Geospatial Web Podcast

The New Sense of the Web is an hour-long discussion on the geospatial web. (podcast)

Nicolas wrote a transcription of the talk. Great work!

The typical bad outcomes of the geo-web (privacy and digital divide) are mentioned. However I am more interesting in the challenges in making the geospatial web more usable. That is how to make it work for people. In the industry level, the biggest challenge is to make the walled gardens in order to move towards to an interoperable geo-web. Peter Morville (Ambient Findability) thinks governments should create digital parks as they do when buying part of the land and open them up as public parks! move towards an internet of objects. Another challenge is to make the technologies used by the geo-web work. Peter mentions a wifi watch with a built-in gps to track the location of your child (berk!) and that people complain because it does not work good enough. Another challenge is to manage the relation with (on and off modes) the geo-web. One caller, a trucker, complained about how being tracked during his job changed his relation with his nap time: “Everybody know where I am and what I am doing, it’s terrible. before I could take a nap without any problems (it was me and my nap) and now… it’s impossible (how come you’re not moving?)”.

Mike Liebhold mentions way to provide access to geospatial information to the less priviledge people:

There are lots of wonderful standards for a while to make information available (since gore) but about equity and access, it turned out that the cell phone is the world’s computer: if cell phone are equiped with wifi access, then you don’t necessarily have to dial to a commercial access: wifi can give you location information and access to the web in a way that it does not cost money and it does not necessarily give your location. this device will be cheap enough that less privileged people can have access to geospatial information.

I am always surprise to see WiFi as a mean to provide free access to people. WiFi (or any other current wireless service) availability far from ubiquitous, its accessibility is rarely free (outside of Montain View, Palo Alto, …). Plus, the wide and chaotic development of WiFi might lead to unpredictable degradation in coverage and data speeds and drives a need for continual network upgrades (which would be excellent for my thesis! ).