Geospatial Revolution Project & 2 Mountain Visions productions

Over the past few years I have been tracking and recording trends related to the Geospatial web and other new networking opportunities that can empower citizens to become more informed and active in environmental current affairs and decision making. As part of this effort I created a presentation for the Idaho Environmental Summit last November titled "GeoWeb Common Adventure Networking." On this blog and other participatory opportunities I will attempt to add interesting information as time permits.

A few days ago I was alerted by a message from the Idaho Geospatial Office List Server about a very interesting and informative web site and video trailer titled the "Geospatial RevolutionProject -- The location of anything is becoming everything." This is a project of the Penn State Public Broadcasting. The video trailer is at the top of the web page.

In Summary text under a topic "THE PROJECT" notes that 'We live in the Global Location Age. “Where am I?” is being replaced by, “Where am I in relation to everything else?”

Text under a "THE NEED TO KNOW" topic states: "Geospatial information influences nearly everything. Seamless layers of satellites, surveillance, and location-based technologies create a worldwide geographic knowledge base vital to solving myriad social and environmental problems in the interconnected global community."

As I watched the video I was reminded of two similar Geospatial educational projects we (Mountain Visions) produced in the year 2000.

The first of these was titled a "Virtual Exploration of GIS", a short series of multimedia tutorials to explain the basic concepts of Geographic Information Systems, and was prepared as an Interactive multimedia CD-ROM and an interactive web site. Sponsors the production included the Remote Sensing and GIS Laboratory and Landscape and Ecology Modeling and Analysis Center at Utah State University and the Bureau of Land Management National Training Center. The original purpose of this project was to be a presentation tool for BLM workshops helping land managers and other citizens understand how GIS technology works and how to use it. The web site version of the project also became a popular educational tool for colleges and other GIS training projects. This project was awarded "First Place for Multimedia" at the ESRI International User Conference that year.

Another multimedia program we created in 2000 was titled "Understanding the Nature of Ecosystems Through Science" and explained the history of how maps were created for Yellowstone National Park and how hyperspectral satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS technology was being developed to help solve ecosystem issues. (Note that this was originally produced for a CD-ROM presentation for the "Yellowstone Ecosystem Studies" project and was subsequently reduced in window size for acceptable presentation on the web at that time. The window size now could fill the computer screen for future projects of a similar nature.)

GeoWeb, GIS & Neogeography notices

There has been a lot of very interesting "buzz" on the internet about the announcements made last week at the Where 2.0 Conference. Here is a link to the Where 2.0 Web site where you can find links to highlights from the show at the top of the page under the site menu and a very good short description of the conference.

John Henke, head of Google Maps and Google Earth and Jack Dangermond, founder and Chief Executive of ESRI announced the upcoming opportunity to merge GIS Map server information with other neogeographic services that are becoming popular. Here is a link to a video of this presentation.

I found this video on the May 13, Google Earth Blog--here the author Frank Taylor summarized the presentation as follows: "The other interesting thing that happened during John's talk was his strategy to get more GIS data into the Where 2.0 type applications world. John went and spoke to Jack Dangermond, CEO of ESRI, to see if he could convince him to work on ways to better enable access to GIS data. He invited Jack up to the stage and Jack quite enthusiastically described his shared vision with Google to get GIS data more accessible. Apparently ESRI will be intorducing new features in the applications to facilitate KML output of GIS data. Jack said the new features will start rolling out in about 4 weeks. The implication was that it would be possible to create mashups between GIS databases and neogeography databases and tools. They discussed a bit the issues that might crop up between crowdsourced data vs. professional GIS data, but that in the long run it could be for the best. Emergency situations like the California fires was given as an example where both data types proved useful."

Another Blog (GeoScrum) written by Chris Spagnuolo also posted an article titled: "Where 2.0: Overall impressions and a Desparate Plea." Chris notes that "What I am excited about is the rise of numerous crowd sourced data projects. It has always been my contention that local geography and micro/personal geography was missing from most standard"geographies". These localized, micro-geographies can't be built by just anybody, they have to built by the people who live, work, and play in those locales if they are to have any meaning and relevance. So, I'm very psyched to see lots of local crowd sourced projects encouraging exactly this sort of behavior. I think in the past two decades, people have lost their sense of "place" and their connection with their own geographies and these efforts are breathing new life into communities by helping people reconnect with their local geography. I know this sounds very touchy-feelie, but it's important and I'm glad to see it happening.
Finally, I'm really excited about some of the Open Source platforms and frameworks being developed for "GeoWeb" applications. I think that the growth in this area will help fuel serious innovation and advancement in web-based mapping applications."

Another related Where 2.0 article was written on May 13, in the CNetNews.com blog was titled "GIS exec works to unlock hidden geographic data." Stephan Shankland wrote this article and noted "The new version 9.3 of the dominant geographic information system (GIS) software, sold by a company called ESRI, now makes it a relatively simple matter to expose that data for easy consumption over the Internet." Jack Dangermond provided example projects in Portland Oregon and the recent San Diego Forest fires. "We are engineering it so it plugs in. It becomes effectively a support mechanism to the geoweb,"