Rico Simpkins, REI, - Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networking

Today I saw a news release explaining Recreational Equipment Inc. initiative to encourage Web 2.0 mapping and Social Networking for their customers. I found a YouTube video with Rico Simpkins explaining the development of this program. YouTube provides an easy way to include this in my Blog, so I am sending this now.

I intend to find out more about this project. There are many ways I can think of that this program could be expanded to environmental, recreation, education and scientific groups in Idaho for example, but other places all over the country.

I will write more detail about how this can work soon. Meanwhile I intend to contact REI to find out more.

Place and Time Knowledge Networking

Over the past few months I have been somewhat inundated by information and news that I feel I should be writing about and sharing with people who read this blog. For awhile, I am going to try to narrow down future topics in an attempt to develop a more consolidated view of how I believe "Place and Time Knowledge Networking" should become more important to individuals, groups and communities who have an interest in the past present and future of special geographic "places" or locations they care about. I wrote an earlier blog post on this topic on September 07, 2007.

One excellent reference on these topics I noted in that post is the book titled, "The Geospatial Web" - How Geobrowsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Networked Society. This link goes to a web site where an Introduction, Table of Contents, Bibliography, Contributors and an Acknowledgment. A link to a "Sample Chapter" is also provided.

Another reference I made in that earlier post was to interesting presentations at the GeoWeb 2007 Conference and available on the web site.

Now. a year later the GeoWeb 2008 Conference has just concluded. Keynote and invited speaker podcasts will be available online and the entire proceedings are available for sale.

On his Blog on August 1, 2008, Ron Lake, CEO, of Galdos Systems, Inc., the GeoWeb conference organizer, wrote a post titled - "GeoWeb and the State of the World." I will quote a few sentences from this post and make some of my own interpretive comments below.

"One of the most pressing issues facing our planet is of course climate change and its close sister ecological decline. In order to act on these issues we need to come (more or less globally) to an agreement on the “state” of the world....The important issue for me is simply that we are seeking in this discussion to express something akin to the “state” of a system, in this case the state of the world climate or world ecosystem, although many other system states are of interest."

I believe it is clear that these other system states Lake alludes to could include smaller areas or system states like a distinct ecosystem, a watershed, a wilderness area, and perhaps even man made boundaried systems like states, counties, and cities, or conservation areas like a wildlife refuge or wildlife corridors, a river restoration project, or even a precise geographic location where a a single remote sensor is gathering information.

Lake also notes that it is interesting to note that the use of the word "we" implies that “we need to come to an agreement on the state of the world.” In my mind the "we" word clearly implies that citizens should be involved in learning about system states that affect them, and also should be involved more in future decision making processes. This requires that all possible knowledge about a place or a system has to be made available and networking opportunities need to become more widespread for people to become involved in places and systems they care about.

Regarding knowledge, Lake's thinking is that the GeoWeb will evolve in a different way than the conventional web as we know it now. Instead of finding a large amount of data represented by web pages and documents when we do a search he believes the data we receive "must be organized with respect to space and time." I believe this means that we should be able to find all the available information about a place or system of interest that has taken place over time. An overview of discussions about the "Semantic Web" will help reveal how this is becoming possible now and will become even stronger in the next few years. (There is a lot of new information about the Semantic Web that I will try to add later, but I have written several posts about it in the past.)

Lake also mentions "what one might call “GeoPresence". Again I believe that this word can be used to indicate that potentially any identified geographic location will have associated space and time knowledge that could be made available via a Semantic Search to anyone interested in the past history, current status, or future decisions that might be made about that location. A major advantage that is promised by a Semantic Web Search is that the information about data and authors will become much more accurate, reliable, and dependable over time because everything will continually be rated by experts and by many Internet users.

Lake concludes the post with this thought. "GeoWeb is not just a fusion of the Web and Geo-technology. It is response to an unmet need in our society to know and express the state of the world. This part of the journey has hardly started."

In another post soon, I intend to give an example of the valuable Geographically local knowledge contained in community newspaper archives, especially those that have been in existence for many decades or a hundred or more years. Much of this knowledge could be made more openly available to the GeoWeb in the near future.

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,"

Encyclopedia of Life - First Version

Last weekend, a friend, who is a "lichenologist" talked a little about the "Encyclopedia of Life" web site project that E.O. Wilson is involved in. I wrote about this project in my Blog almost a year ago, connecting it to efforts to create the Semantic Web and content contributions by interest groups via new social and interest networking efforts. The EOL is using a Wiki type format that is an advance form of the Wikipedia project which has become very popular on the web.

I looked at the EOL project again this week and want to report that it has progressed to become a "First version" work in progress that I thought my friend might interested in looking at and possibly contributing to in the future. The project is looking for species page Curators (authenticators) and "later in 2008 will set up a mechanism for anyone to contribute species-related content (photos, drawings, text, video, etc.). The curator(s) of the species will consider the submissions for incorporation into the authenticated species page."

The home page now has some detailed information about 25 exemplar species to show the rich and extensive information that will be possible with all species in the future.

Just for fun I decided to do a search on EOL for "Lichen" and found that almost all of the information is still to be contributed.

I also did a search for the Lichenologist, Roger Rosentreter, (resume to 1999) who is a Botonist for the Bureau of Land Management in Boise, Idaho. There were many search results and I will add one as an example that I found very interesting titled "Lichens and Wildlife."

Roger and his associates and many scientists, photographers and people with interest in individual species will have much to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Life as it develops in the next few years.

Here Comes Everybody - a book by Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky is a well known educator and writer about social network topics. I have followed some of his work for the past few years. On Thursday April 3, he was interviewed on the Stephen Colbert Report and what he said sounded a lot like the "Common Adventure" group organizing process I have described earlier in this blog.

He has written a brand new and exciting book titled "Here Comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing Without Organizations." And he is providing a new Here Comes Everybody blog to "chronicle and extend the themes of the book."

I have not read the book yet, but I have looked at some of the web reviews and a video of Clay talking about the book. A book review by Elizabeth McKenna of Radar Reviews notes that Shirky "... offers an extremely readable sociological text on how communication technologies (cell phones, Internet, etc...) strengthen the world's ability to form social and political groups with ease and provide significant platforms for even the simplest of citizens."

The video was recorded at the Harvard Law School on March 4, 2008. Here is a link to the video and I will provide a summary of important concepts he talked about. Sharing, Conversation, Collaboration, and Collective Action.

I intend to purchase the book and keep reading the blog and will write more comments here in the future.

Google Maps- Boise, Idaho Street View Embeddable panorama

The Google Lat long Blog posted a note on December 11, 2007 that any available Google Maps Street view panorama can be embedded on a web site or a blog. I decided to try this out and place a panorama of a street showing one of the downtown Boise buildings that provides a creative River artwork scene facing the street. You can move this panorama around in a 360 degree circle and you can also zoom up close to the artwork. If you click on the "View Larger Map" link on the bottom left of the panorama, Google Maps will open and you can navigate around the downtown area of Boise starting at this location. You can also choose to navigate to panorama views of most of the streets of Boise by selecting locations on the "Larger Map."


View Larger Map

Phase 3 - The Internet and World Wide Web

I believe Web site projects can now begin to create interactive social networking interfaces, semantic links, and cross referenced data aggregation opportunities to aid future environmental networking decision making processes at a local, regional, national, and global level. The brief outline below provides a general summary of the important components that are already providing impetus for this developing third new phase of the Internet. Our next web site projects with Mountain Visions will attempt to incorporate these features and I will attempt to explain this process on this blog as time allows.

Geospatial Web
Online maps loaded with Place &TIme Based data about the physical world.
Google Earth/maps, Virtual Earth, NASA World Wind, etc.
Virtual Communities

MobileWeb
The World Wide Web as accessed from mobile devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and other portable gadgets connected to a public network. Access does not require a desktop computer.

DataWeb (Semantic Web)
Expert and Knowledge based Content and Concepts,
Semantic Searching - Much more defined, reputable and reliable search results.
Related to Geospatial place and time all data sources noted below:
Scientific papers, reports, studies, etc.
Environmental Impact Statements, Planning documents, etc.
GIS Data bases from many sources - local regional, national and global.
Other Databases - Government, environmental, knowledge, economic, visual, etc.

OpenSourceWeb
Open Source software, public domain knowledge, etc.
Online web applications, public domain imagery etc.
Shared GIS data and GITechnology

ImageWeb (Images are unique forms of data. See DataWEb)
A proliferation of shared GIS maps, historical maps, paintings, graphics, photos,
video, audio, animation, etc. related to the Geospatial and Data Web.
3D Simulations, Virtualization, and future scenarios and models based on existing data.
Virtual Environmental game scenarios.

SocialWeb
Social Networking 2.0 and 3.0
Education - K-12, Community and College Networking.
Citizen participation, volunteers, public input.
Pubic tagging and rating tools for data, photos, knowledge, etc.
Posting photos, citizen monitoring data, blogs, wikis, and much more public involvement in planning decisions.