Slashgeo

Direction Mag host a review of Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. From the review: "[...] the book is not so much about knowing the location of people or items in the real world and its implications, but rather about the challenge of finding information. [...] The book includes many big, important topics to ponder (or not). What is information? Morville suggests that we not worry about it too much. How do people deal with too much information? They don't bother to go looking, per Calvin Mooers. What is the Semantic Web? Is it useful? What of taxonomies, ontologies, and folksonomies? These last few topics will take some time to ponder, but Morville does a fine job making sense of what can seem like overwhelming and distant ideas." You can also hear Peter Morville in this great Very Spatial interview.

During GeoTec, it's celebration time for the 100-years anniversary of the Atlas of Canada, a project lead by NRCan. On day one, surprisingly interesting presentations and discussions took place. I won't tell you about everything I heard but want to share with slashgeo readers one aspect of the Atlas of Canada's future: wiki-atlases. One of the foreseen futures of Canada's Atlas is community-driven and participatory atlas. Atlases must be demand-driven, not supply-driven. This brings a lot of questions (to be settled in the coming years?), such as how do you manage authoritative maps, accuracy and reliability? What will be the role of the government in regards to that future? What's the Atlas's vision and who provides it? Who will provide source data? How do you make sure data goes from data to information and knowledge? During the discussion, the importance (and I was honestly surprised to hear this) of open source and open standards was repeated on many occasions. What should be archived? How should it be archived? Who will do the work and provide the tools? Shall any cost-recovery goals be left aside? Which business model to implement? How shall the link between policy-makers and citizens be? How should we address knowledge management. Beyond the paper map, time topology must be built into GIS along with 3D (not 2.5D, often refered to as 3D). Digital maps tend to disapear quickly, faster than paper maps. It is hard to fund cross-department projects, and such an Atlas of Canada is cross-departemental.

Jesse writes "A VerySpatial Podcast's 1/2 year anniversary episode features an interview with Peter Morville, author of the book Ambient Findability published by O'Reilly Press. Visit http://veryspatial.com/podcast.php to download Episode 26."

What's the state and future of Google Earth, ArcGIS Explorer, Windows Live Local? This was discussed by Bernard Szukalski, senior product manager of ESRI, Vincent Tao, director of Microsoft's Virtual Earth BU, and Ronnie Yaron (?) of Skyline Software Systems. Micheal Jones, CTO of Google Earth, failed to show up. Here's various notes taken during the session. Read my account below.

Here is some last notes on the GeoTec 2006 event that I deemed worthed to share. See me three previous entries regarding GeoTec. It was also nice to meet Paul from the Cartography blog. Read more below for the notes.

Geoplace shares the eight simple rules for geospatial interoperability. I saw M. Sussman explaining his interesting rules at GeoTec 2006. From the article: "Interoperable Web services are a new paradigm-users and developers no longer have total control. The geospatial data community is a leader in the technical aspects of interoperable computing, but it’s only beginning to understand the associated non-technical issues." See also ArcGIS's interoperability discussed.

I recently read Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. I want to encourage anybody with interests in geospatial technologies to read the book. Here's a previous review from Directions Mag and let's not forget the Very Spatial interview with Peter Morville. He also gave the keynote speech at GeoTec ealier this year. There was also this other interview along with Mike Liebhold. You can see also Peter's wikipedia entry and the findability.org website. The book is short and to the point, but very pertinent and even brilliant. From the O'Reilly description: "How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to your questions? What does it mean to be "findable" in this day and age? This eye-opening new book examines the convergence of information and connectivity."

Participating at GeoTec 2007, Calgary, here's my summary of Ed Parsons' Keynote, which was one hour of pure geowisdom. Read more below for my summary.