It’s hard to wrap up a whole day at Where 2.0 since it was packed with interesting presentations.
My personal highlights of today were the panel discussion “Social Data Face-Off” and the presentation done by MetaCarta.
I think this was not the last discussion we heard about copyright of data provided by users. Though it was interesting to hear how this issue is handled by various services so far. Beside user data, how is “copied” data like place names and street names from background maps (provided Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.). Is it legal to pinpoint “San Jose” above a Google Map, getting the coordinates out of the data set Google Map is based on, and name this point “San Jose”, the name which appears on the Google Map and was put there by a third party? Can we be sure that there is no copyright on this data as Di-Ann Eisnor from Platial said?
One way to avoid this kind of uncomfortable questions can be the use of OpenLayers by MetaCarta. They provide a free API to free geodata. If you can’t use Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps or any other available mapping API because of licensing reasons, you should give this BSD licensed API a try. Together with OpenStreetMap it can be a powerful package.
Another fantastic API released by MetaCarta is their GeoParser, which basically parses text for place names them and maps them. I have to try this with our data and studies.
Talks like those about the least cost path calculations doing in GRASS or the raster based demographic data offered a sneak peek into the GIS world for the audience, which is obviously not very familiar with GIS processing and methods. Hey, never forget that behind all those mashups it needs a lot of GIS work in order to build *only* the base-maps. On the other hand, coming from the traditional GIS world, I’m very excited about all this developments going on right now. The growing participative aspect of mapping and geographic information will sooner or later make its way into the world of spatial planning. I’m pretty sure about that.
As Ed Parsons already wrote, the announcement of Google Maps Enterprise solutions probably made some phones ring in certain GIS companies. A big player like Google entering the professional mapping market (additionally to their free geocoder!) will surely lead to some interesting developments.
Let’s start day #2.
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