morning sessions day one

Well, I am finally here. I'm in the middle of the first break. some notes:

• Business casual dress
• Main session room is set up with AC powerstrips abd free wi-fi so that people can plug in their laptops
• Single-track of presentations
• About 800 attendees
• 44 mapping APIs
• KML turned over to OGC to become a "standard"
• TEchno BPM music playing in the background and in the transitions
  
  

The first presentation was Schuyler Erle from MetaCarta. His presentation was titled Mapping the Maximum City. He spoke really fast, too fast, like he just took a presentation he often does and tried to fit it within the time he was given. THe short abstract probably gave as much information as his whole presentation. He's working with Mumbai to take their highly detailed vectorized data of Mumbai and give it spatial intelligience. The original

• He said that the U.S. has a wealth of public domain information but the availability of it is haphazard, in other words, there is not a central effort to make U.S. gov public domain data EASILY available.
• Other countries don't have this luxury or users are made to pay. He used Great Britain as an example.
• Links of note:
• www.publicgeodata.org
• mumbai.freemap.in
• openstreetmap.org

The next presentation was Rich Skrenta of Topix.net. They aggregate news from about 50,000 news sources and blogs and locate news events on a map down to a zipcode. THey use several databases and search the article text for familiar terms that exist in the databases (place-related information) and locate it.

• Demonym - name given to people of a place. (e.g. Hoosiers, Virginian,...)

The third presentation was more interesting, because of the news from Google:

• Talked about mainstreaming of Geo
• They are investing in their basemap
• User-created data is important.
• Google has opened up StreetView
• Panoramic view of place with the ability to pan and zoom
• State DOTs have something like this -- videologging, but this is more dynamic. this is a potential app. for DOTs
• Sent KML to OGC to make it a more official standard
• Google Mapplets let's you add data to Google Maps, similar to how you may add Google gadgets to iGoogle. Check out maps.google.com/preview

After the morning break there was a short presentation on twittervision and flickrvision.

The next major presentation was on Quakr which tries to build a 3D world from photos placed on Flickr. They are bring in photographs, geolocating them, and then tying them together in a 3D world.

• links
• flashsandy.org
• www.quakr.co.uk
  
  

Andrew Turner spoke about the "geostack" (Create, Publish, Aggregate, Consume). He mentioned the following terms, which will have links.

• Eye-film
• Platial
• Geopress.org -- geolocate your Wordpress Blog post
• Safe's FME
• Mapufacture
• GeoServer
• OpenLayers
• FreeEarth
• Mapstraction
  
  

Next up was Kevin Bankstrom who urged developers to consider the privacy vs. convenience issues of the application they are creating.

MapQuest's Jim Greiner announced that their ActionScript API had been released. They also surveyed users and found 5 Success Factors for Web applications:

1. Demonstrate the value to the user, then make it the standard
• Once users are informed and shown why features are relevant, their demand increases
2. Give the user control
• Provide alternatives to control outcome of map and routing experience. Let them choose what's relevant for them
• Users want to share their personalized maps but in limited ways
3. Reinforce the Foundation
4. Don't just give data -- help make a decision
• Turn data into intelligience during the user's experience
5. Evolve with your users -- help them whereever and whenever

Lunchtime