Presentations, posters and articles presented during the 6th gvSIG Conference are now available. The Live-DVD given during the Conference is also available. The event was held under the motto "Knowledge for change" and brought about 500 attendees.
The Open Planet 4 magazine and the videos of the presentations will be published soon.
Read More »I told you it would eventually be published, there it is. My personal notes of my attendance at the FOSS4G conference. They have been edited to remove content specific to my organization. Please find other FOSS4G entries here.
At the Location Business Summit, Director of Nokia's Ovi Places, Gary Gale, gave the talk “Geobabel and the Open Places Database”. After a long introduction in which Gary likened the the challenges facing the location based business industry to the four (4) horsemen of the Apocalypse, he got to the heart of the matter he wanted to address: the lack of a central database for place names. He bemoaned the current situation in which most major players in the location based business industry were building their own data “silos”, each with some mechanism to associate place names with a location and a unique identifier. Each player creating duplicate place name entries for these places.
What solution did Gary propose to this problem of duplication? An “open” database of place names. This solution would need to be supported, Gary argued, by the big players in the location based business industry, to be successful. Gary admitted that the Ovi Places Registry is currently a silo, but that he was interested in learning how to share a common registry of place names with other companies.
I believe that Gary was championing an excellent idea. A common, and “open” database of place names would be a valuable resource for all in the geospatial industry, not just location based business companies. Gary expressed concern that open licenses wouldn't be sufficient to protect an open place name database, but I disagree. I believe the correct license would prevent one company from exerting control over the database.
I was curious why Gary didn't mention the existing effort to create an open registry of place names.
I'd like to see the OSGeo or another organization that supports open source software and open technologies support a the creation of an open place names database and a file format for sharing place names. There are technical challenges and questions about an open registry of place names, such as how to handle multiple names for the same location, multiple locations for the same place, and how to represent the shape and location of places in the database (WKT perhaps?).
These challenges could be surmounted with the right type of collaboration between cartographers, surveyors, GIS professionals, and location based businesses.
The Sunburned Surveyor
Read More »On the first day of the Location Business Summit USA, David Peterson, the CEO of Sense Networks, presented a talk with the theme “Extract Intelligence from Location to Infer Trends and Build Tribes”. David described Sense Networks as a “location intelligence” company with a focus on delivering knowledge based on behavior patterns, with a special emphasis on analyzing location-based behavior. For example: If you know that a person goes to the local elementary school every morning for a drop, spends time shopping at Toys-R-Us, and likes to go to the local City park on the weekend, you could reasonably guess that the person was a parent or lived with small children.
Boiled down to its essence, the business concept of Sense networks is to use location-based behavior to divide consumers into “segments” or “tribes”. David argued in his presentation that location-based behavior is a more powerful indication of personal characteristics than any other type of information. I don’t know if I completely agree with this argument, but you can certainly make some good educated guesses about the tribes a particular consumer would belong to based on where he goes as part of this daily or weekend routine. I believe sense networks is exploring an interesting concept in this sense, although it seems somewhat humorous that scientists have been doing this with radio collared wild animals for a long time. Looks like your mobile phone might be your new radio collar.
Additional insights about a consumer can be gained by combining location-based behavior with other historical or contextual information, according to David’s talk. This supplemental information would include the time of day, weather, or “user mode” (the user is shopping; the user is commuting; etc.) Sense networks had to overcome some challenges to implement its business concept. This includes storing and analyzing millions of location features from millions of users. Steps in this process include (1) cleaning and normalizing the data, (2) extracting knowledge from the data, (3) segmenting consumers into tribes based on the data, and (4) making predictions about consumer behavior based on the data.
The Sunburned Surveyor
Read More »Here are my personal notes for the FOSS4G closing session. More to come later. OGC's Raj Sing - The tao of information sharing: standards, open source and the future information ecosystem
Here's last week's announcement regarding the availability of the final FOSS4G conference program. From the announcement: "More than 700 people have already subscribed and the number is growing every day. If you have not subscribed yet, do it now. Some workshops are already sold out so don't loose the chance to choose your favourite workshop." As announced earlier this summer, Slashgeo will have a representative attending the conference.
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