The 2009 GeoWeb Conference has come and gone once again. 2009 was special to me because we have started to see some really great GeoWeb enabled websites really take flight. Clearly many have stopped talking about how discovery and sharing of data should be done and have begun implementing it.
I was lucky enough to see Jason Birch’s talk before having to go to the airport and now he’s posted his slideshow up on Slideshare. I highly recommend that you take a look at it and a look at the City of Nanaimo’s website to see that you don’t have to get all “SDI” to share data and have Google index it. Jason has a blog post that gets more into the details of making your data discoverable.
While there is still discussions about OGC and “working with them”, implementors are not waiting for OGC to get their act together, nor are they waiting for INSPIRE or Data.gov to “lead the way”. I think one can sum it up this way, users are more important than standards. Consensus is hard to achieve and usually when people can agree on something, it becomes bloated and difficult to use. That isn’t to say that standards and standards organizations aren’t important. What it does say is if you want your data to get out to your users it is best to think of what works for them and not what ISO or OGC standard you can apply.
So maybe GeoWeb 2009 is about doing something about all this great technology and then seeing the results. Jason’s presentation above clearly shows that if you take the time to implement good SEO and make everything discoverable, people will find your data and use it. ESRI, Oracle, Google (and I assume Microsoft, but they seemed to skip GeoWeb this year) are all working hard at allowing users to get data out of these systems (to greatly different degrees of course) and into the hands of their customers/users.
Ron Lake puts on a great show and I was glad to both present and spend time with presenters all week. The new academic track looked really interesting with some real cutting edge stuff. As I said last year, the really great part of GeoWeb is connecting with people you have not met before. GeoWeb Conference does a really good job of bringing together Europe and North America to discuss implications of the internet on our business practices. The tile of this post references the one thing that did get everyone’s attention at GeoWeb 2009, the heat. Of course a cold beer with friends has a way to make all that hot air go away.
Ron Lake and Andrew Turner got into a water gun fight over GML.
7 Comments
Wishing I had gone to GeoWeb – I’ve been enjoying the notes and video.
Remind me to buy you a beer next week @ WhereCamp5280 so I can hear more about your theory on standards. I’m working on a research theme concerning how the non-cartographic elements drive basemap adoption (eg, standards, licenses, apis…)
I think Andrew wins via the fact his pants are closer to his armpits than Rons
James:
Prevented from attending this year by this nagging little irritation called the economy, for me the big revelation was the utility of Twitter and Dave Bouwman’s video streams were an effective way to follow from afar. Ron should be applauded for putting together a conference that, in 3 years, is where a lot of the most interesting geospatial conversation is happening. I understand that conferences have bills to pay, and sponsorships mean someone needs to push product, but the signal-to-noise ratio and the variety of voices is impressive.
Unfortunately, that Canadian heat wave seems to have headed towards Colorado…
Brian
Hey, thanks for the shout-out. There is definitely a lot of room for light weight data sharing, and my feeling is that it has much higher benefit-per-person than data downloads or web services.
I’ve followed this up with a post that emphasises open publication of government data. Geospatial is truly one of the more isolated and inaccessible government data sources and we need to pay attention to this even more than in other areas within government.
I took some time this morning to look through the Geoweb reports. Wish I could have been there but I’m like Brian, doing the old economic shuffle.
Interesting to see the ’standards’ vs ‘just use it’ debate is still going along. I recall similar thoughts back in SVG history. Why use GML with no style attribution when we have this xml standard that already does all that? But standards are a way out of the tight proprietary grip on spatial data so I’m glad they keep on evolving.
I just wish government entities (should I mention Census) actually used them. Instead of worrying about publishing dead data downloads it would be nice to see more live web service streams opened into the data. The merging and chaining of diverse data streams is the still unrealized promise of all those OGC standards.
Hey Eric >>how the non-cartographic elements drive basemap adoption (eg, standards, licenses, apis..
I wouldn’t equate INSPIRE to OGC.
INSPIRE is financially backed through supporting agencies that are aiming at the Directive and therefore enabling the implementor’s that you refer to – many of them at the grassroots level. (http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/newsid/2980)
The European Soil Portal is one of the best examples. (http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) Trying to get 27 countries on the same wave length is no small challenge.
Admittedly, it is interesting to see (and hear) how different people and cultures approach the same problem from opposite sides of a river or mountain sometimes.
I see INSPIRE as driving grass roots change through broad based funding, not to mention, also supporting SME across Europe.
Jeff, not sure I did compare INSPIRE to OGC, though I did sort of with Data.gov.
INSPIRE and grass roots change. Might have to dwell on that a little bit. In my book INSPIRE is holding back “grass roots change” with their “committee think”.