easily create shareable calculators and embed them in web pages. Read more about this application at TechCrunch.
To show you how it works, I put together a shareable InstaCalc for the 25 most common RDF namespaces (source: swoogle 2006/08).
Here is a screenshot:
