Google Maps: A Step Towards a WorldWide Atlas?

location based services

There's a very interesting, modestly technical explanation on engadget.com on how to make your own annotated multimedia Google maps. While creating your own google maps is a very cool new hack, It will be interesting to see how Keyhole and Google geonotes, gpstracks, and locative media, can be -combined- and -shared- worldwide; and how we'll share -all- attributes geodata layers and media, for any given place: art, media, cultural, social, historical, infrastructure, physical,etc.So far, with a few major obvious exceptions, a lot of geoweb experimentation still seems to be on discrete, non-interoperable, maps, atlases, location services, and locative media experiences - even where exercising new semantic web techniques using xml/gml/wfs and xml/rdf/, xml/svg. etc. I am very encouraged by Sam Ruby's approach to bridging Soap and raw xml over http: This gives me some hope for a future of blended hypermedia and geodata, Since most of our hardcore mainstream GIS brothers and sisters seem to be buying into soap/uddi web services in a big way, deploying ESRI and Microsoft '.net' Mappoint web services The legacy worldwide web is mostly encyclopedic, let's hope the new semantic geospatial web can, ideally become a worldwide altas of interoperable media and layers and wiki atlas of contextual media.Geo Info PowertoolsFebruary 23, 2005/Mike LiebholdHere's the updated page of starhill blended daily links and a starhill blend RSS feed of my favorite cool geospatial related link feeds, tagged and updated daily by a growing community of contributors on del.icio.us - the public meta tag and link repository created by geourl inventor Joshua Schacter. Japan & GeowankingFebruary 28, 2004/Mike LiebholdIN-duce is an encouraging & cool blog view of parts of the Japanese alternative tech edge by Paul Baron, an expat experimental media designer, lately from London.Here's the heavily geo flavored mobility and location games page: IN-duce:De-duce: mobility Webpark Wildlands GeoservicesFebruary 26, 2004/Mike LiebholdWebPark, a European Union sponsored consortium project, is a research plan and technological implementation program to develop personalized value-added Location Based Services (LBS) for recreation in coastal, rural and mountainous areas. ...involving the integration of expertise in GIS and multimedia content, device-sensitive delivery and adaptive terrain and landscape intelligence, Geographically relevant location-based information services delivered directly to users in protected recreation areas via the mobile Internet. The Swiss National Park is be the first testbed. The link to an interactive map was broken when I last checked. Project Investigator David Mountain, of the City University of London, has a very interesting .ppt here describing project investigations of GKD - geographic knowledge discovery - for location based services. Back on the AirFebruary 20, 2004Please forgive the long silence due to personal projects, and startup in new roles as visiting researcher at Intel Labs, and now also as an affiliate researcher with the Institute for the Future. For a quick update on interesting geospatial news during my hiatus, check out the the geowankers' archive or del.icio.us/geo, Joshua Schacter's new community link repository. For professional GIS, GPS and LBS news, http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/is an excellent resource. Please direct flames, comments, suggestions to mailto:mnl@starhill.usCollaborative Mapping at ETech February 20, 2004Here are excerpt's from Jo Walsh's post to the geowankers list summarizing the geo pyrotechnics of the Collaborative Mapping Workshop at the Oreilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego:" We started on the monday evening with a 'show-n-tell' type session ... including the wireless geolocation / annotation group at UC San Diego who are working on a successor-to-geonotes type project - Active Campus , the NYU guys with their funky http://dodgeball.com/ , and Damian from http://carbot.org/ , whosein-car system is waiting for the air around it to fill with foaf-filtered geoannotations. good dreams... We had short "here's who and where we are" presentations from the ... hackers who'd precooked software for the workshop [ using a common