Last week at the Ignite Spatial: Boston event I gave a short talk – 5min, 20 automated slides, 15sec each – about OpenStreetMap and why I think it can be interesting for town administrations to look at the OpenStreetMap model. In a nutshell:
OpenStreetMap is successfully based on open crowdsourcing, a horizontal multi-directional work-flow model, to build and maintain the world’s largest free geospatial database.
Open crowdsourcing helps to collect local knowledge across your residents, improve local geospatial data, engage residents and provide a 24/7 feedback loop for them.
Wide variety of data and information distribution: OpenStreetMap allows output from raw data access for developers to print map renderings for tourists.
Built-in data interoperability: no matter how many or in what part of the world people are contributing to the project, it all fits together to one piece.
Bottom line: towns should take a serious look at OpenStreetMap and the underlying model. It’s proven to work in many places and provides some valid points town administrations can benefit from.
A week ago Helge and I were invited to host a Digitalks session about GeoServices. Digitalks is an interesting event series in Vienna, aimed to explain recent media and technology developments to a “normal”, not so tech-savvy audience. Meral, the woman behind Digitalks, usually tries to invite early adopters or enthusiasts who are passionate about media and technology to host a session. There’s no PowerPoint in Digitalks, only live demos and hands-on are allowed, which is good and makes the presentations very lively, although it doesn’t always work as expected.
Anyways, I felt honored to be invited and talk a little about GeoServices. Helge did a brilliant job in presenting OpenStreetMap and explaining the revolutionary aspects of the project. I tried to give an overview of the grown variety of geographic applications in the internet since the first appearance of map mashups in 2005 and showing some recent location based services on a mobile device. If I’d have had a closer look at the attendees list first, I probably would’ve had chosen a few other things to demo. The ratio expert/novice of the audience was actually more leaning towards expert, so I hope it wasn’t too obvious for most people.
Thanks again to Meral for inviting us and many thanks to Luca for taping the session on video!
PS: the next Digitalks is about Microblogging, hosted by Twitter, should be interesting!
Alex and I would like to take the opportunity and introduce, talk about and discuss our project timatio. And I would be interested in doing a session about OpenStreetMap – advantages, use case scenarios or licensing issues compared to other map sources for instance.
Great experiences at former BarCamps let me look forward to an interesting event next weekend. Be there!
Next weekend, as part of the Art and Cartography symposium, the exhibition “zoomandscale” will take place at the Academy of Fine Arts and Kunsthalle Wien project space karlsplatz.
We participate with 2 projects in the exhibition at Kunsthalle project space:
The opening is on Friday evening, celebrated with 4 hour presentation block of all participating art projects (no comment on that), and somehow reserved for symposium attendees – there is an entry fee for public visitors. Saturday and Sunday it’s open to the public, without entry fees.
Basically I’ll be there during the weekend, but not all the time. If you would like to meet and hear some details and backgrounds about the projects, please drop me a note (or comment) before and we figure something out.
Below is all the official information about the event:
“zoomandscale”
The exhibition „zoomandscale“ in the context of the symposium „Art and Cartography – Cartography and Art“ shows a range of international artists concerned with maps in a wider sense. The exhibition presents a
variety of positions oscillating between artistic cartography and cartographic art which put into perspective the normative claim of strictly scientific cartography.
Knowing that the map is not the territory but its interpretation we allow different readings of territorial representations. In fact, artists´ maps may capture issues which cartographers´ “scientific” maps would never describe. Whereas the scientific attempt to describe the world makes a normative claim by using rational systems like longitude and latitude, artistic methods use opposite approaches by challenging or ignoring these coordinates. They may even take the liberty to shift points of reference to unexpected grounds. This is what makes maps so intriguing: they communicate different views of our world and help us understand its complexity.
The exhibition “zoomandscale” takes a closer look at the relation between objectivity and interpretation and presents works ranging from maps as reflection of the individual, up to studies of social fields and cityspaces. “zoomandspace” raises the question how to describe places as reference points for strategies of orientation and how maps as metaphors can describe spatial, social and psychological realities.
Thursday 31.01.2008
Academy of Fine Arts, Aula
Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna
18:00h Gallery Opening
Peter Dykhuis [CA], Wolfgang Fiel [AT],
Gabu Heindl [AT], Christian Mayer [AT],
Manuela Mourao [US], Nasrine Seraji, [FR/AT],
Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch [AT], Ludo Slagmolen [NL],
Laurene Vaughan [AU], Ruth Watson [NZ]
The BarCamp Vienna last Saturday proved again that (un)conferences focused on coffee breaks work very well – interesting sessions, chats and people, combined with the pleasant atmosphere of werkzeugH.
