Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging web service. Micro-blogging services differ from the traditional blogging services in that they restrict the maximum length of a blog entry — e.g., Twitter blogs must contain less than 140 characters. Twitter is one of the hottest social web applications today.

Many mashups have been developed around Twitter. Here is a few interesting map-related Twitter mashups:

1. TwitterMap: displays latest twitter messages on a map based on the author’s physical location.
2. TwitterVision: an animated mashup that cycles through latest twitter messages on a map.
3. TwitterVision 3D: same as TwitterVision, except that messages are displayed on a 3D Earth globe.
4. TwitterWhere: given a location name and this service will return an RSS feed of twitter messages that came from the vicinity of this location.

I’m not an active Twitter user, but I enjoy playing with Twitter mashups. Reading random Tweets (Twitter messages) are actually entertaining. As the Social Web embraces micro-blogging, there is much to be learned from the world of Tweets.

Intel announced a new research project called Mash Maker, which is aimed to help users to augment web page functions using mashup technology. The technical details of this project is still sparse. Nevertheless, from the available documentations, we can guess the basic capability of the service.

Problem Statement

There has been a lot of hype about mashups recently, and with good reason. Mashups are allowing us to transform the Internet from being a collection of separate website islands, into a unified intelligence in which knowledge from one web site can be automatically combined with knowledge from another.

But mashups have still not really penetrated the mainstream. My mother is not using mashup sites, and she is definitely not creating them. Even if there was a mashup out there that did exactly what she wanted, the chances are that she wouldn’t know it existed, and would be confused by it if she tried to use it.

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Geonames announced a new experimental service that includes thumbnail images of geographical locations in its query results. For example, a search query to lookup London UK will return a thumbnail image of London. All thumbnail images produced by Geonames are acquired from various geographical location pages on Wikipedia.

Marc at Geonames Blog introduces this new feature:

Thumbnail images for wikipedia articles are a new experimental addition to the geonames webservices, the full text search and the maps mashup. Around a third of all articles on geonames have thumbnail images. A simple algorithm determines which image to use as thumbnail if more than one image could be parsed from the original article.

I think this new feature could be useful to many Web mashup applications, especially those that need to display photos of some arbitrary geographical locations — maybe in a semantic-web travel tool.

Salvatore Salamone at InfoWorld.nl wrote a nice article that talks about the current mashup phenomenon. Salamone points out that mashup applications are not limited to just aggregating geographical data and maps. Many life science databases also can be used to combined with other information.

An example cited was of the mashup iSpecies.org. Upon entering a species into what looks like a regular query search line, the mashup returns a page with NCBI genomics information, Yahoo images of the species, and articles culled from Google Scholar.

In addition, Semantic Web technology such as RDF can help to expand the amount of data available for mashup applications. It makes easier for machines to discover, search, save and share information.

Source: Hip hop offers data integration lessons

Harry picks mashup applications of the day:

1. Dig to the Other Side: If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop? Pick a spot on the map and it shows you the opposite location on the globe.
2. Brewster Jennings Protects America: The classic game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego lives on in this interpretation on a Google Map. Race around the globe as a government agent to stop a deadly terror attack.
3. Bush History Map: See George W’s life history plotted on this Google Map.