Spatial isn’t Special « Urban Mining. On Monday I gave a talk at a workshop in Edinburgh hosted by the Association for Geographic Information of Scotland. The workshop was titled “Apps, INSPIRE, and the New Economy” and took place at the British Geological Survey near Edinburgh University. It’s description began like this: The booming market of mobile ICT devices (SmartPhones, tablets) is radically changing the geospatial scenario which is increasingly characterized by the fast update of so-called “apps”. The use of “so-called” beside quoted “apps” seemed to tell me that this workshop was not expecting a crowd of Computer Scientists! People are getting used to retrieve the information they need when they need it according to their location. Reflecting on recommender system research, this sentence clearly echoes the recent calls for context-aware recommender systems.
Two short thoughts in closing: Talking to different audiences. Like this: Like Loading... Subway Napster for the London Tube: undersound. Undersound is a new project to distribute music around the London Underground trains. Users can upload songs from their collections to centralized distribution points, and download tracks left by other users. The system keeps tack of which tracks came from what station –this is a public-transit version of the “Traffic Napster” that appears in my novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. undersound will be spatially distributed at individual stations and throughout the wider tube network. I can add music to the system at upload points in the ticket halls , and I can download tracks on the platforms.
Each track in the undersound system will be tagged with its place of origin (the station where it was uploaded) and this information is visible as the track is being played. Collective Intelligence 2012. Social Cities of Tomorrow » International conference 17 February 2012, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Neogeography – towards a definition. Over the past day there has been a large discussion about “what is neogeography” in the geoblogosphere. (more posts). It’s apparent that, given the quick and large-scale response to the original impetus, that this question has been brewing in the minds of many geo-types. There are many analogies to draw here – and typical to the geoworld they see their situation as newly evolved, yet the same thing has happened in other, less specialist realms for much longer. Look at journalism vs. blogging, movies vs. television, or any number of other field that has had its identity questioned. My feelings are that GIS and Neogeography are in fact different things – but that doesn’t mean they are mutually exclusive.
They have different goals and purposes. An Analogy Extended A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation at the University of Kansas on just this topic (slides). This is what is happening in the geospatial community right now. The Definition neogeography|nē’ō-jē-ŏg’rə-fē|