From September 2005 to June 2006 a team of thirteen scholars at the The University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are transforming the way in which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.
This site documents the process and the results.
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Mike Liebhold Lecture: The Geospatial Web and Mobile Service Ecologies
In collaboration with ARNIC, Michael Liebhold, Senior Researcher, The Institute for the Future spoke to the Networked Publics group on October 27, 2005 in the living room of the Annenberg Center for Communication at 2pm.
Lecture abstract: Beyond a growing commercial interest in mobile GIS and location services, there's deep geek fascination with web mapping and location hacking. For several years a first generation of geohackers, locative media artists, and psychogeographers, have been experimenting with web media tagged to geo-coordinates(latitude and longitude) and now a second, larger wave of hackers are demonstrating some amazing tricks with Google Maps, Flickr, and del.icio.us. Meanwhile, a growing international cadre of open source digital geographers and frontier semantic hackers have been building first-generation working versions of powerful new open source web mapping service tools based on open standards. Out of this teeming ecosystem, we can see the beginning shapes of a true geospatial web, inhabited by spatially tagged hypermedia as well as digital map geodata. Google Maps is just one more layer among all the invisible cartographic attributes and user annotations on every centimeter of a place and attached to every physical thing, visible and useful, in context, on low-cost, easy-to-use mobile devices. However, while it is interesting to entertain ideas of early financial returns from geospatial web services, we all need to take a deep breath and perform a sober and unhyped assessment of where we are, and what we still need to do to enjoy the economic and creative benefits of a geospatial web. We can't afford a second dot-bust; investments and developments have to be smarter this time. So, in this talk we'll discuss what we need to do in order to build a sustainable mobile web, using the geospatial web as our primary example. Biography: Mike Liebhold is a Senior Researcher for the IFTF focusing on context-aware computing based on a geospatial web, with a minor focus on massively parallel computing. Most recently, Mike was a producer and program leader for the IFTF Technology Horizons "New Geography" Conference at the Presidio of San Francisco. At the two day workshop was aimed at helping technologists and strategic planners from top tier companies and the public to better understand the emerging geospatial information infrastructure. The event included The Fort Scott Locative Experience, a hands-on field exercise for conference attendees exploring a prototype geospatial web combining digital geodata and modern web hypermedia. Previously, Mike was a Visiting Researcher, Intel Labs, Working on a pattern language based on semantic web frameworks for ubiquitious computing., and co-author of 'Proactive Computing through Patterns of Activity and Place', [publication pending]. In the 1980s and early 1990's at Apple, Advanced Technology Labs, leading investigations of cartographic and location-based hypermedia and the launch of strategic partnerships with the National Geographic, Lucasfilm, Disney, MIT Media Lab, AT&T Bell Labs, and others, and then as Chief Technology Officer for Times Mirror Publishing helped launch over 20 professional and consumer web content services, lead very early large scale Intranet designs, and then worked for two years as a senior consulting architect at Netscape. During the late 1990s Mike worked on startups building large scale international public IT services and IP networks for rural and remote regions in China, India, Europe, and Latin America. Most recently Mike has been helping to design and stage collaborative mapping workshops with the Locative Media Lab, a loosely affiliated network of geospatial hackers and artists. Mike publishes his occasional thoughts about microlocal and geospatial computing on his web log at http://www.starhill.us, and aggregates hundreds of new geospatial web-related links daily from perhaps thousands of geeks and users at http://del.icio.us/inbox/starhill_blend.
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response from julian bleecker
The following are my remarks on Michael Liebhold's talk on The Geospatial Web, capture in my notes. Mike insights and thinking on the promise of the Geospatial Web, as well as the necessary systemic alterations in the current service/media/business ecology are fairly well articulated in his essay The Geospatial Web: A Call to Action — What We Still Need to Build for an Insanely Cool Open Geospatial Web. (I wrote a response to that article called A Design Approach for the Geospatial Web.) His talk on the topic of the Geospatial Web fills in some of the questions surrounding what the Geospatial Web is, as well as what would make it happen and what is preventing it from happening.
My remarks on the talk pertain in part to what I think is the kernel of The Geospatial Web challenge:
it is one of those bold visions that's as compelling as it is intractable in practice. Why is it compelling?
For many in the extended tribe of Geospatial Web enthusiasts, practitioners, hackers and visionaries, the idea of extending that data-rich and network-enabled environment best represented by the Internet (canonical, capital I ) out into the world in which social bodies drive cars, walk down streets, throw punches and reach for their wallets means opportunities for creating new kinds of social formations. Liebhold outlined some possible scenarios, many of which are easy to imagine. I'm looking forward to the unexpected scenarios that cannot possibly be anticipated. I'm talking about the Geospatial Web-enabled experiences that really create a new arrangement of social interaction or circulate culture in a way that is far from doing the same old thing (e.g. buying some music) with the same old device (e.g. my cell phone) through a half-heartedly designed usage scenario (e.g. when I walk by an advert for a new Cold Play album.)
Why is it intractable?
Well, not intractable forever, but certainly exceptionally stifling to my own personal style of innovation — the late-night hack motivated by passion for some completely off the wall idea. This is much of what Liebhold was referring to when he discussed the various "ecologies" that pertain to the Geospatial Web (see my <a href="">talk notes</a>). The Industry Ecology is made up of carriers, handset manufacturers, operating system developers, toolkit developers, business economics, content developers/deployers (media networks, apps developers, games developers), paying customers, with the carriers maintaining a somewhat heavy-handed authority over that kingdom. They own the customers, own the handset manufacturers in that they dictate what the handsets are able to do, dictate what operating systems will run on them, etc. Carriers are at the top of the "value chain" and want to stay there. But the value chain is untenable; it stifles innovation because the loop is closed. One palsied entity is dictating the terms of the entire ecosystem.
But there are ways in.
It's not possible to imagine, really, that everyone in the carrier world is interested in stonewalling innovation, or that there aren't insightful clusters of intelligence therein that recognize that the opportunity for sustainability and growth is not about charging customers a nickel to let them know where the nearest gasoline station is. One way in is to prove the business-economy case that open systems, cooperative practices and embracing the kinds of designed mobile experiences that are happening at the edges of the network are a viable, even necessary path to growth. Another approach I discussed with Liebhold and Francois Bar is the MVNO — mobile virtual network operator. These are "white label" mobile operators, contracting for network usage from the big carriers. Essentially, they are branding and marketing exercises — cobble together your own Service Ecology and try to sell it through to your demographic. Often times these MVNOs offer a unique suite of applications and services targeted toward a particular audience — it might be music downloads, push-to-talk, chat..whatever. I suggested that one way a carrier might experiment with an open style Service Ecology might be to develop their own MVNO — sort of like what United does with its Ted airline service. It becomes a way to run an idea up the flagpole, and see who salutes. <!--{12274556114870}-->
Technorati Tags: geospatial web
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response from anne friedberg
GEOSPATIAL WEB: THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE
As Mike Liebhold insisted, the Institute for the Future does not "predict" the future, but "forecasts" it. IFTF produces forecasts of technology 10-20 years into the future, as if to extend the cartographic impulse forward into projective time, "mapping" the future. The Mercator projection at hand is the new map of data: the Geospatial Web.
Although the "geospatial web" implies a cyberspatial geography, I kept thinking of the old Sherman Williams paint ad. Change the paint to data layers and the image I conjure is one of information mapped onto, draped over the globe, attaching invisible data to every centimeter/millimeter/nanometer of the planet. But why stop there? Why not add the smart dust that hovers in atmosphere above, the moons and distant planets equally mapable if conquered by the data cloud.
Julian Bleecker (see also his notes from the lecture) finds the geospatial web compelling and intractable for the same "enthusiasts, practitioners, hackers and visionaries" that find it compelling. Intractable? Read: hard to manage, hard to enter, hard to combat.
Several things strike me about this "vision" of the future extrapolated from the near present. In an age so often described in terms of its frenzies of ever-more proliferating visuality, the geospatial web is premised on its invisibility.
The geospatial web projects a near future where not just devices (that cellphone, that PDA) but furniture (that chair, that table), objects (that tree, that street sign), buildings (that monument, that apartment building), landscapes (that forest, that desert, that riverbed) become sentient information platforms, sensors to collect and send data to whoever is out there to collect it, analyze it, read it.
Geolocation technologies: The question hovering here is: who will be using this data? Is it BiG Brother surveillance of every trace of our movement extrapolating data from patterns of behavior? (And not just surveillance photos of the roofs of our houses, our cars at the intersection, but also our data streams as credit card users, web logins, biometrically-scanned travellers), … OR is this information there for us to exploit, to negotiate this new environment with decoder rings that will be able read the data clouds of smart dust around us, to see into the objects we encounter, the buildings we inhabit? How smart will we be amid such a smart environment-able to, for example, learn the data-history of a place, because of the endless annotation of the visible world? Or as several questioners mentioned at Liebhold's talk-there is mounting resistance to panoptic surveillance by groups like Institute for Applied Autonomy whose See project in Manhattan teaches you to be aware of/avoid all surveillance cameras. Will we have to don Harry Potteresque "invisibility cloak" to move through the world undetected on this geomap? Do we need to begin to spin a counter-sci-fi future; where geospatial spam jams the system, attaches false data to contradict, to challenge, to hide?
Devices for Augmented perception: How many prosthetic devices/decoder rings will we need to be decoders or readers of such an augmented/annotated environment? Liebhold had a foggy crystal ball on this one: he seemed uncertain about how "device ecologies" will unfold. But such questions--along with the ongoing debates about coordinate standards, about the representational politics of mapping.; about access (and its uneven distribution) to geodata-may serve to obscure the potential benefits of the geospatial web's grassroots use-mapping sick buildings, tracing viral paths, creating spatial memories. I'd like to build histories into spaces, remembering phantom buildings, restaurants that were once there, past residents, conversations once had or imagined, in a deep-data version of who slept there.
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