Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Chris Osborne of #Geomob fame, who last week attended Where2.0, the leading global neogeo conference.
Fellow Nestofari,
As the passing geo-hobo at Nestoria, I was duly dispatched with a shiny dollar to cover the geo-fest that is Where2.0. For those not in the know, Where2.0 is all about the ge-o. Or maps. On computers.
Mapping is a big deal for us, we’ll be presenting again at this year’s State Of The Map conference in Amsterdam, and you may have noticed that all our listings are, yes, on a map! Unfortunately, we weren’t presenting at Where2.0 this year but that gave me more time to soak up the geo-goodness, ruthlessly self-promote and blag as much free food and drink as a geo-hobo can.
As always at these events, there is one act that steals the show, and this year it was a last-minute addition to the lineup. Ludwig from C3 Technologies had been wowing the people in the corridors with incredible 3D models of cities. Not only do they look realistic, but they are automatically generated, utilising technology from missiles. With just a few hours left to go on the final day, C3 were given a slot and took the crowd’s breath away:
Michal Migurski, of map design gurus Stamen, always has something interesting to say and gave not one, but two great presentations. First a crash-course in building your own custom rendered maps with Cascadenik, not for the faint-hearted but a great way of earning your geo-stripes. And ‘Flea Market Mapping‘, an intriguing presentation about using some old school paper maps in thought provoking ways.
Our old chums Yahoo! launced their exciting new PlaceMaker product to universal acclaim. Its a little difficult to do it justice in a small blog article so I thoroughly recommend you watch the video below. Essentially, its a way to find location information about any kind of content; throw some news articles at it and it will tell you where they are written about. For the more techy of you, that means you can get geographic metadata, and WOEID, from structured and unstructured data and start to do some very interesting things with it. Importantly, its contributing to the open data geoweb that is currently evolving.
Speaking of open data, we also had OpenStreetMap’s Steve Coast telling us all about ‘Ubiquitous Geocontext‘. Or, in the future everything will know where everything else is and act accordingly. It was a refreshing change from some of the talks, focusing on the possibilities for the future. A far fetched, but thought provoking view of the geo-tastic future that awaits.
In sum, innovation in the online geography sector is alive and well!
Chris blogs regularly at cloudsourced and is @osbornec on Twitter. The next #Geomob event takes place on June 30th in central London.
