GeoNext – Why ‘Where’ Matters

I am proud and pretty pumped to be on the advisory committee for the first ‘GeoNext’ conference, to be held in Sydney on 29 February.

As I’ve written before, what I’ve been missing in Australia/NZ is an event that bridges the gap between the ‘traditional’ geo-community (read: surveyors and spatial analysts) and the neo-geographers: the (young) upstarts who’ve discovered new and wonderful things to do with location, such a location-based marketing, web 2.0 and gaming.

Vision on "SDI 2.0"

At last November's annual conference of the CRC for Spatial Information, I presented a vision on "SDI 2.0", or what Spatial Data Infrastructures will look like in the 21st Century.

There will be a shift from SDI 1.0: top-down, supply driven, slow and expensive initiatives, that mainly generate a flurry of (user-less?) YAPs (Yet Another Portal), to SDI 2.0, which is demand driven, mobile, crowd-sourced, cheap and immediate. In SDI 2.0, the default 'authoritative source' is no longer assumed to be a government department or large commercial provider.

SDI 2.0 will harness the forces of Web 2.0 and neo-geography, where there is less and less distinction between users and consumers of geodata. There will be a long tail of many producers of little amounts of data and small applications and mash-ups. This dramatically shifts the demands on government, industry and data providers, who ignore these trends at their peril.

You can watch the slides below, or download them here.

CRC-SI Soapbox Presentation on SDI 2.0

View more presentations from Maurits van der Vlugt.

PSMA, Sensis or OpenStreetMap: what makes Spatial Data “Authoritative”?

You are probably aware that recently in Australia, Google switched map data providers. They ditched the government owned data provider PSMA in favour of Sensis' Whereis, and this data will (at least in part) be maintained by users themselves.


The switch has created a bit of a stir in the Australian spatial information community. Our industry association (SIBA) sent out a stern word of warning about authoritative data and the risks of dealing with User Generated Content (UGC).

More diversity needed at Spatial@Gov

Day three heralded the graveyard shift for the speakers at Spatial-at-gov 2010. It was a case of speaking in the morning, while delegates were still fuzzy after the night before, or speaking in the afternoon, when everyone's waiting to go home.

I had the morning slot, in the government 2.0 stream, to talk about Where 2.0 and Neogeography. Despite geo-beers the night before, the room was full, and the audience seemed attentive to hear about Paradigm shifts and Bushfire Connect. The slides can be found here.

Neo-geography by numbers

I've always believed life's a numbers game (OK, accuse me of being a left-brained rationalist) - look at it: elections, the economy, 'all good things come in threes', online poker, and the list goes on.

So, as a bit of entertainment, let's look at some topics in neo-geography by counting up. This post will go from two to four, and I'll be happy to take suggestions for topics for number five and further (though I have some wicked ideas already).  

The Paradigm Shifts of Neo-Geography

Attending the world-wide Surveying and Spatial Information Conference FIG2010 this week in Sydney, I can't help but notice a growing divide between the traditional GIS and Surveying community and the rapidly evolving world of 'neo-geography', represented at the Where 2.0 conference just before Easter.

What sets these two apart, other than the average age of the delegates (about 60 and 30 respectively), is the way they approach the paradigm of computerised mapping.

Reverse Geocoding the Twitter Geo-Stream

I'm at O' Reilly's Where 2.0 2010 Conference in San Jose, California. It's a great event: absolute geo-geek heaven. There's a multitude of technologists around, and all the big players in online and social media(Google, Bing, Twitter, Foursquare etc.) have their 'Directors of Geo' present.