receiver magazine      #21 | Space is the place!

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