GIS

Open Geospatial Consortium Approves Google KML as Open Standard

Michael Liebhold — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:28:11 -0700

Description

The members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced the approval of the OpenGIS KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML), marking KML's transition into an open standard which will be maintained by the OGC. Developers will now have a standard approach for using KML to code and share visual geographic content in existing or future web-based online maps and 3D geospatial browsers like Google EarthTM.

KML is an XML-based programming language, originally developed to manage the display of geospatial data in Google Earth. It's still used heavily in Google Earth but is also supported by a variety of vendors' tools and mapping websites including Microsoft.

The OpenGIS KML 2.2 Encoding Standard formalizes the KML 2.2 model and language while remaining backwards compatible with existing KML 2.2 files and tools. In comparison with the GoogleTM KML 2.2 Reference, the standard defines:

* the KML 2.2 geometry encoding and interpolation model
* an extension model in support of application profiles
* conformance requirements and test cases

The adopted OpenGIS KML 2.2 Encoding Standard (OGC KML) is available at
http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/kml/.

Biomedical Sciences and Biotechnology

Source

http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/857

Illuminating the Path: The R&D Agenda for Visual Analytics

Jess Hemerly — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:23:12 -0800

Description

From the website:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security chartered the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC™) in 2004 with the goal of helping to counter future terrorist attacks in the U.S. and around the globe. A major objective for NVAC is to define a five-year research and development agenda for visual analytics to address the most pressing needs in R&D to facilitate advanced analytical insight.
Under the leadership of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and top researchers on the R&D Agenda Panel, a Research and Development Agenda for visual analytics was developed to define the directions and priorities for future research and development programs focused on visual analytics tools. This R&D Agenda, Illuminating the Path, provides a coordinated technical vision for government and industrial investments, and ensures that a continued stream of technology and tools enter the hands of analysts and emergency responders.

The R&D Agenda presents recommendations to advance the state of the art in the major visual analytics research areas:

The science of analytical reasoning

Visual representations and interaction techniques

Data representations and transformations

Production, presentation, and dissemination.

The R&D Agenda also includes recommendations to accelerate the ability to move the most promising research into practice and set the stage for an enduring visual analytics research community through a combination of education and research collaboration.

Source

National Visualization and Analytics Center (2005). Illuminating the Path: The Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics.” Richland, WA: U.S. Department of Energy, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Software-sorted geographies

Jess Hemerly — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:12:05 -0800

Description

Abstract:

This paper explores the central role of computerised code in shaping the social and geographical politics of inequality in advanced societies. Arguing that ‘software-sorting’ techniques are now being widely applied in efforts to try and separate privileged and marginalised groups and places across a wide range of sectors and domains, the paper analyses recent research addressing three examples of software-sorting in practice. These address physical and electronic mobility systems, online Geographical Information Systems (GISs), and face-recognition Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems covering city streets. The paper finishes by identifying research and policy implications of the diffusion of software-sorted geographies within which computerised code continually orchestrates inequality through technological systems embedded within urban environments.

Source

Graham, S. (2005). "Software-sorted geographies." Progress in Human Geography 29 (5):562-580.

Bruce Sterling SIGGRAPH 2004 speech "When Blobjects Rule the Earth"

Jess Hemerly — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:58:32 -0800

Description

From the spech:

So what's a Blobject? And why might they rule the Earth?

Since I write about design quite a lot, sometimes people think I made up that word, "blobject". If you Google it, my name pops right up, but I didn't coin the term. A famous industrial designer named Karim Rashid made it up, and he wrote about it in a book aptly called "I Want to Change the World." A good book, very educational, you should buy it and read it. I did. Karim's not kidding.

A Blobject is commonly defined as "an object with a curvilinear, flowing design, such as the Apple iMac computer and the Volkswagen Beetle." But computers and cars are just end products, they're not the process. The truth about a blobject is that is a physical object that has suffered a remake through computer graphics. It was designed on a screen with a graphics program. A blobject is what a standard 20th century industrial product, a consumer item, looks like after your crowd has beaten it into shape with a mouse.

Source

Sterling, Bruce (2004). “When Blobjects Rule the Earth”, SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August, 2004

Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography

Jess Hemerly — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:48:32 -0800

Description

Abstract:

In recent months there has been an explosion of interest in using the Web to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic information provided voluntarily by individuals. Sites such as Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap are empowering citizens to create a global patchwork of geographic information, while Google Earth and other virtual globes are encouraging volunteers to develop interesting applications using their own data. I review this phenomenon, and examine associated issues: what drives people to do this, how accurate are the results, will they threaten individual privacy, and how can they augment more conventional sources? I compare this new phenomenon to science and the role of the amateur in geographic observation.

Amateur, DIY, and citizen science

Source

Goodchild, Michael F. (2007). “Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography”, GeoJournal 69: 211-221

Geospatial technology blurs the boundary between cyberspace and urban space to form geocomputable cities

Paul Torrens — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:21:06 -0800

Description

The boundary between computing infrastructure and urban infrastructure were blurred to a fuzzy line some time ago and much has been written (and speculated) about on the ramifications of their consociation across a spectrum of topics, from sociology and public policy, to cyborgs and robotic management [1, 2, 3, 4]. Somewhere along the way to the fusion of the computational and the urban, cities became geocomputable spaces.

A number of catalyzing factors are, perhaps, responsible. First, software and computing became increasingly relevant in the management and production of space [5], across the board. Urban utilities are now monitored and managed as large-scale Geographic Information Systems of sensor networks and automated notification systems.

Second, cities and the throngs of people, vehicles, and things that pulse through them have become ambient physical and social infrastructure for large-scale distributed communications networks: digitally interactive crowds with hand-held devices, ubiquitous Wi-Fi signals leaking into the airwaves, and a spaghetti-knot of fiber sequestered in the urban fabric.

Together, these have provided the network-cloud for massively distributed information exchange and computation.

Fourth, digital positioning systems became important in cities, guiding fleets of bike messengers and mail trucks to their destinations with optimal locational accuracy; then, they became ubiquitous, public, and really cheap.

Fifth, near-field and locative technologies based around RFID readers and tags have become ridiculously cost-effective, to the point where individual stores can set up their own geo-grid for automated asset tracking, monitoring, and management. (The navi-wagon shopping cart is just one of many examples.)

Sixth, pattern recognition concentrated on spatial structures of, and spatial compositions in, the urban fabric became useful across applications, from monitoring cars and their licenses remotely in downtown congestion pricing schemes, to law enforcement and policing.

Seventh, intelligent transport systems with strong geospatial components enjoyed a surge in their development and deployment in cities, within roads and across transit systems.

Your location in cityscapes, and your geography in socio-technical urban networks, will become a commodity
Business models fashioned around location-based services have blossomed in very recent years, thanks in large part to a drop in the cost of integrating Global Positioning Systems (GPS) with mobile devices (cell-phones, handheld gaming platforms, personal display assistants, digital cameras, and so on). Concurrently, alternative positioning technology and algorithms based on triangulation of cell-phone and Wi-Fi signals with base stations and access points have evolved to the point where the positional accuracy they produce is useful for consumer mapping. Knowing where you are in a cityscape--and its mirror world in cyberspace--and, particularly, what is around you, will continue to become a commodity that consumers will pay for. At the same time, maps will continue to evolve as the new portal between meatspace and cyberspace, particularly for urban activities, services, and markets, with many groups jostling for position in this new emerging commodity-scape, where commercial interests can pay for brand-name territory. Undoubtedly, there is keen interest in harvesting users’ place-based search and queries to train a new generation of geospatial AI for location-based services. What remains to be seen is whether this arena will become dominated by traditional geospatial technology providers (the potential for Garmin’s nuviphone to erode iPhone market share because of superior positioning technology is an early example [6]) or existing cyberspace behemoths (Intel and Microsoft both have long-standing R&D investment in alternative positioning technologies, for example [7,8]).

The potential for function creep
The emerging glut of technologies used to geoprocess and geocompute in urban areas is so massive that it is difficult to keep track, manage, and regulate them. This latter point is particularly salient with respect to the potential emergence of function creep in the use and application of these technologies and the vast stores of data they will produce. Geospatial technologies of this kind create a bridge between cyberspace and cyberplace and users’ Online data-shadows can be potentially traced to the real-world with greater ease. This creates new emerging opportunities for marketing, advertising, and commercial data-mining, and as with most emerging technologies, it creates privacy concerns. Already, geodemographics for marketing have begun to farm these data-sets, and algorithms for creating privacy masks and filters are emerging. How these data and services creep across interoperability boundaries to add value to related (or unrelated) services will shape the future development and application of these technologies.

The potential for things to go wrong
What happens when geocomputable cities are hacked, crash, or succumb to malware or viruses? Thus far, we have been spared any serious locative-based mechanical, software, or system failures. As geocomputable cities begin to play host to intelligent highways and robotic drivers, thorny issues regarding positional accuracy and spatial ontologies will likely surface. These are not issues that are easily solved with version 2.0 iterations to existing technologies and they pose grand challenges for future research and development.

Geospatial technology will expand the Digital Divide
Many of these technologies already divide and partition urban spaces based on place-time tuples that authenticate some people as valid participants in particular buildings, places, and spaces at particular times (at the simplest level through RFID-embedded card access, for example). The potential for socio-technical spatial polarization among the geodigital valids and invalids is profound [9]. As geospatial technologies develop in sophistication and their application-sets grow and expand, newly segregated divides may well emerge.

References
[1] Mitchell, W. J. (1995). City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

[2] Batty, M. (1995). “The computable city”. Paper read at Fourth International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management, July 11th - 14th, 1995, at Melbourne.

[3] McCullough, M. (2004). Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

[4] Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. London: Perseus Books.

[5] Graham, S. (2005). “Software-sorted geographies”. Progress in Human Geography 29 (5):562-580.

[6] Jonson, Joel (2008). "Nuviphone: Garmin Announces First Credible iPhone Competitor, boingboing.net, January 31, 2008.

[7] Knies, Rob (2005). "Using Wi-Fi to make your device find where you are", Microsoft Research News and Highlights.

[8] Cheng, Yu-Chung; Chawathe, Yatin; Krumm, John (2003). "Accuracy characterization for metropolitan-scale Wi-Fi localization". Intel Research IRS-TR-05-003.

[9] Dobson, J., and P. Fisher. (2003). “Geoslavery”. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 22 (1):47-52.

Signals

Software-sorted geographies

Geoslavery

The Computable City paper

Google Earth: Geodata everywhere, for everyone

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:31:16 -0700

Description

Google Earth may do for geographical information, and users' ability to understand the spatial dimensions of information, what the early Web browser did for the World Wide Web. Google Earth allows users to view geographically-coded information atop satellite photos of the Earth, and create new place-specific information that can be shared with other users. The rapid growth in Google Earth's popularity suggests comparison with the early 1990s, and the Mosaic and Netscape browsers.

In both cases, growth was driven largely by word-of-mouth and enthusiastic early adopters. Likewise, popular uptake was supported by the conversion of large quantities of extant information (digital texts and pictures in the 1990s, geocoded data in the 2000s). Finally, in both cases, user-driven innovation was seen as a significant driver of growth, or even a potentially revolutionary disruptor.

In the near future, Google Earth may move from the early adopter phase, and will attract both conventional content providers (e.g., publishers, governments), and communities of ordinary users. (Unlike the Web, however, Google Earth seems unlikely to promote visions of "virtual worlds" or electronic communities that replace real-world ones.) As with the Internet, it is also likely to give rise to experiments in malicious activity, as well as new forms of activism and political protest.

http://www.ogleearth.com/