Dan Simmons has been a BBC journalist for 14 years, working in local and national radio and on the rolling TV channel, BBC News. He joined the corporation's flagship technology show, Click, as a reporter and producer in 2004. His main area of interest is the mobile phone market. He has three hobby horses when it comes to any consumer technology: ease of use, ease of use, and ease of use. And what could be easier than applications that just run by themselves? That's how Dan became fascinated by location services that cover his leisure activities. So, what about you? Feel like tracking yourself?

Website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online

Illustration by Lars Uebags ...........................................................................................................................................................................

GPS is used for many extremely important things: guiding aircraft, ships, or cars; monitoring goods as they are delivered around the world; and telling us where the nearest coffee shop is. Its job to date has been to place us in context with our surroundings so we may make better decisions; turn left; call a client to say their package will be late; or to give coffee a miss. There are already hundreds of products and applications that help us do this, all working in the here and now. But can GPS be fun as well as functional? And can it help us make sense of our lives, rather than simply tell us where we happen to be?

I believe, as GPS gets more personal and embedded in our everyday lives, primarily through the mobile phones and laptops we carry with us, so a fresh historic perspective of where and when will become apparent. Put another way, we have a new tool that will readily offer up an exact history of where we have been and perhaps even recognise what we were doing. Ahem ... I'm getting ahead of myself: a diary that writes itself!? Pah!



Carving out a position for GPS

So there I was at the top of a black run in a beautiful Alpine resort. I don't really do "blacks" but something always pushes me on, as if to prove something. On this occasion, it was my "we were born on skis" friends who were egging me on. They then bombed off, wiggling their backsides and I was left to consider my options: the sensible red; or the death-defying-icy bobsleigh-run of a black before me. Of course I took the black; of course my friends were having far too much fun to appreciate my bravery/foolhardiness; and of course they did not believe my version of events, come the traditional après-ski bar crawl that followed. But that evening I produced the evidence. I had signed up to what was then (in 2005) a new service which would track not only which slopes I had skied but in which order and the average speed down each. The application ran on my phone, with a separate GPS receiver provided. Bluetooth completed the circuit. It wasn't completely accurate – some of the runs hadn't been picked up (dropped signal?) and my phone had run out of juice too early – but there it was, a map of the slopes and my little red line down that (now) "impossibly lethal" black run.

The bragging rights were mine and GPS bought me beer that night, in a roundabout sort of way. Today apps like www.slopetracker.com do a similar thing, recording your top speed, calories burned, and total mileage as well. There are similar apps for golfers too, but that's when my zigzagging gets me really depressed.

The new buzzword: sportstronics

Location finding has added a new dimension to a growing market being dubbed "sportstronics". A completely new range of keep fit gadgets is blossoming, not least in the field of running. The Garmin Forerunner not only monitors the distance you travelled, your speed, and the calories burned but, using GPS and Google Maps once you have finished, you can see the route you took. In conjunction with the heart monitor, details of your condition at each stage in a run can be compared. Now these standalone gadgets are prime targets to be replaced by our mobile phones.

OK, they may not yet be as sophisticated, but with GPS on board you'd only need to hook up a wireless heart monitor and suddenly we're not buying new kit, just a downloadable app. The Samsung F110 MiCoach phone suggests that the South Koreans are on the right path. It has a tiny "personal trainer" on board and will pick songs from your library to match your running pace. Wayfinder Active, a free app, does a similar job turning your mobile into an all-knowing personal training guru (http://www.wayfinder.com). Maximum, average, and current speeds are stored, together with altitude, calorie burn, and the route you took, just in case you get lost. All this info is uploaded while you are on the move (if you have an internet connection) and collated for you in a rather useful training diary.

And Nokia's Sports Tracker (Beta) app http://sportstracker.nokia.com combines the best of both worlds. Got a GPS phone? Just download the app. No GPS? Just buy the satellite receiver and connect via Bluetooth. Again, all your vital details are recorded and presented in a rather flashy display so you can huff and puff over something pretty. It also lets you add photos, which it places on your route in the position where they were taken, thanks to geotagging. In future, Nokia promises to let you upload your current position and the "track" on which you are running to your blog in real-time, so you won't have to make it to the Olympics to enjoy live coverage.

Got an iPhone? There are currently more than 300 health and fitness apps for the iPhone 3G, many taking advantage of its accelerometer and GPS receiver.

Now for the fun part

The fun side of GPS is now beginning to shine through. Yes, it's damned useful in getting us from A to B, but what if we don't know which letter we want to get to? What if we don't care? In that moment, we often turn GPS off, as it's a technology born of necessity (or, in my case, panic)… but that, my friends, is beginning to change. Microsoft's Photosynth is perhaps one of the best arguments for just leaving GPS "on" in the background and then having done so, you are suddenly able to bring a whole new world to life. When taking pictures, cameras with GPS or Wi-Fi positioning on board are still just used as cameras, but upload the photos to Photosynth (http://photosynth.net/) and because they've been geotagged with the exact co-ordinates of where they were taken, this ingenious bit of software uses your photo as one piece of a puzzle. It searches other databases, like the photo-sharing site Flickr and creates a wide vista (if you'll excuse the pun), or 360o vision of the location. You can then move around that virtual area and explore; relive; have fun.

At this year's BBC Mashed (http://mashed08.backnetwork.com/) event, where developers get together and create something new by combining existing technologies, I saw a live Snakes game. In the early days of mobiles, and indeed video games themselves, there was a game where you were a snake, travelling around the screen eating food and scoring points. Each time you ate some food, you became longer. The object of the game was to keep snaking around the tiny screen without colliding into your own tail. At Mashed, two developers showed us this in the real world using mobile phones with GPS. The real world is slightly bigger than a mobile phone screen so this was a two player game where each player had to "entrap" the other by leaving him nowhere to go but to cross his deadly trail. Can you imagine the looks of passers-by?

Real life games, like paintball, could also be enhanced with GPS tracking, not exactly giving away an enemy position but perhaps telling you when an enemy is near, or the direction of the flag you need to capture.



Homing in

GPS is not entirely accurate. Until 2000, the US military deliberately threw the readings out by a hundred metres or so for any commercial users for "security reasons". But even when it is working properly, it's only accurate to within a few metres and frankly, that could be the difference between the supermarket and the sex shop next door. You can, of course, cross-reference GPS results with any Wi-Fi signal strengths in the area, using a database of registered hotspots, or triangulate your position using mobile phone mast signal strengths... but real pinpoint accuracy will come soon. New satellites are being launched from 2009, and a second GPS system called Galileo (http://www.esa.int/esaNA/galileo.html), co-ordinated by the European Space Agency, promises accuracy to within one pace. It is hoped Galileo will come on-line by 2013.

Another exciting development comes in Nokia's recent announcement of a tracking system that will work inside buildings. It's the sort of statement that would make the US military wet its pants with excitement had it not already perfected thermal imaging. The Finnish giant is trialling "Indoor Positioning" in forty of its buildings. It uses wireless networks and clever mobile mapping to do many things – like tracking down specific stores in shopping centres or finding your motor in an underground car park. A public trial is due soon.



The diary that writes itself

With these developments in place, my diary is almost ready to be written for me. Knowing where I am to within a pace means I'll know which shop I am standing outside of, or inside of with Nokia's system. Hey, if I knew to within a few paces where I was inside a building and at what time, that could answer a lot of questions. Like whose round it is next! Or, more seriously, whether I was (or was not) at a murder scene, or to be more precise, whether my phone "did it".

If the ski program and jogging program recognise what you are doing because of how you move and at what speed, would a Bluetooth wristwatch with accelerometer, help my phone know I wasn't just laying about in the pub but had actually managed to conquer four pints?

Might I find out for myself which airport terminals get me through security the quickest, by simply looking at my past data? Or the best time of day to go shopping, based on how long I queued at the checkout in the past? Over time, your own database could tell you a lot. It could be very powerful – until you move house and your routine changes.

As long as GPS tracking and data transfer are free, and given how sponsor-friendly that combined service might be to advertisers that's a real possibility, why not just leave them on? Why not collect lots of information about yourself? Everyone else seems to be doing it. Why not link up an accelerometer device, which might talk to the GPS and work out what you might be doing, and add any relevant geotagged time-coded photos from you or anyone else on the network, to illustrate your diary. Why not have your diary write itself? *

This article was written for receiver

* Small print
Please note:
a) Emotional events and "feelings" may not be reflected in the finished diary.
b) While the makers of your diary and its partners aim to reflect places visited and activities undertaken by the user, the diary cannot be relied upon as being an historically accurate account of past events, nor used as proof in a spat between couples.
c) When involved in activities of a "personal" nature, it is advised that your diary and its associated products be switched off.
d) Any information transmitted as part of your diary service, whether for personal use or in conjunction with the application, is the property of the service provider, who may use it in whatever way they wish. If you don't like it, don't sign up.
e) Your diary cannot be held responsible for any lack of data in the event the user wipes out on a black run and slides down on his bum. Although if it were accurately recorded, we agree not to tell anyone.

Contact: Dan Simmons

Martijn de Waal is a writer, curator, consultant and researcher based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Together with Michiel de Lange, he co-founded and organised “The Mobile City”, a conference on locative and mobile media and how they relate to urban culture and questions of identity. The conference took place in spring 2008, in collaboration with the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. De Waal is currently working on a dissertation on new media and urban culture in the department of philosophy at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His receiver contribution introduces you to “MySpace urbanism” – the condition of cities saturated with media networks, where physical space is intersected with layers of personalised, spatial orientation.

Website: http://www.martijndewaal.nl

Website: http://www.themobilecity.nl

Illustration by Dennis Schuster ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

“Great cities are not like towns, only larger”, urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs observed almost half a century ago. But what then is it that makes a city into a city? Now that telecom operators, handset builders, and media companies are churning out new media technologies that promise to drastically alter our sense of place, this question has once again become very urgent. Whether we call them locative media, contextual media, or placed-based media, these technologies promise to change the way we interact with our surroundings. Let me call this new way of experiencing the city “MySpace urbanism”.

If you ask urbanists, city planners, architects, economists, sociologists or urban anthropologists about the essence of a city, you will probably get as many different answers as there are disciplines concerned with the study of the urban fabric; each answer somewhat cloaked in its own jargon. Yet, if you closely observe what scientists in all these different domains have written about the city, two common themes usually float to the surface: heterogeneity and density. The city is a place that brings together people with a broad variety of different backgrounds, in a heavily built up area. People with different ethnicities, lifestyles, professions, economic status, outlook, religion etc, all find themselves cramped together in a few square kilometres.

It is exactly this diversity that leads to what has often been called “urban culture”. Even in the 1920s a scholar of the famous Chicago School of Sociology observed that “it is characteristic of city life that all sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street still live in totally different worlds.” Yet, ideally, the city is not a mere collection of “urban villages”; isolated enclaves of the like-minded. What makes a city a city is that these people with different backgrounds and identities observe each other, interact and confront one another. This process leads to a cross-fertilization of ideas and makes the city a stronghold of innovation, economists might point out. This is what leads to the creation of new lifestyles and identities, anthropologists would say. And sociologists would argue that this very eclectic mix of lifestyles downplays the effect of social control that has characterised traditional societies.

At the same time, some philosophers claim, the city also provides a spatial composition that enables all these different lifestyles to live together in spite of all their differences. The city, in their view, is a stage on which people display their identity, often unconsciously, just by acting out their everyday life. Everyone is a performer and an observer at the same time, constantly making comparisons; are those people behaving in such and such a way like us? Or do they belong to other social groups? “We identify ourselves socially by continuously comparing ‘us’ with ‘them’”, writes Dutch sociologist Talja Blokland. This process has different consequences: it helps us to define who we are ourselves, mixing and matching, rejecting and dismissing elements of lifestyles that we see around us. At the same time, this process could also produce a certain form of trust between citizens, even if they do not belong to the exact same lifestyle group. Some theorists have called this “public familiarity”: we’ve become familiar with unknown others in public places. “The trust of a city street”, wrote Jane Jacobs, “is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts”. Finally, this process could also produce a political community: we all share the same city space, so whether we like it or not, we just have to deal with each other.

Many of these accounts describe idealised (some would say nostalgic) versions of the city, and often refer to cities of a bygone era. It is the boulevards lined with cafés and pedestrian passageways of Walter Benjamin’s Paris that is often evoked in these theories. Therefore, we could label these ideas “BLVD-urbanism” – referring to the broad boulevards that formed the heart of public life in late nineteenth century Paris.

Over the last few decades, quite a few critics have pointed out that many of our cities have stopped to function as such, due to several different causes. Suburbanization and gentrification have isolated different lifestyles in their own enclaves, limiting the nodal contact points between different groups. The rhythms of our daily lives run less synchronously as well, so that haphazard meetings between different people become less likely. We drive around in automobiles to commercialised “non-places” such as shopping centres rather than strolling around public piazzas. Yet, in many accounts the ideal remains: the city as a site of physical exchange and interaction between citizens, that fosters different communities, enriches the life of the individual, leads to innovation and creates what Dutch philosopher René Boomkens has called, a “community of strangers”.



The city of the digital natives

Most of these theories see the city as a purely physical space. So, how do these theories hold up in the era in which the city is saturated with media networks such as, to name just a few, GPS, WIFI, UMTS, HSDPA, GSM? Now that mobile and locative media change our interaction with our environment, no longer do we just experience the physical city itself: we SMS and chat with distant friends who in our minds are near at hand. We can inquire about our location, or leave virtual graffiti for those who’ll pass by after us. We can withdraw our attention from our actual surroundings, and into the mediated spaces of these networks. Or we can actively engage with our surroundings through the screens of our mobile phones.

Recently, a range of discussions have arisen around these themes. Let’s have a look at some of the points that were brought up. One of the central tropes of BLVD-urbanism is the idea of the city as a stage for comparison, interaction, confrontation and innovation. As Mark Shepard (http://www.lulu.com/content/1554599), Danah Boyd (http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/18-socializing-digitally) and others have pointed out (in, amongst other places, this journal), at least for the generation of “digital natives”, the urban stage has now broadened extensively with the rise of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal, Cyworld or QQ. There, identities are displayed through profiles, pictures and widgets, in two different ways. On the one hand, these webpages are performance-sites in the literal sense: constructing a profile is akin to putting up a carefully directed stage act, or dressing up for a night on the town. Which picture, which catchy status-update, which profile description matches best the image that the user wants to portray to the outside world?

On the other hand, new iterations of these sites can also display the unconscious rhythms of everyday (urban) life. It is easy now to add widgets to your profile that automatically show the last song that you listened to on your iPod, the last article you read, the last bookmark you made on Del.icio.us, and even your exact whereabouts in the real city. Sites such as Plazes or Bliin let users update each other about their physical location in the city. The places that one visits – tracked and broadcasted by mobile phones with GPS receivers – become automatically a part of one’s performed identity, both in the actual city as well as on-line.

On a personal level, these developments mean that we can continuously receive “status updates” from our friends. Adam Greenfield uses the term “the big now” to describe this experience (http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/the-long-here-and-the-big-now/). Through services like Twitter or Facebook on our mobile phones, we are in continuous touch with those we feel close to, even if they are on the other side of the planet. “For me, at least”, Greenfield writes, “it’s been difficult to see my New York through quite the same eyes, when every time I get my phone out I feel the entire planet’s deeper rhythms working themselves out.”

On a higher level, something interesting is going on as well: all these tracks and traces that we are leaving behind can be aggregated. These aggregates can be visualised and projected on to maps and portray a collective culture of what is happening where in the city. MIT’s Senseable City Lab ( http://senseable.mit.edu/ ) and Citysense ( http://www.citysense.com/home.php ) are early experiments with these new cultural forms that show us the city and its collective rhythms in new and possibly interesting ways.

“Today’s intelligent maps don’t just represent spatial relationships”, Kazys Varnelis has written ( http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/tt_varnelis.html ).

“They reveal conditions in the city that were previously hidden in spreadsheets and databases.” They are not just maps in the old sense. They show us real time representations of events in the city, ranging from a traffic jam, to a gathering of our friends in a neighbourhood bar. We can even adjust our own behaviour in the city on these maps.

We could also use these maps to collaborate on assembling information about the city. During a lecture at a conference we organised in Rotterdam, artist Christian Nold showed the audience a collective map of nearby gardens in Los Angeles that featured trees with low-hanging, ripe fruit, there for the taker (http://www.softhook.com/). Other wiki-style maps are currently emerging that can be updated right from a mobile device, varying from restaurant reviews and personal memories, to local news. This means that geographic visualisations – not necessarily the Cartesian grids that are the basis of most of our current on-line maps – are becoming an important interface through which we experience the city.

The utopian promises of these technologies go one step further. When social networks, and the traces we leave in the city are combined, mobile media might start to work as an enhanced “city guide”. Just like Amazon might recommend to you a book based on aggregated purchase patterns, mobile media might start recommending new places to visit and people to meet. The media will “filter” the city for its users and guide them to the places they would like to go. They could even help us to engage in new communities, or forge “smart mobs” – spontaneous get-togethers in real space with unknown others to achieve a common goal.

Adam Greenfield has called this a shift from “browsing”, where we just wander around in the city, to “searching”, where we are more actively looking for a particular area, function or person in the city. The buzzword language of the dotcom-industry takes the metaphor even one step further. We are not just searching for what we already know, industry pundits argue. These services will help us to “discover” places and experiences that we didn’t even know we were looking for.



The city: OurSpace

Of course it’s easy to be critical about these utopian visions, often put forward by marketing departments of commercial companies that want to sell these services, and certainly not all of these features will become popular. Yet the general direction of these developments is taking shape right now, and could be labelled MySpace urbanism.

First, this term refers to the role of social networks, on-line profiles and tracking sites, as spaces where we project our identities, through which we connect and which could lead to interaction in the real city. Secondly, the term “myspace” also implies that these media can help us to personalise the city: to focus only on the bits and connections that are of specific interest to us personally, to remake the city in our own image.

In this way, locative and mobile media promise to make the experience of the city more pleasant, more efficient, more exciting and more manageable. Yet there are also critics who point out that these exact developments endanger one of the central concepts in BLVD-urbanism: serendipity. Serendipity means that it is never completely predictable what or who you may encounter in the city, nor are these unexpected encounters avoidable. It is exactly these inevitable confrontations with unknown others, this experience of “social seams”, that are important: through these confrontations trust is built up, a community is forged, and (cultural) innovation is achieved. But when you start “searching” the city, rather than “browsing” around, this quality might get lost. Do these critics have a point? They might. In the most extreme negative scenario, public space might evaporate. People will use locative media to filter out serendipitous encounters as much as possible. This is a very defensive interpretation of MySpace urbanism, where people use technology to demarcate their space and refuse to let anyone else in – “this is my space, now get out!”.

But there is also another way in which MySpace urbanism can be interpreted. A space becomes “yours” when you engage with it. Not to claim it as solely yours, but to actively take some responsibility for that space; when you are actively (and collectively) taking part in its shaping. The collective maps mentioned above can be used as platforms for exchange and confrontation. They could even help to make visible collective rhythms that until now have gone unnoticed.

In reality, we will probably see a combination of both scenarios. People who use mobile media often find themselves shifting between different modes of being in the city. Sometimes they use their technology to withdraw from their actual surroundings, to form a private bubble, to demarcate TheirSpace: at other times, they will use the same devices for more public acts. They will engage in the space around them, and participate in OurSpace.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Martijn De Waal

Professor Arno Scharl is Head of the Department of New Media Technology at the private MODUL University, Vienna. Holding a PhD in Economics and Business Administration, he wrote his habilitation thesis on “Evolutionary Web Development” and currently focuses his research on text mining, integrating semantic and geospatial web technology, media monitoring, virtual communities and computer-mediated collaboration. Prior to his MODUL appointment, Scharl held professorships at Graz University of Technology and the University of Western Australia, and he was also a key researcher at the Austrian Competence Center for Knowledge Management. Last year, Springer published “The Geospatial Web”, a book co-edited by Scharl. His receiver contribution explains why geography is emerging as a fundamental principle for structuring information.

Website: http://www.geospatialweb.com

Illustration by Thomas Wellmann ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Contrary to early predictions that the internet will render geography obselete, the discipline is increasingly gaining importance. In a 1998 speech at the California Science Center, former US Vice President Al Gore, called for replacing the prevalent desktop metaphor with a “multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of the planet, into which we can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced data” (Gore 1998). After the successful introduction of virtual globes such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth, achieving the vision of a Geospatial Web seems more realistic than ever. By integrating cartographic data with geotagged knowledge repositories and environmental indicators, the Geospatial web will revolutionize the production, distribution and consumption of media products.

Thanks to human space exploration, most users will instantly recognise our planet and find it an intuitive and effective metaphor to access and manage geotagged information. The appearance of geobrowsers in mainstream media coverage, further increases public acceptance of geospatial technology and results in keen competition between software and media companies. The underlying platforms are evolving quickly, gaining new functionality, data sources and interface options in rapid succession. Yet the currently available applications only hint at the true potential of geospatial technology. The Geospatial Web will have a profound impact on managing individual and organisational knowledge. It will not only reveal the context and geographic distribution of different types of location-based resources and services, but will also act as a catalyst for virtual communities by matching people of similar interests, browsing behaviour or geographic location.



Production, distribution and consumption of electronic content

While many innovations that gain ground in the media industry are largely invisible to the end user, geobrowsers have a direct impact on the consumption of news media; they change mainstream storytelling conventions and provide new ways of selecting and filtering news stories. By facilitating the access of annotated knowledge repositories, geobrowsers set the stage for the Geospatial Web as a new platform for content production and distribution. With little effort, users can upload geo-tagged stories and photos to central repositories, making them available to a global audience at the touch of a button. Such user-generated content is either provided publicy to create awareness and visibility, or to keep in contact with friends around the globe through social networking platforms. Technological advances, eg in terms of the resolution, bandwidth or GPS capabilities of mobile devices, also revolutionise the consumption of user-generated content – integrating various channels, making them available anywhere and anytime, and tailoring the information to the user’s current task and location.

Hybrid models of individual and collaborative content production are particularly suited for geobrowsers which can integrate and map individual sources (monographs, commentaries, blogs), edited sources (encyclopaedias, conference proceedings, traditional news services), evolutionary sources (Wiki applications, open-source project documentations) and automated sources (document summarisers, news aggregators). Geobrowsing technology not only affects the production of content, but also its distribution, packaging and consumption. For example, when specifying preferences for personalised news services, geobrowsers are effective tools to pinpoint locations and specify geographic areas to be covered by the news service.

The widespread availability of metadata will drive the transition towards the Geospatial Web. Emerging geospatial technology supports restructuring processes within the media sector, enhances the workflows of virtual newsrooms and promotes locally dispersed content production. It also facilitates the distribution of (customised) electronic content, which is usually characterised by network effects. Metcalfe’s law describes such effects by stipulating that the aggregate value of networks increases with approximately the square number of adopters. This results in first-mover advantages and lock-in effects, due to high switching costs once a network technology dominates the market. Consequently, successful business strategies, for providers of geobrowsing platforms and distributors of media products, build on top of these platforms, using innovation to attract and retain users and so quickly grow a community of like-minded individuals around a new technology, and successively enlarge this community through synergy effects with other products and services.

First-mover advantages gained through network effects might allow innovative media companies to dominate the information spaces built on top of these platforms. The content management systems of media companies often contain rich geospatial annotations, reflecting both the source and target geography of articles. For articles without geospatial references or only partial annotations, geotagging as outlined in the following section can add the missing information.



Mapping physical spaces

Information retrieval research has discovered geobrowsers as an effective platform to identify and access relevant information more effectively. An increasing number of applications use geospatial extensions for specifying queries and structuring the presentation of results. The availability of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is largely responsible for the growing popularity of such applications, since they facilitate building third-party, on-line services on top of geospatial platforms.

The lack of geo-referenced data often hinders an even quicker adoption of geospatial technology, which has led to concentrated efforts to create the required annotations. This process of assigning geospatial context information is usually referred to as “geotagging”. It can either be performed manually by the author (through location-aware devices such as GPS-enabled cellular handsets when the document is being created) or automatically through natural language processing techniques to retrofit existing documents – eg on-line news media articles or other types of unstructured textual data found on the web. Such electronic resources usually contain metadata as explicit or implicit geographic references. News articles are particularly rich in such identifiers, since they usually discuss the location where an event took place, or where it was reported from. The New York Times article “Brazil, Alarmed, Reconsiders Policy on Climate Change”, for example, has a target geography of SOUTH AMERICA/BRAZIL/MANAUS and a source geography of NORTH AMERICA/UNITED STATES/NEW YORK. Once a location has been identified, precise spatial coordinates – latitude, longitude and altitude – can be assigned to the documents by querying geographic databases for matching entries.

Annotating documents with geospatial metadata paves the way for a range of geospatial applications. Figure 1, for example, shows how geographic visualisations of search results can improve the user interface of news media portals. The portal “Media Watch on Climate Change” (shown below) filters and visualises environmental web content from 150 news media sites across the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The web portal has been developed as part of the IDIOM research project ( www.idiom.at) and uses the webLyzard suite of text mining tools ( www.weblyzard.com) to aggregate and annotate large collections of web documents. The consortium partners behind the project share an interest in the determinants and impacts of anthropogenic climate change, and in the potential of three-dimensional interface technology to support communication and collaboration in virtual communities.

Figure 1. Geographic visualisation of results for a query on ‘hybrid cars’; (Media Watch on Climate Change; www.ecoresearch.net/climate)

Mapping virtual spaces

Besides displaying geospatially referenced information, geobrowsers can also serve as a generic, image rendering engine to project other types of imagery. Diverting them from their traditional purpose, they can also be used to visualise “knowledge planets” based on layered thematic maps – visual representations of semantic information spaces based on a landscape metaphor. This metaphor allows the visualisation of massive amounts of textual data. At the time of map generation, the knowledge planet’s topography is determined by the content of the knowledge base. The peaks of the virtual landscape shown in figure 2 indicate abundant coverage on a particular topic, whereas valleys represent sparsely populated parts of the information space.

Figure 2. Knowledge Planet based on the NASA World Wind Java SDK

Summary and conclusion

In the competitive environment of new media, geography is emerging as a fundamental principle for structuring information. By integrating cartographic data with geotagged hypermedia, the Geospatial Web will serve as a catalyst of social change and enabler of a broad range of, as yet, unforeseen applications. Methods to “geo-enable” existing knowledge repositories through parsing geospatial references, deserve particular attention, since they represent a further step towards the “earth as universal desktop”, an idea widely popularised in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash”:

“A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm’s length in front of his eyes. … It is a piece of CIC [Central Intelligence Corporation] software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns … It’s not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the Earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems – vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. … The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his cornea, senses this change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to plunge downward toward the globe, like a space-walking astronaut who has just fallen out of his orbital groove.” (Stephenson 1992, 100ff.)

Besides changing individual working environments, geobrowsers are ideally suited for creating and maintaining location-aware communities, bringing people together who share common needs or desires – eg communities of friends and social contacts, gaming enthusiasts, political activists or professional acquaintances.

The compatibility of geospatial technology with current internet communication models, might help explain its unprecedented rate of adoption, from both organisational and individual perspectives. It integrates well with current protocols and therefore does not replace but complements established modes of navigating web resources. This process goes hand-in-hand with the transition towards the Web 2.0, a term that describes advances in web technology governed by strong network effects, and the harnessing of collective intelligence through customer self-service and algorithmic data management.

This article was written for receiver

It is based on updated material from the introductory chapter of The Geospatial Web, a book in Springer’s Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series ( www.geospatialweb.com). The Media Watch on Climate Change has been developed as part of the IDIOM and RAVEN research projects ( www.idiom.at; www.modul.ac.at/nmt/raven), funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation & Technology as well as the Austrian Research Promotion Agency within the FIT-IT Semantic Systems Program ( www.fit-it.at).

Contact: Arno Scharl

Anne Galloway recently completed a PhD in sociology and anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, which involved conducting an ethnographic study of the design of mobile and pervasive technologies. She is interested in connections between technological, spatial and cultural practices, and her current research explores design as a social and cultural activity and asks how social and cultural relations are designed. Galloway’s work has been presented to international audiences in technology, design, art, architecture, social and cultural studies, as well as published in a variety of books and journals. She currently teaches design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. In her receiver contribution she takes a close look at community mapping and sensing projects, and points out both the opportunities and challenges for activism made possible by locative technologies.

Website: http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org

Illustration by Nadine Redlich ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

We often think of mobile technologies simply in terms of their communication capabilities, but their increasing ability to trace our movements and collect information about the spaces through which we pass, can also make it easier for people to keep track of the places and things that matter most to them. From geo-visualisations and mapping mash-ups, to the mobile geospatial web and location-based services, people’s relationships to places (and each other) are changing.

Community mapping and sensing projects that use commonly available consumer electronics as environmental measurement devices, enable people to collect and view a wide array of location-based data. As a form of public science, such projects stand to reinvigorate environmentally focused civic engagement. However, given public concerns around environmental risks and their connections to technological progress, I believe that this kind of active citizenship should promote more critical reflection on the values and goals of the very projects that expect to create such profound changes in these domains, and carefully consider the limits of its own power.


Urban sensing

Over the past few years major global industry players have increasingly partnered with university researchers and artists around the world to investigate the potential of large-scale and publicly accessible environmental sensing projects. Historically, environmental monitoring has been limited to fixed sensors, embedded in particular locations, under centralised control. In contrast, what Jeff Burke and his colleagues at UCLA call “participatory sensing”, or the ability of individuals to act as sensor nodes and come together with other people in order to form sensor networks, emphasises a more grassroots and decentralised approach to urban sensing.

For example, the US-based artists, activists and technologists of Preemptive Media have been exploring how both people and animals can be used as technologically enabled environmental sensors:

AIR (Area’s Immediate Reading) http://www.pm-air.net/index.php

“AIR is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use Preemptive Media’s portable air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots … While AIR is designed to be a tool for individuals and groups to self identify pollution sources, it also serves as a platform to discuss energy politics and their impact on the environment, health and social groups in specific regions.”

Moving beyond people for data collection, Preemptive Media’s PigeonBlog (→ realtime map http://pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/map/index.php) project recruits homing pigeons and equips them with sensors that relay data on-line and allow it to be plotted and visualised, in real-time, to anyone with an internet connection. By focussing on air pollution, both of these projects take up pervasive computing’s familiar mandate to make the invisible visible and demonstrate locative media’s interest in collective political action. Embodying what sociologist Bruno Latour has called “collectives of humans and non-humans”, AIR and PigeonBlog reconfigure political networks in terms of their capacity to collect and disseminate sensor data.

UK-based creative studio Proboscis, in collaboration with university researchers, has similar interests in using sensor technologies to enable public action around environmental issues:

Robotic Feral Public Authoring http://socialtapestries.net/feralrobots

“The Robotic Feral Public Authoring project seeks to bridge the fields of experimental robotics and pervasive place-based public authoring. It combines low-cost robotics with geo-annotation in an innovative way, to develop a novel approach for galvanising social activism, on a local level, around environmental issues. By adapting commercially available toy robots with a variety of sensors and uploading the readings to a spatial annotation database for visualisation, we have explored new ways in which the exclusiveness of pollution sensing and robotics can be dispelled, and a new sense of empowerment promoted for grass roots communities.”

Proboscis follows up on these ideas with Snout, a project that embeds sensor technologies in carnival-inspired costumes and encourages communities to “scavenge” free on-line mapping services to help put the data to use. Moving more explicitly into the realm of potential political action, the Robotic Feral Public Authoring and Snout projects make direct connections between the public’s ability to collect scientific data and the ability to effect social change. Similar to the Preemptive Media projects described above, these interventions focus on enabling local, non-expert knowledge production and sharing.

Another example with a pronounced emphasis on distributed environmental monitoring as a form of public science and political action, can be seen in the Common Sense research project. A collaboration between US-based university and industry partners, the project website employs clever wordplay and conjures revolutionary thinking by using Thomas Paine’s famous 1776 political tract, Common Sense, as its background image.

Common Sense http://citizensensing.org

“The Common Sense team is developing mobile environmental sensing platforms to support community action and citizen science. An increasing number of mobile devices have the potential to become personal environmental sensors. To this end, we are developing sensing platforms that allow individuals to collect environmental information [and] software applications that allow people to analyze, share and discuss this information, in order to influence environmental regulations and policies. We aim to develop new communication paradigms that empower communities to produce credible information that can be understood by non-experts, in order to effect positive societal change.”

Most recently working with City of San Francisco street-sweepers to map the city’s air quality on a street-by-street basis, the project is part of a larger effort to enable what the researchers call “citizen science”. By turning mobile phones into sensing devices, the researchers hope that public understandings of science and environmental issues will be improved, scientists will have access to larger and more detailed data sets, and people will be better prepared to participate in government and policy making activities.

Citizens as sensors / sensors as citizens

What all these exploratory projects have in common is a shared expectation that mobile sensing technologies can be effectively used to effect social or political change. Despite the timeliness and politically progressive nature of such endeavours, by focussing on environmental data as products or objects that can be used for future political action, all the projects shift attention away from the present politics of the data collection and interpretation processes.

For example, projects in this domain rarely, if ever, question the environmental or political impacts of the technologies they seek to employ for environmental and political activism. For example, the United Nations now estimates that almost 50 million tonnes of electronic waste are discarded each year. While the environmental costs of toxic e-waste are substantial and can be added to the environmental impact of manufacturing new electronics, the problem is exacerbated by a variety of related practices that disadvantage developing nations. While all of the projects discussed above advocate using technologies for socially, politically and environmentally positive ends, they also implicitly support existing consumption practices in the developed world, and hide the role that technological progress has played in creating the very problems they seek to improve.

When active citizenship requires access to particular technologies, people without access are effectively excluded from the democratic process. While it may be accurate to point out the ubiquity of mobile phone use, it is also worthwhile to account for how new technological applications stand to impact those who are absent from typical-use scenarios. Furthermore, while promoting public science is undeniably a laudable goal, it is also a rather complex one. Despite the emphasis on local knowledge production in such projects, the data collected still speak the global language of science. By implicitly supporting the notion that scientific data are the appropriate types of evidence a citizen can collect, political action relies on conformity to existing structures of knowledge and power. In other words, local knowledge is primarily configured as a matter of location, rather than definition, and the transformative power of the sensor citizen is limited to pre-existing interests. Finally, this complexity is further compounded by the capacity (or incapacity) of people to make sense of the data collected, not to mention their willingness (or unwillingness) to act as data collectors in the first place.



Emotional mapping

Now, what if technologically enabled activism was explicitly more playful, or fun, than simply collecting scientific data? Certainly PigeonBlog offers an unexpected twist on data collection, and both Snout and Robotic Feral Public Authoring emphasise the value of embedding these activities within existing cultural practices that are more creative and community-oriented. Yet, what if such objective or rational evidence was supplemented with more subjective or emotional evidence? What if sensing technologies were also used to record people’s fears or concerns about particular environments? And what if the public environmental record mapped our pleasures and joys too?

Since 2004, over 1500 people around the world have participated in the Bio Mapping project to create “emotion maps” of their cities and neighbourhoods. While all the projects mentioned above allow non-experts to collect data and share it in ways they find meaningful, the Bio Mapping project is unique in its desire and ability to collect more ambiguous data.

BIO MAPPING http://www.biomapping.net/

“Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which … participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.”

Since the project’s GSR device measures intensity of emotion, without being able to identify if an emotion is negative or positive, people must more actively interpret the collected data. Rather than treating data as a final product that can be used in particular ways, these data act more like materials that people can shape and reshape as they see fit. Not only does Bio Mapping locate individual bodies in shared environments, but in doing so it supports the collection and production of different kinds of knowledge. In turn, the political action it affords is arguably less normative and prescriptive, but no less effective.

Ultimately, I believe that researchers, artists and citizens should be encouraged to experiment with new ways of using mobile technologies, and to explore new forms of political action. Indeed, given the growing impact of global climate change, our pressing need for environmental activism opens up a productive space for critical intervention, and all of the projects discussed in this essay do just that. However, I also believe that we need to approach our activities in this area with a clear understanding of their boundaries and biases. Because, in the end, I believe that it will take working through – or around – these limitations in order to effect the most profound and lasting changes.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Anne Galloway

Jonathan Follett is the President and Chief Creative Officer of Hot Knife Design, Inc., a Boston based UX and web collaborative. He is an internationally published author on the topics of user experience and information design and contributes regularly to web industry publications UXmatters, Digital Web and A List Apart. Jon Follett's current interests include the mobile and geospatial web. At Hot Knife, he is responsible for visual design and project management, creating web sites and applications for a variety of private (and public) sector clients – his visual design work having garnered several American Graphic Design Awards, the Horizon Interactive Award, and other industry recognition. In "The world as the interface" he shares his thoughts on the hybrid experience of interacting with on-line data in the physical world, through the mobile geospatial web.

Website: www.hotknifedesign.com/

Illustration by Andreas Schuster ...........................................................................................................................................................................

There is a world of information that we can't immediately see in the streets we walk and drive in, and in the buildings in which we work, play and live. The great potential of the mobile web – whether it is delivered by smart phone, automobile navigation system, or other device – is to reveal this hidden world to us, by adding geospatial and timing data to the user experience. In this way, the mobile web is poised to become the delivery mechanism for a new generation of location-aware applications.

Geo-specific information will enable real connections between the digital world and the physical one, so that people can freely interact with virtual data in real spaces. An old friend from out of town is at the restaurant down the block right now; your dry cleaner is closing early due to the holiday, but he has your suit ready; and an apartment in the building you're passing by just went on the market. As location-based mobile products and services increase in popularity, all these pieces of data become immediately knowable and useable in real time.

Location-based data has the ability to not only enhance the communication, productivity, and entertainment applications for which we regularly use mobile devices, but also to create a new hybrid experience at the intersection of real and virtual worlds. This mobile geospatial web will allow the information and imagination that runs freely in cyberspace, to become increasingly available and integrated in our physical space – and with that comes both possibilities and problems.



Mapping in real time

People have always used geography as a primary organizing method for relating to the physical world – our lives are deeply affected by the environment that surrounds us. It follows, then, that the initial wave of mobile products incorporating location data are consumer-oriented mapping and navigation systems. Personal navigation systems for drivers – for example, TomTom http://www.tomtom.com and Dash http://www.dash.net – provide interactive maps and turn-by-turn audio directions for users to follow.

Of course, directing users from one place to another is just the beginning. To help drivers avoid traffic, Dash collects real time data – such as speed and location – from its users who are driving different routes, and incorporates that current information into their mapping system and timing estimates. And with the cost of gasoline giving US consumers sticker shock, TomTom has integrated fuel pricing into its mapping system, so that drivers can find the best deal when filling up their gas tanks
http://www.tomtom.com/plus/service.php?ID=24&Lid=4.


While both of these services use Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, a person or object's absolute physical location can be determined by other methods as well. Google's My Location technology http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6gqipmbcok provides mobile users with an approximate position based on their proximity to cell tower footprints. Also, the Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) from Skyhook Wireless uses signals from Wi-Fi base stations to determine location.


When location data is combined with the ability to search for services nearby, the result is a compelling and desirable user experience. The geospatial web can enable you to behave like a local in an unfamiliar city, or make you more informed about your current one. In a US television advertisement for the iPhone earlier this year http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhhbaaWBgnk, mobile product innovator Apple illustrated how a person hungry for calamari could easily find a nearby seafood restaurant. For the iPhone user, there's a great difference between this location-based mobile experience and finding the restaurant via a wired connection in a hotel room. The mobile experience is immediate, spontaneous, and specific, which increases the value of the interaction.

Another extremely useful dimension of geospatial data is relative location – the relationship in physical space between two or more people, places, or objects. This type of data makes possible mobile social mapping services like Dodgeball http://www.dodgeball.com , Loopt http://www.loopt.com , and the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) location plug-in http://gallery.aim.com/detail/38 , which inform users when friends or colleagues are in their vicinity. Such social mapping applications unite on-line and off-line interactions. You are no longer relating to people in your network solely in digital space, but rather through personal, real world encounters as well.

And, of course, geospatial data can be used for tracking services – to monitor packages in transit, find stolen or missing possessions, or keep track of teenage drivers.



Filtering and tagging information

Geospatial data can also serve as a powerful filter for other information – either delivering specifics or removing unnecessary options, based on a user's location. Some enterprise-level business applications already take advantage of location-based contextual data. For example, drivers for international shipping and logistics company UPS can access data related to a specific delivery address. So, if a condominium association requires a pass-code for a security gate, that code can appear alongside other information when a driver views the next address for a package delivery.

Even more powerfully, we can tag content (photos, documents, video or other media) using location data and assign it a place. Flickr, for example, enables users to upload photos tagged with location metadata, which can be viewed by others using a map interface, like mashup service Loc.alize.us http://loc.alize.us .

But it is the Yelp application for iPhone that really begins to reveal the potential of location-based services. Yelp offers user-generated reviews of restaurants, shopping, entertainment, and other businesses. The iPhone app uses the iPhone's built-in location aware feature to find your current position, allowing users to view ratings of nearby vendors. It's easy to see how the mobile experience can enable customers to bridge the on-line and off-line worlds – allowing them to access pricing, reviews, and other valuable data while, say, in a physical store examining a product. The power of on-line shopping, arguably, is the customers' ability to conduct product research and compare pricing at a variety of retailers. Conversely, with the in-store experience, customers benefit from actually being able to touch products, look them over, and assess their quality. The mobile, geospatial web can bring both of these experiences together.



The evolution of contextual data delivery

The next step for mobile user experience design will be anticipating what people need, based on where they are and what they're doing. And the most important question will become, "What do your users need to know right now?"

Mobile services can already be used to help us prepare for the unexpected. Car companies are monitoring the status of vehicles, through systems like OnStar, to send the owners reminders when the oil needs changing or when a check-up is required, or to find out if a person needs emergency assistance, say, when an airbag deployment is detected.

This idea could be applied to human health. Patients with pacemakers can already wirelessly transmit status information to their doctors for follow-up http://www.medtronic.com/carelink/patient/index.html . Whilst, for the time being, this data is strictly controlled and reviewed by the patient's doctor, we can imagine a potent combination where adding location data to this information would enable an emergency medical technician (EMT) to be alerted that someone at a nearby restaurant is showing warning signs of a heart attack or stroke.

The mobile geospatial user experience will increasingly focus on the design and delivery of the data itself, with innovation coming from the ways in which we combine, slice, and filter information. Social mapping application Dodgeball lets you list five "crushes" – people in whom you may be interested in romantically – and alerts you to their presence nearby. It's not hard to envision a location-based social application connected to your iTunes data that, in combination with other user criteria, matches you to people listening to the same music in your vicinity with whom you might have much in common, or a professional networking app that brings together potential business contacts based on their LinkedIn credentials and preferences. And just as these applications can bring you into contact with people you'd like to meet, they can, conversely, help you avoid people you'd rather not see – say, a location-based service that helps the police monitor restraining orders.



Mobile user experience design challenges

With the mobile geospatial web, we have the potential to share experiences and create opportunities in the most immediate fashion. It is the immediacy and the connection to our current environment that makes it so compelling. However, such immediacy also presents difficulties:



Privacy

Loss of privacy is the primary concern people have with social mapping and other location-based services. While many people try to build a firewall between their real lives and their anonymized on-line personalities, it will be impossible to maintain that separation should they start using location-based services; anonymity becomes thin when your cell phone tells you that you are standing three feet away from "citygirl105". Knowing someone's location is a two-way street, and if users want to reap the benefits of finding out where other people are, they will also be forced to share their own locations. People will know where you are, for better or for worse. Parents may embrace systems that track their teenage driver's location but they should be prepared for the day when that same system, which perhaps their company uses to help coordinate team members that are flying to a convention in another city, can also be used by their boss to follow their movements when they call in sick. (Did you really stay in bed all day...?).



Permission

From a marketing perspective, the mobile geospatial web has tremendous potential as a tool to match potential customers with nearby vendors. It also has the potential to be intrusive and overwhelming. We can imagine digital coupons spamming our mobile devices as we walk by shops at the mall, or vendors trying to draw us out of a competitor's location with the promise of a better deal. Of course, the immediacy of this kind of advertising might have a self-correcting component, since there would be negative effects on the vendor should they push too far.



Trust

All of these factors result in higher stakes for the mobile geospatial web. The immediacy of decision making is going to make trusted information sources extremely valuable. People on the go have less opportunity to sift through pages of search-engine results; when they pose a question, they need an answer. Information sources will need to be canny, and they will need to be correct. For example, if you make a date based on an on-line listing for a movie time, only to arrive and find that the show started 20 minutes ago, you're going to feel burned by that listing service. How many times will you make a decision based on faulty data and return to an information source? Not many.

The mobile geospatial web is an open frontier, with the potential to change our lives for the better. The hybrid experience of finding and interacting with on-line data in the physical world is compelling and useful, and the need for location-aware services is seemingly boundless. However, as with many technological improvements, the questions of privacy, trust, and permission remain open. And we must weigh these carefully if we are to successfully create geospatial mobile experiences.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Jonathan Follett

Michael DiBernardo is a software engineer with keen interests in writing and teaching. Projects currently taking up most of his spare time include; a novel exploring the interplay between focus and balance and how people choose between one and the other when seeking self-identity; contributing to open-source software projects; developing a volunteer-teaching curriculum, targeted at preparing interested and motivated secondary-school students to pursue a career in software development; as well as finding time for other interests he feels are important to maintain. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

DiBernardo wrote “Spaces” for the “Mobile 2020″ competition that accompanied the opening of the Mobile Life Excellence Center in Stockholm, Sweden last year. The story follows a person exploring the physical and social landscape of an unfamiliar city, receiving … well, just read on to find out! .

Website: http://mikedebo.ca/

Illustration by Olaf Albers

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This story by Michael DiBernardo won the “Mobile 2020″ competition held by the Mobile Life Center, Stockholm. It is reprinted in receiver in arrangement with the author and the MOBILE LIFE VINN Excellence Centre at Stockholm University in Kista, director Kristina Höök (http://www.mobile-life.org). © Michael DiBernardo, 2007

For an interview with the author on the Mobile 2020 competition see: http://www.it-univ.se/artikel/1579/117002/se

Contact: Michael DiBernardo

Based in London, Andrew Grill is an Australian mobile advertising evangelist and a senior telecoms executive, with particular expertise in the mobile operator space. He has a specific focus on mobile advertising and mobile social networking. During 20 years in senior positions across the entire value chain, he has developed a deep understanding of the telco market from vendor, operator, analyst, consultant and media viewpoints. Grill is a regular conference presenter, providing opinion and thought leadership for a range of publications on issues related to mobile advertising, location and social networking and he maintains a popular blog on these subjects. So what is it about Location Based Services (LBS) that gets everyone excited, yet fails to deliver on the promise of automatic, always-on, location assisted services and content? Andrew Grill explains.

Website: http://www.andrewgrill.com/

Illustration by Marco Schmidt ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Location in a mobile context is the Holy Grail for many people. The one item we carry with us almost all the time is uniquely positioned (pun intended) to be able to add location information to everything we do whilst mobile.

In theory, getting the current location of a mobile phone and working out an approximate location should not be that difficult. TV shows such as CSI and movies like Minority Report reflect an always-on society where information on a person’s whereabouts is instantly available. In practice however, location is quite difficult and expensive to deliver to a mass market audience.

The introduction of satellite navigation (or Sat Nav) units by companies such as Garmin and TomTom in recent years has brought what was originally a military service to within easy reach of today’s consumer. Some 30 years ago, the US Military launched a series of satellites in low earth orbit that together form the basis of today’s GPS system. It was not until May 2000 that President Bill Clinton allowed the GPS system to be more accurate for the public – until then the military system was more precise.

GPS goes mainstream

Sales of in-car GPS units in Europe have soared over recent years, and now GPS navigation is making inroads into the mobile phone market. Handset manufacturer Nokia is now shipping more and more devices with GPS built in – recent launches of N or E series handsets have all been GPS equipped.

Nokia’s recent €8 billion purchase of Navteq has also shown that they are serious about location and navigation on the handset. At a recent location conference, I listened as traditional personal navigation device (PND) manufacturers insisted that they were not worried by the mobile phone GPS/navigation market, but in private they are concerned that the dominant navigation device in the future could become the mobile phone.

Google joins the party

It didn’t take long for web giant Google to join the location party. Their Google Mobile Maps was made available for mobiles in late 2006, and a year later they added a game changing feature to their product, called My Location. This feature, built into all GMM clients, allows the user to simply hit a button (normally the zero key) and have the application automatically detect where they are – either using the phone’s inbuilt GPS (for a location accuracy to within tens of metres), or more amazingly, for those phones without GPS or those indoors, the program automatically places the handset on a map to within a few hundred metres in built up areas, all in a split second.

This innovation from Google, combined with the increase in GPS enabled handsets, has provided the catalyst for new location services to evolve in 2008.

Since the late 1990s, the only way to locate a mobile phone was by taking a location “feed” from one of the mobile operators, assuming that they had a location platform deployed in their network.

In simple terms, the way this works is that the location server checks which base station the handset is logged onto (ready to accept a waiting call) and the location of the base station is used when calculating a rough approximation of where the user is currently located. Many in the industry predicted that this service would launch a range of location based services but as we have seen this did not eventuate.

One of the reasons behind the very small take-up was that each time the user was located, the operator would need to charge the equivalent of an SMS. For regular location updates, this could become quite costly and the resulting accuracy returned from these location platforms was quite poor. As there were almost no GPS enabled handsets available when these location services were launched, this was the only real way to gain access to a handset’s location.

There are also the obvious privacy concerns around any location service, so great care and attention was paid to the proper authentication around providing a user’s location to third parties. In the end, many in the industry would agree that cost, poor accuracy and privacy issues all but killed any new initiatives in the location space.


Handset based location

Until Google launched their GMM with My Location in November 2007, there were only a few companies developing operator independent location services. Companies such as Cambridge Positioning Systems, Seeker Wireless and Skyhook Wireless all developed handset based solutions to remove the reliance on the operator location service, and hence drive down the cost for regular location look-ups.

Skyhook Wireless has spent a great deal of time and money in developing a global database of WiFi base stations by literally, driving around cities and highways “listening” for WiFi base stations and recording their location via GPS. As the handset base station client detects a new base station, it checks the Skyhook database, and if present, the location is provided back to the phone.

The iPhone (both the 2G and 3G versions) both use this service to provide very good location accuracy when indoors and close to a WiFi base station.The iPhone/Google maps experience is then very close to what we have all been expecting for a while – automatic and always-on cellular location.

Not to be outdone, Google and Nokia have also built massive global databases of the cellular identifier (or cell-ID) code that is transmitted by every base station in a GSM or UMTS network. In the same way that Skyhook uses WiFi, the Google and Nokia mapping clients are now able to automatically locate a user on a map when GPS is unavailable or not present.

This handset based approach is what the location and mobile advertising industry have been waiting for, so that a user’s location can be easily added in real-time to make a decision about what content might be provided, based on location.


Open source location

Halfway through 2008, Google went one step further and launched their open source Google Gears geolocation API for Windows Mobile. This is a browser plug-in that provides the location of the handset by sending the cell-ID heard by the phone to the Google cell-ID database and returning the location co-ordinates to the handset application requesting it.

The Gears plug-in will be released to other handset operating systems over time, but once again, as with the web based Google maps, Google has provided to the masses a utility that the average consumer or developer (mapping and location) could never afford and which will drive location innovation across the industry.

Yahoo have also developed a location broker service called Fire Eagle that takes location information from any source and securely manages applications and services that can have access to this information.

Now that many of the building blocks are in place for low-cost, reasonably accurate location services for mobiles, we should start to see a range of new location services hit the market in the coming months, and into 2009 I predict we will also start to see location based advertising trials underway.


Now the pieces are in place, which location services will take off?

As a location advocate, I have had heard many people talk about the “Starbucks example” where a subscriber walks past a Starbucks … and you know the rest. I don’t believe that this type of location based advertising (LBA) will work, for a number of reasons.

First of all, let me kill off the Starbucks example. It is unlikely that this would ever work in practice, because in cities like London Starbucks doesn’t discount its coffee, and Starbucks stores are simply everywhere.

A more realistic use case would be for a movie chain. They most likely will have a movie club and a list of subscribers who have opted in to receive movie news and discounts. If the movie chain wished to fill seats on a slow Thursday afternoon, they would want to know how many of these opted-in members are near one of their cinemas.

Importantly, they do not want to know if they are actually at the cinema (then there is no point in sending them an offer as they are already there seeing a movie) but if they are close enough, and the offer is compelling enough (eg 50% off any movie in the next 30 minutes) then they are more likely to respond to the offer – creating a very targeted and instantly successful marketing campaign. It is this sort of approach that advertising agencies and brands have been waiting to explore.

In the real world though, the movie campaign example above would be difficult to execute with location technology available to the mass market. Let’s assume for a moment that all of the movie club members have a GPS enabled phone. What percentage of them have the GPS turned on (battery life is measured in hours when a mobile phone has the GPS on), and what percentage are not indoors, and hence able to provide a location fix?

Also, how often would you need to check the location of each of these users to see if they are close to the cinema? What is the cost to the subscriber, or advertiser, for each of these regular location requests, and how many are wasted if most of the movie club members are nowhere near a cinema?

The most effective and efficient way to provide this sort of location campaign is with a concept called zone detection, which has been pioneered by companies such as Seeker Wireless. In this scenario, a small piece of software resides in the handset, or the SIM card, loaded with all of the movie chain’s cinema locations.

Every minute or so, the software in the handset checks to see if it is near one of these zones, and if and only if they are “in the zone” will a message be sent to the ad server. In my opinion, for LBA to take off, it must have an element of zone detection for the push-ad campaigns to work at all. Mass market location campaigns will also have to consider location-enabling all of the inventory – this is not a trivial exercise, and is worthy of an entire article on this subject alone.

One commercial example of this concept is Starhub in Singapore who have recently launched their own LBA service. Checking a subscriber’s location from the network side as Starhub are doing consumes massive amounts of network resources that are also required to send revenue generating SMS, voice and data traffic. It will be interesting to see how successful this service becomes and what the return for Starhub actually is.

Location aware advertising opens up new frontiers for brands to place their advertisements in front of consumers at or near the place where they can obtain them, thanks to the ubiquitous nature of the mobile. In the most basic sense, if an ad server is made aware of a user’s location, then a decision can be made to deliver an advertisement based on either the user’s current location, or a history of where they have been, coupled with a user profile of their interests and previous purchases etc.


Location will emerge to become a key component of mobile advertising campaigns – but there are a few other things to get right first

I believe there are four key areas of focus to ensure mobile advertising as a whole is a success:

1. Flat rate data plans for all. The UK and other markets have made a good start here but the realisation by other operators that flat or low rate data plans will drive mobile advertising is key;

2. A common framework for mobile page rendering and addressing. Since the beginning of 2008, there is strong evidence that the “m.” address is winning over “.mobi” but the industry has a long way to go on the issue of page rendering to ensure mobile compatible pages are presented to mobile users;

3. Customer profiling. Smart collection and use of subscriber information goes hand in hand with location information. Location can be seen as one of many targetting and profiling inputs. If you already know I am a 39 year old male, living in postcode W11 in London and I like gadgets and technology, the type of ad I am likely to respond to is fairly well defined. Layering this with real-time location information is icing on the cake, as I am most likely to respond positively to an ad that is targetted correctly and is sent to me when I am close to a location where I can take immediate action on the advertisement; and

4. Mobile location without GPS but instead using a mix of zone detection and handset based location. Existing location technologies available today, such as cell-ID from the network operator and GPS via the handset, are not suitable for mobile advertising on their own.


What are the barriers to handset based location services from Google and Nokia taking off?

As mobile operators add, remove, and change mobile cell towers, the quality of the Google and Nokia databases will suffer. There will come a time when enough Google Mobile Maps users have essentially re-surveyed the area – at no cost to Google – and corrected errors in the database. However, this process will take valuable time that even Google can’t afford.

Put another way, Google will have to plug the holes in its database quickly and accurately – otherwise it risks losing users who are likely to vote with their feet when the device display tells them “Your current location is unavailable”.


Location + mobile social networking = mobile 2.0

One area that will benefit greatly from the advances in location technologies and services described above, will be social networking services delivered to the mobile.

Mobile social networking is the natural extension from the web based versions of these major sites to the mobile. It is the mobile’s ability to provide real-time location, and in turn presence (“I’m seeing a movie in London”) that will provide a real boost to the mobile versions of these sites. I think it is unlikely that a mobile social networker will want to publish a map of exactly where they are for all to see but they may wish to promote where they are relative to their profile, community or local area.

So, instead of just being a cut-down version of the main site, the mobile version of a social networking website could add real-time value with presence from location services.

What is encouraging is that social network users are wanting to take their web 2.0 experience with them in a mobile web 2.0 way – and this is good news for the mobile industry as the social networking boom experiences another surge via the mobile channel.


Location goes mainstream in 2009

The real excitement for me is not about the cool services on the horizon, it’s the recent emergence of disruptive tools and technologies that allow content companies and developers to deliver location-enabled and presence-aware apps without having to rely solely on the mobile operators.

Now the building blocks are in place, we should see more adventurous location services emerge through 2008 and into 2009. Location based services is once again a space to watch closely.

This article was written for receiver

For more thoughts on mobile advertising, mobile location, and social networking visit Andrew Grill’s blog (London Calling) at andrewgrill.com/blog

Contact: Andrew Grill

Kazys Varnelis is the director of the Network Architecture Lab, at Columbia University in New York. Within this experimental department of the university's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Varnelis investigates the impact of computation and communications on architecture and urbanism. Together with Robert Sumrell, he runs the non-profit architectural collective AUDC; their first book, "Blue Monday", was published in 2007. In 2005/06 Varnelis was a visiting scholar with the "Networked Publics" program at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication. This fall, MIT Press will publish the results of this program as "Networked Publics", edited by Varnelis. His essay for receiver looks at how mediated communication has changed our notion of place, created non-places and now has us darting between simultaneous environments.

Websites: http://kazys.varnelis.net/
http://networkarchitecturelab.org
http://audc.org

Illustration by Mortimer Neuss ...........................................................................................................................................................................

As an architectural and urban historian trying to make sense of the transformations in contemporary society, I find that looking back at moments much like our own – but also different – can be a way of gaining perspective.

A little more than a century ago, the relationship between people and place underwent a massive revolution as the telegraph and the transoceanic cables that carried its signals, made it possible for information from around the world to be transmitted in near-instant time. Almost immediately, news organizations, such as the Associated Press, developed to take advantage of these new technologies. Newspaper editors could collect the previous day's news from across the globe and make it available in the morning paper. The telegraph, and later the telephone, allowed diplomatic, military, and corporate decision-making to be centralized. The modern metropolis emerged out of this new centralization as command-and-control districts, such as the American downtown, arose while, under remote control, factories moved out from the urban core to less expensive but more spacious quarters on the city's periphery.

These were profound changes, and we live in their wake, but we should not underrate the new psychic conditions that accompanied them. Chief among these was alienation. As more and more individuals left their rural homes to seek their fortunes in the city, human ties were fundamentally transformed. One of the first sociologists (a field that arose, of necessity, to study mass behavior), Georg Simmel wrote of these changes in his 1903 essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life. Faced with "the intensification of nervous stimulation" Simmel observed, the metropolitan individual shut down, becoming blasé or indifferent to the world around him. Simmel's diagnosis paralleled that of contemporary psychologists, such as George Beard, who in 1869 identified the stresses of urban life as causing kinesthetic neurasthenia. Individuals afflicted with kinesthetic neurasthenia, Beard suggested, would shut down, becoming apathetic, depressed, and withdrawn.

If exhilarating at times, change itself could also be alienating. Of the old Paris, disappearing under Baron Haussmann's interventions, Charles Baudelaire would write, "the form of a city changes faster, alas, than a mortal's heart". Reading of a distant event, one could marvel at the greater degree of connection that technology made possible, but the newfound simultaneity of this early moment of globalization was also deeply unnerving. Electrical impulses had bent space and time irrevocably. All the simultaneous goings-on in the world underscored how one's own perspective was just one of many. The Enlightenment's prospect of coming to a thorough understanding of the world began to seem impossibly distant. New forms of art, such as Cubism, responded to this condition, depicting simultaneity not as something that could be easily grasped, but as confusing, even perverse.

To navigate businesses through these changes, and to maximize the efficiency that technology made possible, managers engineered the behavior of their employees. The punch card, the assembly line, and the automation of the workplace were meant to help businesses, but no matter how successful these techniques were, they estranged individuals even further. The system was not loved but hated; the corporation seen as a dehumanizing machine.

For the bourgeoisie, at least, the home was the bulwark against the pressures of a changing society. The overstuffed interior demonstrated the family's ability to command a global market and to demonstrate their taste while serving as an inward-focused world of intimacy, emotion, and meaning: a place in which connections could be nurtured.

But even here, there were pressures. Mass media soon entered the home through the radio and television, devices that replaced the piano and the fireplace as gathering points for the family. Individuals were subsumed into the mass, addressed by a media that perceived its audience as homogeneous; consumers rather than producers.

During the twentieth century such conditions were exacerbated. New, faster forms of travel – on the motorway and by plane – were ever more disconnected from their environment. Automation and scripted procedures reduced human contact. Toward the century's end, Marc Augé noted that under this condition of "supermodernity", place was rapidly giving way to "non-place". Places, that is, spaces, made up of social interactions between people, accumulating in memory to form historical meaning, were disappearing. Instead our lives came to be composed of a relentless procession through spaces of transit. Caught in airport lounges and freeways, but also ATMs, the space in front of the CRT, and supermarkets; we found ourselves increasingly alone, inhabiting non-places. Our alienation was ever more total, a consequence of the empty, meaningless environments that we pass through during our solitary lives.

Or so it seemed. A scant decade later, a second revolution in communications and society is well underway. Everything has changed in the blink of an eye, a century of modernity undone as fast as it came as new technologies support new ways of relating between individuals. Networking is now not just marked by the flow of media from the top down – it is, above all, a vast social phenomenon. This is our world, and it is a radically different place from the condition we once knew as modernity (or postmodernity for that matter). Just imagine being alone today. There were 18 million mobile phone subscribers worldwide in 1992, when Augé's book was published. Today there are over 3.3 billion. The United Nations estimate that by year's end over 50% of the world's population will own a mobile phone, double the number that has access to a landline. The mobile phone is now the world's most ubiquitous gadget. Along with this comes a world of constant ambient communications – text messages (the Gartner Group estimates that some 1.9 trillion were sent in 2007), e-mail, and internet-based data, are now flowing into our hands at a rapid clip. Computers too are increasingly mobile. Laptops are taking over from the fixed, heavy, desktop "towers" (the very name evokes isolation!) and the massive CRT screens of the 80s and 90s. Outfitted with Wi-Fi, they allow us to communicate wherever we can get a connection.

Augé's world of non-places is rapidly disappearing. The airport lounge is always outfitted with a Wi-Fi network, a last-minute place to dash off an email. Far from a place of alienation, the plane is now the business traveler's last indulgence, an isolated sanctuary in which to catch up with work or to just relax without the threat of receiving a new e-mail to respond to.

One can, to be sure, be more alone than ever. But this happens by choice, when we plug in our iPods. Introduced in October 2001, the iPod was a runaway success worldwide. That it succeeded, even though it was released just a month after the 9/11 attacks to a generally depressed consumer mood (and an even more dismal economy) points to its significance. The iPod allows us to paint the world with an emotional soundscape. Surrounding us with a feeling of intimacy, the iPod creates connection through the familiar sounds it reproduces for us.

Our world is one of connection, not disconnection. Through social networking sites, we reconnect with friends from prior jobs and schools, from days long gone by, and make new ones with little effort. When we see our "Facebook friends", we feel we know them well. After all, we have been following their every move religiously. As we graduate from school, change jobs or move to new cities, our social networks come with us and our friends stay in touch by voice, by e-mail, and by instant messaging. Photo sharing sites make it possible to see our distant friends change over the years and specialized social networking sites like Delicious or Last.FM allow us to share in their interests. For future generations, the experience of rediscovering long-lost friends will be unfamiliar. Similarly, new friends are all too easy to make. Through social networking sites, we come to regard each other as old friends even before we have met.

If alienation was, in part, the product of feeling alone in a city or in mass society, misunderstood and unable to find others like oneself, today the internet makes possible a boundless amount of information and a massive number of dispersed communities brought together around taste cultures. Interested in space history? There's a place for you. Interested in Hello Kitty? Collecting owl stamps? Like to make military dioramas? How about knitting sexy clothes? Of course there's a place for you, too. You can freely cultivate your eccentricities in an era where you can meet on-line with friends who share your desires.

Other communities emerge in virtual spaces that are more three-dimensional than textual. MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Everquest provide hours of interaction with players both near and far. To play in a raid with a spouse, a friend in the house next door and a soldier in Iraq, is not uncommon at all today. Such on-line games now far surpass the revenues of even the largest major motion picture.

But "mass media" has changed as well. Ours is a world of networked publics, in which consumers comment on and remix what they consume. Composed entirely of clips uploaded by individuals, YouTube threatens television networks. Snarky commentary on media is now the norm, much to the broadcasters' chagrin. Individuals often create their own media – posting on blogs and on-line venues set up to display their creations, such as photo-sharing sites.

Even when consuming traditional media, consumers react back. In front of the television, they increasingly gravitate toward watching material as they wish. My own young children, for example, have little interest in, or understanding of, traditional television channels, even though they have hundreds of networks (not just three) to choose from. For them, watching a show "on demand" is far superior to joining a show in mid-stream.

The simultaneity of the 1900s was a simultaneity that the inhabitants of that time could really only observe. They could read about what happened in China in the newspaper, but weren't, generally speaking, involved. Once they put the newspaper down, the simultaneity ceased. Today's simultaneity is pervasive; active not passive. While mom sets the dinner table, she checks her Blackberry for messages from work and the kids text their friends, or even each other – to get a giggle at dad's expense. We live in a state of simultaneous environments. We are here and there, in multiple places at once. For many of us, this is our condition almost all the time.

The intimacy of the family is now replaced by the "telecocoon". Coined by anthropologist Ichiyo Habuchi, a telecocoon refers to the steady, ambient conversation over SMS that keeps us together even when we are apart. Providing intimacy at a distance, the telecocoon provides the shared feeling of what Mizuko Ito calls "co-presence". Like most of these new media, telecocoons foster feelings of connectedness, but at what cost? Instead of alienation and disconnection, today's networked disorders center around addiction or inability to disconnect. The ease and rewards of the virtual world make it all too easy to retreat into it. Simmel suggested that we can only maintain so many connections with others. If you have 1,000 Facebook friends, how many real friends do you have? With on-line social networking making it easier to keep up casual virtual connections over real friendships, the future of human connection is unclear. Recent research by sociologists suggests that in the US the number of confidants that people feel they can talk to about serious matters, has dwindled from three to two in the space of one decade. We may have more connections, but are we any closer to each other?

As we drill down deep into the Long Tail, we focus on our own particular perversities and find comfort in those people most like us. We appreciate those who are mirrors of ourselves and recoil from those unlike us (ZOMG INCOMIN TROLL!!). If the public sphere of the nineteenth century was predicated on debate and deliberation, today we seem more polarized than ever. Reaching out to people unlike ourselves is almost painfully difficult.

Compounding this, our own sense of self seems to have changed. If the nineteenth century individual felt overloaded by the impulses around them and shut down, we dissipate. As SMS, IM, email, and push services such as Twitter demand our attention so that we don't miss anything, we find it hard to focus. The Blackberry becomes the "Crackberry". Continuous partial attention replaces our ability to concentrate on one task. Schoolchildren and scholars alike ignore libraries in favor of the internet and surface grazing becomes more important than research in depth. That all this favors a sedentary lifestyle in front of the screen, is also a concern as rising obesity, especially among children, threatens our health.

Caught up in the benefits of all this, we also expose ourselves. Our notion of public and private is undone. If, a few years ago, critics of social networking sites had suggested that young people who posted pictures of themselves at parties (or having sex!) might have a hard time getting jobs, today that idea seems as quaint as suggesting that a presidential candidate, who had once smoked marijuana, would not be viable. If anything, the record of a collective generation's drunken college years humanizes them. The real concern, however, should be that we have collectively given up our right to privacy. Corporations and governments now know mind-boggling amounts of information about us. Our web surfing habits, search and purchasing histories, even our physical locations are all tracked. The surveillance described by George Orwell in 1984 seems laughably outdated. Twenty years later, we live in a world in which privacy is a thing of the past. That no one has used that information for nefarious purposes is of little comfort. We have given it up without a second thought. What does this say about our sense of self?

During the next decade, networked technologies will become more mobile and more pervasive. As the internet grows into an "internet of things", we will find ourselves surrounded by smart appliances. This threatens to push us back into a world of disconnection, if the universalist qualities of the web are undone. We can see early signs of this, in the rise of the internet-enabled smartphone. Here, the ubiquitous and universal web browser has proven to be too cumbersome to be a primary interface. Instead, downloadable applications – sometimes for free, sometimes not – offer self-contained, often highly-designed experiences. On my iPhone, for example, I have apps for Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Talk, The New York Times, Bank of America, Delicious and so on. Similarly, on the desktop, the rise of web applications such as Google Docs has spurred the development of Single Site Browsers (SSBs). This seemingly innocent development suggests that the massive, networked, public sphere constituted by the web may yet splinter.

The world of micro-publics can also threaten place as well. With access to more information than ever, we can find a community perfectly tailored to our political, social, and cultural interests. I confess that I am perfectly happy in my suburban town on the outskirts of the New York metropolitan region, where people like me live, seeking a very liberal suburban life. We all attend our July 4th parade but we give the most applause to the anti-Iraq-war marchers. Right-wingers are few and far between in these parts. There is a dark side to this. In The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of America is Tearing Us Apart, journalist Bill Bishop uncovered that Americans are increasingly sorting themselves into homogeneous communities. As people worldwide gravitate to the places where others most like themselves live, face-to-face debate and dissent evaporate.

Network culture is as new to us today as modernity was to the people who lived a century ago. To prognosticate more than I already have, is highly dangerous. But it is also necessary. If we can, as yet, do little to project the vast changes in society that will take place in the coming years, we need to watch warily, acting as techno-skeptics one day, techno-enthusiasts the other, so as to ensure a world of greater meaning, democracy, and real social meaning and individuality.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Kazys Varnelis

Jonathan Raper is a Professor in the Department of Information Science at City University London's School of Informatics. In 1999 he founded the Geographic Information Centre at City, one of the UK's centres of expertise in geographic information systems (GIS), geovisualisation and location based services (LBS) research. His main research work in the last decade has been the design, development and implications of location based services. Raper is known internationally for this, having published seven books in the field and being Editor-in-Chief of the "Journal of Location Based Services". He is now a part-time professor at City and runs the University's spinoff company Placr which develops mobile geospatial solutions. He writes a personal research blog on all things digital and geographic, that was started with a "Digital Geography Manifesto". Read on to learn its ten principles.

Website: http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~raper/

Illustration by Johannes Sich ...........................................................................................................................................................................

What should you write on an academic blog? If news, trivia, detail and narcissism are all out, then what's left? When I started my blog "The Digital Geographer" in early 2006, I decided to sidestep these sins by writing a manifesto. My digital geography manifesto was a tongue-in-cheek statement of some of the challenges that we faced in designing and implementing a new generation of "egocentric" mobile applications that will bring the power of location technology to mobile devices everywhere. As I write this, two and a half years have passed and it is instructive to revisit the manifesto's ten principles and see which of them captured an enduring issue – and which of them has already been solved.

1. A digital geography must represent geography responsibly and strive for emancipation

The first principle is concerned with who benefits from location technology. If location technology leads to an enslaved population who are tracked and interdicted by a brutalising state, or probed and profiled by unaccountable, corporate monopolies, then we will have unleashed a demon. If, however, "technology is neutral" (to paraphrase the title of Chapman's famous book, The Jungle is Neutral), then both good and bad will come from location technology, and by regulating the latter and encouraging the former we can have the best of both worlds. This reality has not budged since 2006, but the bar gets higher as the market gets bigger, and regulation is still piecemeal, with big differences between nations.

This principle also encourages us to design location based services that are emancipatory, that is, that help and free people from their daily constraints. Our own "LBS4all" project at the Department of Information Science at City University London explored use cases for LBS, with blind and older people. The results were to highlight the desire for blind users to be able to browse their environment, rather than proceed directly from A to B, and older people envisaged LBS as a kind of augmentation to their senses and as a support when going to new places. Notably, these use cases are not the prototypical "where's my nearest cashpoint?" type of query. They remind us of the dangers of designing for urban myths, rather than real needs, elicited by full-scale technology demonstrations.

2. All consumers of digital geography must also be creators (even if they don't know it yet)

One of the fundamentals of geography is that we are immersed in it all the time … you cannot escape! So when we use location technology we must simultaneously situate ourselves and also break cover. We passively create when we are located and connected using location technology: our potential data trail is simultaneously necessary for LBS developers and troubling to users. It is necessary for developers because many applications will only really impress users when their data trail provides the contextual intelligence that is required to produce geographically relevant (GR) output. We have done lots of research on GR and developed a range of tools to characterise and filter context for the mobile user in our Placr startup. This manifesto principle also anticipated the importance of location-based user-generated content that is now exploding on mobile social networking (eg Whereyagonnabe on Facebook) and photo sharing sites like Locr.

3. The digital geographic world view states that where you are is what you know

It is a measure of the progress in LBS over the last three years that this sounds commonplace because you can consult Google on a mobile. However, this principle hides one of the most intractable issues in LBS development - developing truly ubiquitous but local services. Reports of the "death of distance" (as argued in Frances Cairncross' book of the same name) are greatly exaggerated, and understanding the local aspects of a place of use for mobile information remains a location "grand challenge". Ontology-based approaches are the most widely used solutions at present, where your location is looked up in a gazetteer, and services are instantiated on the basis of what is known about that (usually) administrative zone. This is a very limited understanding of the user's information needs and requires much more work. Mining data trails is one way to address this, especially to try to find natural places where people go, but which are not already known as points of interest.

4. Digital geography should aim to reduce the economic cost of ‘lost’

Though I have looked hard, I have failed to find any authoritative estimate of the cost to a developed economy of its citizens being periodically lost, on either business or pleasure. It is fair to assume that it is an enormous sum of money, and the huge sales of Sat Nav systems for cars bear testament to the desire of people to reduce this waste of time, effort and money. However, in-car Sat Nav applications are a special case of a general requirement for personal navigation that can encompass public transport augmentation, pedestrian guidance and leisure applications like hiking and running. The best example of location technology in personal navigation must surely be Navitime in Japan, who have 2.5 million users on mobile networks in Japan. Japanese cities are large and complex, so tools like Navitime (fully integrated with public transport information) are a natural response to the need to find your way and be efficient in the face of semi-permanent congestion. Location technologies will be able to make a major contribution to economic efficiency over the next decade, one un-costed but essential reason for massive infrastructural location projects, like Europe's Galileo satellite positioning system.

5. The using classes must govern the production of digital geo-content

Despite the echoes of Marxism, this principle raised questions about the intellectual property that is invested in location, as well as user generated content and the new dimensions of location privacy that accompany LBS. So, who owns your location information if you create it digitally? You, of course (in Europe you must consent to its use, under Data Protection legislation) but what about derivatives such as the number of times you are close to any given place, or the average speed you have done on a given stretch of road? Should mobile providers use personalised or anonymous tracking data to market services to you or to target advertising about places you go? And does anyone, anywhere in the world, have the right for their location data to remain private in the face of civil misdemeanours, such as traffic offences? These issues have still not been fully explored and publically debated and yet clear answers seem to be necessary for the mass acceptance of location technologies and LBS.

6. Information is power; digital geo-information is the power of place

I drafted this principle to explore the kinds of power over place and space that is uniquely afforded by (digital) geo-information. If location technologies allow us to know much more about real-time individual and collective behaviour, then a number of new insights become possible. For example, Portuguese water companies operating services in small resorts have used local mobile phone counts to control water supply volume over the year, and Estonian local authorities have used the number of phones crossing bridges to review closure decisions. Capturing mass behaviour has also allowed new insights into traffic patterns (eg TomTom's IQ Streets product for in-car navigation). There are potential problems in the medium term when a large proportion of the users of a service or infrastructure can query its state and make real-time commitments on the basis of the information. For example, so many people may leave a blocked road that the alternative becomes blocked and the original route becomes free. This will require architectures and regulation, or routine use, and will have significant value for emergency management.

7. A geo-processor in your hand is worth ten in the office

There are questions about processing power available on mobile devices used in LBS, despite the fact that mobile processor speeds are now comparable with desktop machines from around 2000. Moore's Law appears to have broken down on mobile devices since 2005 - the fastest processor on a consumer PDA/smartphone in 2008 is still 624Mhz, as it was three years ago, though on-board RAM and storage memory is still increasing. This means that there is a limit to the processing that can be carried out on mobile devices and there is a need to distribute processing to servers accessible on the network, if they can be accessed quickly and cheaply enough. In our experience of creating the operational LBS 'WebPark' at the Swiss National Park, the costs and latency of network connections are still unfavourable for use in consumer-facing applications, and most of the content and intelligence is cached locally using the Camineo platform. Even 10 seconds to get connected is much too long, and this militates against delivering services requiring on-line processing. Thus, there is a performance envelope for mobile location technology that defines what can be delivered to users, at a quality they will tolerate. Much remains to be done in this area, including the development of on-line content caching, driven by location and positional behaviour.

8. There are limits to what you can geo-know; the problem is finding what they are

This principle is concerned with the knowledge and skills that users tend to bring to the use of LBS. For example, we have explored the influence of sense of direction on the effort required to use different LBS interfaces in the Locus project. We found, in practical tests, that users navigate faster with a mobile device using a virtual reality interface, compared to the map, but that the VR interface takes more effort. The Ergonomics and Safety Research Institute, at Loughborough in the UK, has shown that using in-car navigation interfaces requires significant cognitive resources – which distracts drivers, leading the UK Department of Transport to consult on whether to regulate or ban in-vehicle information systems in 2006 (they ultimately decided not to). The differential loading of users with different spatial capabilities by the wide range of location technologies, means that developers have to address a very diverse and fragmented market, perhaps by the development of profiles or personalisation tools for the user.

9. You can put a digital geography on screen but when you can overlay your current position, correctly, in real-time, then you have really got something

I still vividly remember getting my first personal GPS receiver in the late 1990s, and taking it outside to get a position. When it got a fix, it simply showed a rather underwhelming set of cross-hairs on a blank screen as it was not possible to load mapping onto the early devices. The realisation that live positions and maps are both needed to produce location intelligence, was followed by several frustrating years before systems capable of importing standard digital map content became available, around 2002. Only then was it possible to experiment with applications that used real-time, on-line mapping, and professional tools developed back then like ArcPad have given way to Google Maps for Mobile. Although the mapping problems have almost all been solved in the last five years, the broader geospatial content management challenges for mobile have not yet been addressed.

10. You never truly possess any geo-information unless it is backed up

Although this is a real "motherhood and apple pie" statement, there are some specific challenges in preserving tracks, photos and other user generated content from LBS until it can be uploaded, synchronised or backed up. This is achieved in real-time for connected mobile services, but is limited to the places and times when this is possible. We have experienced specific data losses in research and commercial deployments for autonomous devices with low bandwidth data connections, when memory cards have failed or servers have had disk crashes.

We're through. So, what can I say? The digital geography manifesto seems to have stood the test of time quite well, and still defines the key challenges that lie ahead for location technology and LBS. The next two to three years will be critical for location technologies and LBS: now that the infrastructure is falling into place, the environment for delivering consumer location solutions is at last becoming truly favourable.

Addendum: Since 2007 there is a scientific journal, the Journal of Location Based Services, which I edit, through which the science and technology challenges of this can be debated and recorded (but I must say that it remains hard to get developers to publish).

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Jonathan Raper

]]> http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/a-digital-geography-manifesto/feed 1 http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/creating-maps-for-everyone http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/creating-maps-for-everyone#comments Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:39:58 +0000 Sean_Gorman http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/?p=256 Sean Gorman

As a sought after speaker and advisor on the Geospatial Web, Sean Gorman has been featured in Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0 or CNN. To bring advanced geospatial technologies to market, he founded FortiusOne in 2005, a company that was spun out of George Mason University. In addition to his profound academic research, Dr. Gorman brings over 10 years of experience as a practitioner and entrepreneur at the forefront of the geospatial revolution to FortiusOne. His goal is to enable average users to solve problems through maps – and in “Creating maps for everyone” lets us know how the GeoWeb helps us to understand not only the planet around us but also our own personal web of friends and locations that sits inside of it.

Website: http://blog.fortiusone.com/

Illustration: “Mapping Mars” ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Mapping was once the domain of professionals. Cartographers and geo-scientists trained in universities for several years to learn the best techniques for accurately displaying data on maps. In addition to training, professionals needed costly and complex desktop software to generate their maps.

The public often saw the end product of the map creation process, but was largely limited to scribbling on paper when it came to creating maps of its own. Beginning in 2005, this paradigm turned upside down. This article will examine recent trends, including web mapping, the availability of government geographic data, user generated data, the emergence of mobile data, and shifting to where we are today with questions about what this mass of data means for the end user.

 

A brief history of web mapping

Google Earth and Google Maps launched in the summer of 2005. While there had been previous web mapping projects like Microsoft’s Terraserver, public cognition largely began with Google’s new foray. Although these mapping applications were first intended to provide local search results and driving directions, users quickly hacked the application to overlay their own data on top of Google Maps. Paul Radamacher struck first taking housing rentals from Craig’s List and overlaying that data on top of Google Maps for his site HousingMaps.com. Adrian Holovaty quickly followed suit overlaying Chicago crime data on top of Google Maps to create ChicagoCrime.org.

Both programmers had “mashed up” new data sources with Google Maps creating a new term in the web’s lexicon.

Leveraging their talent for writing code, Paul and Adrian became a new brand of cartographer. Neither had a background in geography or science but they had suddenly reinvented how data could be visualized on maps. Instead of admonishing the mapping hacks, Google released an API (application programming interface) that would allow any programmer to easily do what Paul and Adrian had done. They went even further and hired Paul to work at Google Maps. Microsoft, Yahoo! and other mapping companies soon released APIs of their own and the term “mash-up” became commonplace across the Web.

 

Government geographic data – the official source

The data unearthed by the HousingMaps.com and ChicagoCrime.org websites was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to geographic data. The total amount of information that can be given a geographic set of coordinates or a boundary is mind-numbing. Over 80% of data gathered and stored by businesses has a geographic component. The data traditionally collected by professionals alone is immense. Federal government data alone is astounding; including information from agencies such as the Census Bureau, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and Department of Housing and Urban Development. While access to this data has historically required complex software and training, the data itself is open to the public at no cost.

 

The rise of user generated content

Free and open access to public data is often taken for granted in the United States. Many countries in Europe and around the globe are not as fortunate. Governments deem such geographic data to be proprietary and charge the public large sums of money to acquire the data. This was the case in the United Kingdom which led to the creation of one of the most successful open source geographic data projects to date – the OpenStreetMap Project.

A group of students at University College London were assigned a project to map out the rampant bike theft occurring on their campus. They used GPS (global positioning system) devices to log the coordinates of each bike theft and then wanted to post a map online of where the thefts had occurred. When they looked into acquiring a base map on which to visualize the bike theft data, they discovered the UK’s Ordnance Survey charged £50,000 for the privilege.

This was a non-starter for the students who found themselves at a dead end. Then an idea for a brilliant work-around came to them. They used their GPS devices to map out all the streets on campus to then create their own base map for visualizing their data.

The resulting online bike theft map was a huge hit and soon other neighborhoods were asking to have their streets mapped out as well. The team solicited additional volunteers and soon mapping parties were popping up at pubs across London and neighborhoods were being mapped out in great detail by knowledgeable locals.

Today OpenStreetMap.org boasts over 45,000 contributors and has over 442,194,531 GPS trace points uploaded. This is just one example of many mapping websites that are built around user generated content including Google MyMaps, Platial.com, Yahoo! ZoneTagger and MapMixer, Microsoft Collections, OpenAerialMap, EveryTrail, Wikimapia, PPGIS.net, Yelp, Chowhound, Plazes and many others.

 

The potential of geographic data from mobile devices

The concept of user generated data has even greater potential to explode with the emergence of mapping and GPS technology on mobile phones. Groundbreaking devices like Nokia’s N95 and Apple’s 3G iPhone have embedded GPS receivers in the phones allowing for accurate geo-location of the users, potentially at all times.

For a user, this means they can upload their opinion of a restaurant while they are eating and have that comment be geographically tagged to the location. Real-time geo-located user generated content opens a huge door for more geographic data being produced to benefit consumers and businesses. Not only can you know about your friend’s opinions on restaurants, you can also see if any of your friends are nearby to join you for dinner. Services like Loopt and Whrrl offer similar services today and several other services are in development.

Mobile devices can also provide passive data about their users. Sense Networks recently released CitySense for the Blackberry, which allows users to see what areas of town are current nightlife hotspots. The application reveals a map of the city and displays a heatmap illustrating the areas of the city where users are aggregating in real-time. While innovative and powerful, these types of services raise privacy concerns for many.

Arguably, CitySense only shows patterns and not specific location of users; however, GPS and mobile devices easily track the movement of users. Thus far there has been little push back from early adopters, but it will be interesting to see how the general public responds to these new technologies. Have we become so accustomed to having our personal lives made public with applications like Facebook and MySpace that privacy concerns have disappeared?

 

A network effect for data

The common theme across the variety of geospatial data being produced by government/geographic professionals, end users and mobile applications is that data is increasing exponentially. We risk being deluged by so much data that we are not able to make sense of it all or use it in a meaningful way. At the same time there is real power in the mass of data that is being unleashed for public consumption.

Within the technology sector, pundits often discuss the power of Metcalf’s Law – the value of a network is roughly equal to the square of the number of users. If a cell phone network has 100 users there are 10,000 different connections that can be made between users. If it has 1,000 users then there are 1,000,000 different combinations and with 10,000 users 100,000,000 different combinations. Each new user greatly increases the value of the network and the value of that user increases over time. This is one of the basic principles that has made the internet and the web so powerful and successful.

The same principle applies to mapping geographic data – each new data set that comes online can be mapped together with any other data set that has been created. A data set on school test scores is interesting by itself, but becomes far more valuable when viewed on a map simultaneously with crime rates, traffic congestion, cost of living and new homes for sale.

This unique combination of data could potentially show users an ideal place to live based on a variety of factors important to them. Another user could take a combination of data to tell them where to initiate a marketing campaign or show which international market has the highest potential for expansion. As a result, the number of maps that can be created and resulting problems that can be solved is ultimately endless.

To accomplish this goal, several factors must exist: first, there must be an ability to interconnect geographic data from a variety of sources – official sources, user generated sources, and mobile devices; and second, there must be an ability to visualize this disparate data on one map in order to see the true relationships and correlations within the data.

This is exactly where our efforts are focused with GeoCommons – a geographic data platform that allows non-technical users to easily combine their data with data from disparate third party sources on to a single map. The crux of it all lies in the ability to harness the data in an intuitive way that enables the average user to solve problems through maps. This is a lofty goal and one which several companies are striving to solve.

The last three years have fundamentally changed the way people understand their location and geography. Looking at interactive satellite imagery of our globe is now commonplace. The next three years will bring even more innovation, unleashing greater data and details allowing users to understand not only the greater planet around them but their own personal web of friends and locations that sit inside of it. Take the opportunity to explore these technologies, not only to learn more about planet Earth but also what your personal slice of it looks like – maybe soon in real-time.

 

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Sean Gorman

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]]> http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/creating-maps-for-everyone/feed 4 http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/21-art-feature-taggalaxy http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/21-art-feature-taggalaxy#comments Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:36:32 +0000 Steven_Wood http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/?p=253 With the creation of Tag Galaxy, Steven Wood wanted to explore the way that people use tags and the connections that become visible when this usage is viewed on a large scale. Tag Galaxy lets you browse photos intuitively via virtual planetary systems representing related tags. The application itself does not know of any logical connection between the concepts described by the tags, but as it observes the literally billions of photos which have been tagged by the users of the photo sharing site Flickr, their choices become apparent and a certain level of collective intelligence is achieved.

]]> Steven Wood | overview cover artists

Steven Wood is a designer and freelance software developer based in Nuremberg, Germany. He studied Media Engineering at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg and specialises in interface design and 3D web applications. His diploma thesis Tag Galaxy website, a spacey Flickr remix, has been featured on countless blogs and has had over half a million visitors since it was launched in May 2008. At "MashupAwards", it was mashup of the month this summer (http://mashupawards.com/tag-galaxy).

You need a newer Version of the Adobe Flash Player to view the Tag Galaxy application.
Get it here!

Tag Galaxy, an interactive artwork by Steven Wood

With the creation of Tag Galaxy, Steven Wood wanted to explore the way that people use tags and the connections that become visible when this usage is viewed on a large scale. Tag Galaxy lets you browse photos intuitively via virtual planetary systems representing related tags. The application itself does not know of any logical connection between the concepts described by the tags, but as it observes the literally billions of photos which have been tagged by the users of the photo sharing site Flickr, their choices become apparent and a certain level of collective intelligence is achieved.

The distance between the Tag Galaxy planets and the sun is based on the quality of the search results each planet represents. Their size is calculated from the percentage of results their images contribute to the current set. Each new level is an intersection of results with the previous one, allowing the user to dig deeper with every click.

Steven Wood is working on a new version of Tag Galaxy and hopes to be able to launch it soon, but has to fend various attempts to commercialize the app first.

Website:
http://stevenwood.de
http://taggalaxy.com

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