There is also a boom in the development of mapping tools based on “open standards” and “open-data” services such as Geonames, which consist of vast geographic databases available for download under Creative Commons licence that users can edit and expand using a wiki interface. There are certainly numerous communities for “open source” geosoftware and there are countless areas open for work: “GMAP hackers”, “OpenMappers”, “MapServers”, “GPSmappers”, “GeoServers”, “RDF mappers”, “terrain mappers”, “geobloggers”, etc. There are also companies like GeoCommons that enable anyone to generate maps that geographically represent the data that interest them, also using data contributed by many other users.
“The popularization of actions to “annotate the planet” is one of the most significant processes in the development of the second era of the Internet”.
On the occasion of the Second Inclusiva-net Meeting “Digital networks and physical space at the Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain, Juan Martín Prada, has written a good overview of all the trends and practices related to the Geospatial Web, which we also cover in a special section of our wiki.
Juan Martín Prada (excerpts only):
1. Introduction to the Geospatial Web:
“All the tools and applications on the Web currently are quickly adapting this link to physical space, the place and the territory.
The growing interest in geotagged information is strongly reinforced by a rising public awareness of environmental data like pollution or climate change effects, as well as by new needs for information linked to physical spaces such as the traceability of consumer goods, that is, tracking the location and geographic route of a product throughout its production, manipulation and sale.
Great progress has occurred in Web applications related to the field of geographic information systems (GIS), that is, those designed to manage geographically referenced information, which usually function as databases generally associated with digital maps. The boom in services like MapQuest or Google Maps, or the acquisitions by large Internet companies of Keyhole, GeoTango and Vexcel are proof of users’ growing interest in geographic data and information and spatial navigation. Among all the “geobrowsers” (applications for consulting geospatial data and managing geolocalized information), some of them, such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth or Microsoft Live Local 3D, have taken on great relevance and are used by a huge number of people, as well as the vast proliferation of blogs and websites related to these geobrowsers, e.g. Google Earth blog or Google Maps Mania.
Given that the majority of geobrowsing platforms offer APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or XML scripting for carrying out services on their platforms, creating applications to generate geographic contents is a booming field today. A “geospatial web” can be said to exist now, made up of all these types of applications and geographic data management services.
There is also a boom in the development of mapping tools based on “open standards” and “open-data” services such as Geonames, which consist of vast geographic databases available for download under Creative Commons licence that users can edit and expand using a wiki interface. There are certainly numerous communities for “open source” geosoftware and there are countless areas open for work: “GMAP hackers”, “OpenMappers”, “MapServers”, “GPSmappers”, “GeoServers”, “RDF mappers”, “terrain mappers”, “geobloggers”, etc. There are also companies like GeoCommons that enable anyone to generate maps that geographically represent the data that interest them, also using data contributed by many other users.
Linking certain geographic points to the photos and videos taken there, historical data, and all types of personal comments and anecdotes has become an everyday practice among the multitude of users of social networks.
Therefore, Geotagging activities are becoming more habitual on the Web, that is, assigning spatial coordinates to certain files, such as georeferencing photographs on platforms such as Flickr, Google Earth, etc. or assigning geographic identifiers to text files and even video and audio documents (geoparsing). Geo-referencing images is an activity already performed by photographic cameras that include GPS systems: the date, place, or type of event photographed are metadata included in the photographic document at the time it is created. There are even “in-site” applications such as GeoNotes that allow users to “tag” physical space, leaving notes in the places where they are located or reading the notes other users have left there.
The popularization of actions to “annotate the planet” is one of the most significant processes in the development of the second era of the Internet.
The expression “The Earth as universal desktop”is even becoming popular.
Geo-referencing practices understand geographic localization not only as a coordinate, a dot on a map, but also in relation to the experiences of the persons who were there.
The result is generally the generation of open maps, a sort of update of maps showing “points of interest”. Actually, the “Geo-spatial Web” brings depth and richness back to geography after many years when the field provided merely cartographic, objective descriptions of places. The texts and other information added to satellite photographs of the territory inevitably invite comparisons with the plaques on buildings that mark where someone was born or died, just as the thumbtacks marking spots on geobrowsers bring to mind the flowers that relatives place periodically at the site of a car accident where they lost a family member.
All of this is accompanied by proposals that are the beginning of a phase in which the great communicative potentials of pervasive computing, or “ubicomp”, are evident, that is, of all those technologies that enable the management of digital information anywhere, as well as connections and interaction among different strata of spatially localized data.”
2. The Local Web 2.0
“The structure of participatory media contents based on spatial annotation point to interesting signs that practices which “spatialize” information hold intense “socializing” potential, given that they involve the development of reciprocal awareness between persons and their surroundings, often based on belonging to common spatial contexts.
The Web has started to channel the collective desire to know more about the geographic spaces around us, the place where we live or that we pass through, as well as the persons who live or can be found around us. That desire has found one of its main sources of fulfilment in the participatory technologies of the social web, which provides the basis of what is called “local Web 2.0”. The significance of contextual knowledge is growing as the new connected society is constituted, as well as the possibilities opened up for developing a geographically localized collective memory.
The creation of these open maps includes geographic localization and its technologies in the life of the community that inhabits those spaces and places, and serves as a tool for activating specific types of communication and socialization in the community. Thus, many geobrowsers are designed specifically to create communities based on the physical proximity of their users, who share a common environment. Among the most interesting developments are the highly significant projects based on local wireless networks managed by their users.
Actually, even in this new geographic phase of the Web, activated by new geolocalization technologies, we are experiencing the lasting devaluation of public physical space, the continuous de-urbanization of real space. It was thought that this would be offset by the increasing urbanization of the global and (falsely) trans-border space of the networks.
In addition, as a particularly active part of the interweaving of digital production of sociality and coincidence in physical space, directly related to the “live” experience of a place, it is worth pointing out the rise of hyperlocal journalism, based on comments on news at the local community level, of interest precisely because of its ties to its users’ everyday environment. Closely related to this phenomenon, completely coinciding with it in the majority of cases, is place blogging, that is, the activity of blogs focused on events, news and people in a specific local area, such as a neighbourhood or small town. Several aggregators and search engines for place blogs have been put into operation, such as Outside.in, Place blogger and Peuplade. They are proof of a growing interest in exploring the socializing potentials inherent in the physical proximity of Web users and in the information generated and shared by persons who live in the same places.
There are many other emerging collective action practices, such as “Flash Mobs”, that consider their essential component or teleological culmination to be the congregation of persons in a particular place. This is yet another example of the increasingly forceful demand that the social should be built on the materiality of physical space, rather than being limited to the field of online interactions. Streets and squares should be reclaimed as communication media in and of themselves, reactivated as priority spaces for social interaction.
The set of artistic practices related to locative media (a term that can be defined as the representation and experience of a place through digital interfaces) can play an enormous role in the design of forms of social and political dissention, especially though the design of alternative forms of social and communicative interaction. The creative link between these new technologies and mass public protest events that began around the Reclaim the Streets movement are very promising. These critical practices are certainly the clearest reflections of the new tensions between the global and the local, the physical and the virtual.”
(source: IDC mailing list, January 2009)