Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Geospatial Web and Semantic Web are two major discussion topics of the Social Web Technologies course. In the past few classes, we talked about GIS, Google Maps API, geotagging and Geonames.

When introducing Geonames to the students, I decided to do a little experiment. I used Geonames as a tool to teach students the basics of GIS and provide them an opportunity to experience a “social-able” Geospatial Web.

An Annotation Competition

The experiment was relative simple. I spent few minutes introducing Geonames to the students. And then, I asked them to play a game. The class was divided into two teams: Team1 and Team2. Using Geonames, the teams competed with each other in identifying landmarks, buildings and roads that are located within the close vicinity of the UMBC campus. Each student signed up for a free Geonames user account. Using the wiki-style annotation tool provided by Geonames, students tried to annotate as many spatial features as they can in 10 minutes. The team produced the most annotated features would win.

To keep track of the features that each team had annotated, students were asked to tag their features using their team ID: “team1″ and “team2″. Using the Geonames search tool, I displayed the real-time progress in front of the class.

• Features identified by Team1
• Features identified by Team2

Lesson Learned

• It’s fun to use Geonames in a collaborative environment. Students enjoyed the process of creating annotations while chatting with each other and arguing about the location of a specific landmark. It was a social-able experience.
• Geonames has a relative open policy for users to make contributions — whatever the user enters, Geonames stores it. In general, this is a good thing. However, this policy can also lead to unintended creations of duplicated data. For example, because students were entering data simultaneously, we frequently saw multiple annotations of the same location were entered and they had different coordinates values assigned.
• It seems that using the Web as a platform can encourage non-GIS experts (e.g., students) to do GIS tasks (e.g., annotation). Not sure if this is an inherent feature of the Web or just because of the UI of Geonames is well designed.

I enjoy using Flickr, especially its geotagging feature. Not only it helped me to organize photos based on location, but also helped me remember the context in which my photos were taken.

For example, during my recently trip to Paris and London, I took some photos at the Château de Versailles and the Windsor Castle. Using Flickr, I was able to geotag photos in a level of detail that I never thought would be possible. Without it, in the next few months, I probably would have forgotten the exact locations where some of my photos were taken (e.g., this, this and this).

See my photos taken at the Windsor Castle

See my photos taken at the Château de Versailles

Flickr announced a new feature that allows users to geotag photo — i.e., annotate photos with location information such as latitude and longitude coordinates. Unlike typical keyword annotation where users manually enter text strings of keywords, Flickr geotag allows users to annotate location information by simply drag-and-drop photos onto a digital map.

Since most Web users are comfortable with online mapping applications (Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps), for them to learn to use Flickr geotag shouldn’t be too difficult. Flickr even produced a short video that teaches users how to geotag photos and set privacy protection.

I think Flickr has done a great job building this new feature. First, there is little mention of GIS vocabularies in the whole tagging process (e.g, you don’t have to know what lat/lng is before you can geotag). Second, it has built-in privacy protection. This gives a greater comfort to those who put information on the Web. Flickr users will be in control of the information and not Flickr. Third, the geotag map UI looks better than the one in Yahoo! Maps. To me, it seems to have a cleaner design with less clutter.

Spotted on Anything Geospatial

The Web has made people smart. It allows the everyday people to discover, publish, and share information. The Web is a profound technology not only because it allows the display of pretty pictures and the layout of well-formatted texts, but also because it’s a technology that everyone can use.

Like the Web technology, geospatial technology should also be developed for the everyday people. The key is to help everyday people, not just few groups of elite techno-geeks, to do more by doing less.

So, what’re those useful geospatial technologies? Many speakers at the Where 2.0 conference have talked about them.

Read the rest of this entry »

GeoSpatial Expert, a company specializes in developing software for GPS cameras and geotagged digital photos, announces the release of GPS-Photo Link 4.0 that add Google Earth functionality.

A key business of the company is selling GPS camera bundles. For example, their GeoExplorer Bundle comes with a GPS camera and software for processing geotagged photos. The GPS camera supports wireless communication over Bluetooth (i.e., receiving GPS signals from a Bluetooth GPS module).

As location-based technology enters the mainstream consumer market, I think we will see more wide usage of GPS cameras and applications of geotagged digital photos. Though I think many people (including me) would be interested to buy a set of those GeoExplorer Bundles, but I think its price ($3000-$6000) is a bit too expensive for an average consumer.