afternoon sessions day one

Five-person panels starts things off. We have:

• Don Cooke, TeleAtlas
• Jack Dangermond, ESRI
• Michael Jones, Google
• Stephen Lawler, Microsoft
• David Colleen, Planet 9

They offer their visions for 3D Data Platforms for Real World Virtual World Interaction and where it's going.

The next interesting topic was from Bernie Krause from Wildlife Sanctuary with Giving Voice to the Map. He talks about adding sound to locations. For example you can click on an area in Google Earth and hear the ambient environmental sounds in that location.

• Link - earth.wildsanctuary.com

I think that this sound will be more effective in a CAVE environment that would add to the immersiveness of the model. A possible application of this may be in the area of Noise Pollution.

Garmin is the next one up, and they talk about enabling websites to communicate with GPS devices.

• Links - developer.garmin.com, geocaching.com

Stamen Design talked about the importance of presenting information in new and meaningful ways. They described their work giving the following websites as examples:

• mappr.com
• moveon
• cabspotting.org
• modestmaps.com
• INdigital telecom
• trulia.com, hindsight.trulia.com

I'm really impressed with their stuff!

Before the afternoon break Erik Jorgensen from Microsoft Local Live Search talked about how they make their 3-D building models.

The next presentations revolved around grass roots science using digital cameras/sensors and GPS units on pigeons (Beatriz de Costa's work) and the Economics of Mash-ups by Di-Ann Eisnor, CEO of Platial.com.

Then there was a lightening round of 3 5-minute presentations:

• The development of OpenLayers, an API that can communicate with Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Virtual Earth, WMS, WFS, GeoRSS, KML, or data direct from OpenStreetMap.
• GeoBliki: A Platform for Emergency Response
• Graphserver: which is an itinerary engine

Weogeo has a cool interface. It is a marketplace for maps, and it allows you to preview the maps you are interested in on the webpage or into Google Earth. It uses Amazon's EC2 and S3 services. It makes easy to add the data once purchased into Google Earth. You use only the area you interested in. Must check this site out!

Steven Johnson, co-founder of outside.in, talked about the start of community mapping during the 1800s in London during Cholera outbreaks.

outside.in pulls information and news about any location you are interested in.

There was just so much information the whole day, I got burned out.