receiver magazine      #21 | Space is the place!

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