Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Central to the Semantic Web is a collection of RDF documents. Unlike the traditional HTML documents, RDF documents contain explicit semantic descriptions of Web resources (e.g., people, place and things). We all use web browsers to view HTML documents, but what do we use to view RDF documents?

A new site called zitgist.com is attempt to answer to this question. Developed by Frédérick Giasson at the OpenLink Software, Inc., zitgist allows users to browse any RDF documents on the Web and help them to navigate between resources that are linked in those documents.

In zitgist, RDF statements are display as groups of “tabbed” tables. When a RDF resource has nested resources, zitgist creates nested “tabbed” tables within the parent table. This is the typically behavior of RDF browsing. For some special RDF documents, zitgist plays a different trick.

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Ask.com recently gets a major makeover. Among those new features, there is a map editor allows users to create their own maps.

New map editing features include:

• Add user-defined placemarks to a map
• Save snapshots of multiple maps and share with other people
• Draw geometry objects (lines, circles etc.) on a map
• Annotate maps with text descriptions

Here is an example: Cheesecake Factory in Downtown Baltimore.

Jet Blue airline will partner with Google to integrate Google Maps technology into their airplane seat back displays.

The JetBlue Google Maps will allow fliers to track the progress of their flight — location, altitude, and air speed — while en route. Customers will also be able to track the progress of the JetBlue promotional RV as it travels across the US from their seat back screens.

Customers who travel on Jet Blue between June 3, 2007 to September 3, 2007 can enter a photo contest, in which their photos will be displayed and voted on a Google Maps mashup.

Customers can enter the contest by visiting www.jetblue.com/google and submitting their favorite photo taken from the window of any JetBlue flight scheduled between June 5 and September 3. One photo can be submitted per email address along with the date of travel, origin and destination cities, and the approximate location of where the photo was taken in-flight. As an option, customers can also submit the name of the JetBlue plane that flew them to their destination. JetBlue will post customer photos to a Google Maps mash-up, where customers can vote on their favorite shots at the end of the summer. Based on customer votes, the top 10 photographers will receive roundtrip travel for two to any of the airline’s 54 destinations.

Spotted on: Google Maps at 30,000 Feet, Read/Write Web

Street View is Google’s latest digital map innovation. It allows users to see city streets from a first-person perspective. No doubt that Street View is a useful feature, however, it raises some privacy concerns.

Here is a report from theage.com.au:

In San Francisco, there is a man picking his nose on a street corner. At Stanford University, there are a couple coeds sunbathing in bikinis. In Miami, there is a group of protesters carrying signs outside an abortion clinic. In other cities, you can see men entering adult book stores or leaving strip clubs.

Some people think Google has gone a bit overboard this time.

“Everyone expects a certain level of anonymity as they move about their daily lives,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group devoted to protecting people’s rights on the Internet.

Some others think differently.

Privacy experts believe these kinds of issues are bound to arise as technology makes it increasingly easy to share pictures and video on the Internet, pitting the rights of free expression against the rights to personal privacy.

“What you have to do is balance out the perception against the reality and I think in this case, the perception is much scarier than the reality,” said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility, a policy group.

What do you think?