We had a great session on the possibilities and challenges related to dark geo-content on the internet. Amber Case at Hazelnut Tech Talk has a great summary of the session. You can also find the slides I used here.
One of the take home messages that I got from this session is that the problems we see in sharing and accessing geo-content are felt by many others. I hope to contact a few of the participants to help refine the problems and hopefully “illuminate” some possible solutions.
We’re headed to WhereCampPDX on Saturday. It is an event that everyone in the office has been looking forward to attending. This is exactly the type of event that prompted our move across country.
We hope to lead a couple of sessions. The first is by Scott Becker entitled, “Intro to Open Layers, a Free Open Source JavaScript Mapping API”. Open Layers is a powerful JavaScript API for web-based mapping that provides a multitude of tools for the geo hacker, including support for many tile formats, vector data, a drawing API, as well as support for various open data standards like GeoRSS, GeoJSON, GML, KML and more. This session will attempt to introduce the participants to these capabilities and spark ideas for what they might be able to create using them. To view Open Layers in action, check out our WeoGeo Marketplace (www.WeoGeo.com), which has recently undergone an upgrade from KaMap to Open Layers.
Our other session will be led by me: “Illuminating the Dark GeoWeb”. Valuable geocontent is stored in databases, network storage drives, and desktops. These are not accessible to search engines spidering the web making the geocontent undiscoverable. This session will be an open-ended discussion on how to develop tools to index these data, as well as how to motivate the owners of the content to make these data available for discovery and sharing.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there.
While not number 1, we at least made the top 10 of the Oregon Business Magazine’s Top 10 Coolest Start Ups.
(note – the cool guys in the image are not me.)
I know I have been silent for some time, but it has not been for lack of activity. I could not let this one pass without a quick post to let you know we are still cranking.
We have a bunch of exciting news coming up, including the news about the recent opening of our Portland office. Stay tuned.
