Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Geospatial and Contextual Interoperability
Technology Horizons members who participated in our conferences over the last couple of years will recall that one of the leading conclusions of IFTF research on context awareness, and on the Geoweb was that integrating high level information about places is a tough computational problem. There's lots of good news recently that projects are beginning aimed at solving some of challenges we described in our research.
First, geoRSS is starting to gain real traction as a standard way to code the locations of web objects. (see georss.org) geoRSS was designed by a group of spatial web hackers, and web mapping pros including the CTO of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the chief architect of GML (the Geographic Markup Language for maps), and the principal designer of the prestandard geoRSS implemented by Yahoo. Now Yahoo, Microsoft, and the leading Geographic software company ESRI ( Environmental Systems Research Inc.) have all announced tentative plans to support geoRSS coded points. How Google Earth and Google Maps will play is an open question.
Formal endorsement of geoRSS as a mapping standard by the OGC seems like a foregone conclusion, and now the Worldwide Web consortium (W3C) has launched a geospatial incubator group to move geoRSS forward as web standard. (For details see: www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/)
Meanwhile, there are couple of important developments in resolving some of the tougher problems in making information about places useful, and interoperable despite the origins in proprietary applications.
First: Springer books has issued a call for chapters for a book focusing on the semantics of spatial information: