The Geospatial Web

Call for Papers

THE GEOSPATIAL WEB - How Geo-Browsers, Social Software
and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society

http://geoweb.know-center.at/

You are cordially invited to submit chapters for an upcoming book on the Geospatial Web, published by Springer London in the Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series. By integrating cartographic data with geo-tagged knowledge repositories, the emerging Geospatial Web will revolutionize the production, distribution and consumption of media products. This edited volume will bring together high quality contributions on the technical foundations of the Geospatial Web, present information services and collaborative environments built on top of geo-browsers such as Google Earth and NASA World Wind, and investigate the economic and societal impacts of such knowledge-intensive applications. A
particular focus of the book is the integration of geospatial and semantic technology, for example to extract geospatial context from unstructured textual resources.

GoogleEarth Pro vs. ArcView Explorer: GIS for the Masses?

Declan Butler wrote on his blog way back in Dec. 2005: A swathe of new tools is emerging, from the basic to the highly-functional, which allow shapefiles and other formats to be easily converted to kml, and so to be visualized in Google Earth. One of the most functional is Arc2Earth, scheduled for release in January, developed by Brian Flood, president of Spatial Data Logic systems. I’d the pleasure of evaluating a pre-release version of this, and used it to convert data from the Global Registry of Migratory Species database.

Other more-basic tools include KML Home Companion, Export to KML, and ShapetoKML.
These tools mark progress, but of course require that you are have ArcGIS. More generic solutions to converting shapefiles to kml have been slower in forthcoming, although some scripts can do part of the job. The open source GIS players have, as far as I can see, also been slow to provide KML export to their products, but correct me if I’m wrong.

Meanwhile ESRI itself is scheduled to release in first quarter 2006 ArcGis Explorer, a free visualization tool, which is being billed by observers as a Google Earth killer, the screenshots, and comments from developers who have given it a tour, suggesting it does all that Google Earth does, but much, much, more — a Google Earth on steroids.

Maps with embedded Video links

New mapping feature in Yahoo allows for posting videos tied to embedded map links. Various apps for new approaches to mapping at http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/applications.html

Tactile Maps for Visually Impaired

by Steven Landau, President of Touch Graphics

For people who have difficulty seeing, acquiring spatial and pictorial information is a challenge, and in our image-laden world, access to pictures has increasingly become a requirement for full participation in communal life. In 1996, Touch Graphics was formed as a for-profit company to perform research and to develop a number of graphical tools intended for a blind and visually impaired audience. These products and systems employ "tactile graphic" materials as their central feature. This work has been done in partnership, and is based on ten years of earlier research, by Computer Center for Visually Impaired People, Baruch College, City University of New York.

Kids Make Videos on The Environment

Video Critical is visual sociologist's David Gauntlett's approach to media audience research. According to the website, in the early 1990s, a lot of information about environmental issues had appeared in popular media, especially that aimed at children. But had this material had any impact on young viewers? To explore this question, groups of Leeds schoolchildren were given video equipment (and basic training in its use), and were asked to make a video about 'the environment'. The video documents what happened.

The study was published as a book, Video Critical, back in 1997. The book version contains more background information and theoretical discussion. This online presentation (launched April 2004) includes many new digitally-captured photographs.

Maya plug in for Google Earth

Maya2GoogleEarth is an open-source, cross-platform tool developed at Eyebeam studios in NYC for exporting 3D models from Maya into Google Earth. Once installed, it allows you to export 3D models from within your scene as a single Google Earth Placemark (KML) file.

The project was inspired by the Open GL extraction utility OGLE which can extract 3D data from openGL programs likeGoogle Earth. The guys at Eyebeam say they thought "it would be fun to be able to take the extracted 3D data, remix and add to it and then load it back into Google Earth."

Software for coding visual sociology materials

Phd candidate Ken Lyman is interested in using software coding methods that are specifically designed to accomodate visual materials. Click on the Title of this post to access home page for ATLAS.ti. Please add your comments.

Publically available GIS data

I'd be interested to know what people's experience is in accessing GIS data through free portals available to the public on the web.

The article linked details decisions in Manitoba to share GIS. I know that San Miguel County in southwestern Colorado (US) has also put significant resources into sharing GIS data in a web-based application.

http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/features/mli2003/index.html

San Miguel Watershed

This is an image of the watershed of the San Miguel River in southwestern Colorado. The image was created using 55 DEM maps of the region and creating a texture map to mimic black granite in Maya.

Geo (Earth) + Vox (Voice) = GeoVox

GeoVox is a place for sharing your knowledge of place. We want to give the Earth a Voice, and a Voice to People with concerns about the earth. All are welcome--from environmental scientists, to educators, to lovers of the land. We are especially interested in the expert testimony of locals who define a given place--"situated users" who understand the land from the ground up.