mtl3p

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I’m a big fan of Tracey Lariault since I heard her ask some tough questions about access to GIS data yesterday. I immediately put her in contact with Jo and I can’t wait for them to get the chance to talk.

She just finished giving a presentation for a panel on “The Information Society in Action”.

I’m not going to try and sum it up, but here’s some points and links:

-“data liberation initiative” - get mapping data in the hands of canadian university students (but unfortunately not non-profits or communities).

-Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure - “GeoConnections is a national partnership initiative working to build the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI), and make Canada’s geospatial databases, tools and services readily accessible on-line.”

-GeoDiscover - which is an effort to make that information available/discoverable with a concentration on UI.

-”cost recovery” - which involves trying to sell the data to make up some of the costs. Canadian citizens pay for our maps 3 times (when we can get them). 1) tax dollars to produce them, 2)buying them from the government as “cost recovery”, 3)paying taxes for when Canadian federal and provincial departments sell them to each other, which is their policy (?@#$?!!).

-GeoGratis - “GeoGratis is a web and file transfer protocol (ftp) site that distributes geospatial data of Canada. Data is available for download, without charge.” - has some data.

-cybercartography - Tracey’s current project - she’s using Antartica because the mapping data is free (because Antartica is the “scientific continent”).

-new terms I’m adding to my vocab: “cartographic cartel” -those who hord gis data (introduced by Jo or Marc Tuters) and “counter-mapping” by Tracey (which I like to think of as “mapping back”.

They’ve done a project making a mod of NeverWinter Nights where people have to learn about the environment to gain levels. (that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. Kind of like like Kumawar gone right.). I’ve still got this idea of open source mmorpg’s being an amazing tool for education and as a very important future of the internet. With a key point that they have to be decentralized / federated (don’t know if that’s the right usage of the word).

We spoke yesterday and I want us to keep in contact. It’s time the mapping geeks (huge open source / open standards developers and users) starting talking more with the rest of the opensource community. We need some serious knowledge transfer and “vision” transfer from them to start developping some wicked apps. The don’t have the time to make all of these applications themselves. As soon as the rest of the opensource community gets our hands on the data we’ll be right on their tails -in terms of applications of the technology.

That last link looks pretty cool. A P2P opensource mmorpg. Go check it out! Someone tell Soros he should fund them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 14th, 2005 at 3:40 pm and is filed under within 500 feet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.