The well known, highly opinionated and occasionally error prone Tech Crunch seems to think there’s a location war going on.
A search for the keywords location and war on the site yields strident post titles including Just In Time For The Location Wars, Twitter Turns on Geolocation On Its Website, Location Isn’t A War Between Two Sides, It’s A Gold Rush For Everyone, What Did The Location War Look Like At SXSW? Like This and Google Escalates The Location War With Google Places.
And Tech Crunch are right, there is a location war going on, but it’s not the war that Michael Arrington and crew are thinking of; this war is much more insidious. It’s the war against GeoBabel and it’s being fought right now on two fronts.
Front number one is your place is not my place. You may think we’re talking about the same place, the same POI, the same location, the same city or neighbourhood but we’re not. You’re fluent in Gowalla, I’m fluent in Foursquare and the rest of the internet is fluent in Geonames, OpenStreetMap and WOEIDs, each with their own subjective view of where. GeoBabel.
The second front is we think we’re speaking the same terminology, we’re not. Recent articles and comments, not exclusively restricted to Tech Crunch, have bandied about the terms place, map, location, centroid, coordinate, long/lat and used them interchangeably and inconsistently. GeoBabel again.
There’s little doubt that the dream of location as a key context is now on the cards and we’re rushing headlong to meet it. We think we’re all speaking about the same thing, but the sad truth is that we’re speaking about totally disparate concepts and terms most of the time.
Until we solve this GeoBabel in the making, the location war will be lost without most of the people impacted by it ever knowing it was being fought.
Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary
Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.
Mail | Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | More Posts (271)Other bloggage that may or may not be geo-related to this one:
- Talking GeoBabel In Three Cities (And Then Retiring It)
You’re invited to speak at a conference. Great. The organisers want a talk title and abstract and they want it pretty much immediately. Not so great; mind goes blank; what...
- Your Place Is Not My Place; The Perils of Disambiguation
We take the art of geographic lookup for granted these days; type a place name into a form on a web site or feed it into a web service API...
- Finding Inspiration And Teaching Myself Location History At The BCS Geospatial SG
With GeoBabel firmly put to rest, I was looking for inspiration when Andrew Larcombe asked me back to the British Computer Society’s Geospatial Specialist Group to speak. After a week...
- The Letter W and Hype (or Local) at the Location Business Summit
Each time I give my Hyperlocal or Hype (and Local) talk it morphs slightly and becomes more scathing of the term hyperlocal. I started to write the talk for Where...
- Mistaking the Context for the End Game
This is a post about location (for a change); but it doesn’t have to be about location as it’s all about mistaking a vital element for the end game itself....
