The Geospatial Web
Where 2.0 is underway in San Jose, CA.
The first talk was given by Mike Liebhold from the Institute for the Future. He spoke about something he calls “The Geospatial Web,” a term that describes a new paradigm in handling web data like the “semantic web” or “Web 2.0.” In the geospatial web, annotations and attributes that are invisible in the real world become visible on our web-enabled devices. His prediction is that in five or ten years, we will have been able to build an infrastructure into our real-world environment that will allow our devices to connect to geodata services and do all of our navigation for us. Also, Liebhold hopes that this new “geo web” will be created by all of us as we tag our own environments.
Liebhold’s presentation included a dramatic slide that showed a person holding up a Treo like he was taking a photo of a street corner. The Treo’s display showed tags overlaid on top of the real world image. The tags could be linked to things like restaurant reviews, train schedules, and distances to landmarks. He likened this functionality to something like the TriCorders from Star Trek. He also extended his predictions into on-the-spot comparison shopping tools that tell you how far you have to travel to get the better deal (and provide directions).
A similar lecture that Liebhold gave on this topic is available in audio and video form at the Networked Publics research group site. He also set up a del.icio.us feed for geospatial-related articles, images and other nuggets of truth.
