I’ve been busy. I’ve been very busy. I’ve also been at home for all of two days in the last two weeks and whilst video chatting with my family over Skype is better than a plain old fashioned voice call it’s no substitute for being at home more; but things will settle down into a more manageable routine over the coming weeks. Being busy has meant that I’ve kept my head down and tried to assimilate all the new information with which I’m being bombarded, a fact that’s not gone unnoticed by Chris Osborne … “severe drop off in @vicchi’s bloggage and tweetage levels, means that maybe, just maybe, he is actually doing some work these days“. Quite.

I learnt today that Ovi is Finnish for door, proving for once the adage that you learn something new every day.

At Yahoo! we used to talk about eating our own dog food a lot; thankfully meaning that a company should use the products that it makes rather than that the employees develop a predilection for Pedigree Chum. Although it took me the best part of the first week to notice, Nokia certainly eats its own dog food; apart from the ever present starfish style conferencing phones in meeting rooms, there’s no desk phones at all. None. But everyone has a mobile, and uses them a lot, either over the cellular network or hooked up to the internal VOIP system through the office wifi. Actually everyone seems to have more than one mobile handset, two, three and even four handsets doesn’t seem to be unusual.

In a previous role I seemed to spend a lot of my time talking about why location and all of the many geo facets it encompasses is important. Many was a meeting with a senior exec which started with the depressing question “so .. location … is it really important?“. Nokia gets location; there’s absolutely no doubt about that. The question is now how do we deliver real value and real market share with location … and that’s half the fun and half the challenge.

Most of the time … but not all of the time.

The hey presto bit of the process seems at first glance to be relatively trivial but isn’t. Just ask anyone who’s had to implement a system that handles place names. Actually, the hey presto part is actually two discreet processes in their own right. First of all we need to identify a place, or whether indeed there’s a place at all; this is usually called geoidentification.

identify; verb; establish or indicate who or what (someone or something) is

This is the thing that determines that there is a place in “I’m in London today” but not in “I do love Yorkshire Pudding“.

Once a place has been identified, we need to work out if there’s more than one place of the same name (which is more than likely as we’re stunningly unimaginative where place names are concerned, duplicating and reusing the same name all over the world) and if so, which one. This is usually called geodisambiguation.

disambiguate; verb; remove uncertainty of meaning from (and ambiguous sentence, phrase or other linguistic unit)

Some places are pretty easy to disambiguate; as far as I know there’s only one Ouagadougou and that’s the capital of Burkina Faso. Some places should be easy to disambiguate, least at first sight; take London, that should be easy. It’s the capital of the United Kingdom. Well that’s true but it could also be the London in Ontario, or the one in Arkansas, in California, in Kentucky or any of the other 22 Londons that I’m aware of.

The gentle art of disambiguation is critical to the act of geocoding, geoparsing, geotagging and any of the other words the the location industry chooses to tack geo on as a prefix. Get disambiguation wrong and you fail on two counts.

Firstly, you’re showing your audience that you don’t know or don’t care about what they’re trying to tell you. Secondly, you allow your users the opportunity to specify the same place in a multitude of conflicting ways.

This is part of the problem of GeoBabel; your place is not my place.

So far, so theoretical, but let’s look at a concrete example of this. A few weeks back I added my Twitter account to the Twitter directory site wefollow.com. The first thing you’re asked to do is to supply your location, or to “Type Your City” as wefollow.com phrases it. So I type London and the site starts to attempt to disambiguate on the fly; so do I mean “London, United Kingdom” or “London, Ontario“? But wait, what about the other options?

Which “London” is the one tagged by 436 people but with no indication of which country? What’s the difference between “London, United Kingdom“, “London,UK” and “London England“. Space and punctuation, or the lack of it, is obviously important to wefollow.com here. So let’s try and give the system some help and start to type United Kingdom …

Oh dear. The “London, United Kingdom” still shows up but because I’ve put a space in there I don’t get offered “London,UK” anymore but I do get offered the London in the lesser known country of “Uunited Kingdom” and also “London, Ub2“, which one assumes is the UB2 postal code which specifies the London suburb of Southall.

Your place is not my place.

To be fair, I’m not singling wefollow.com out for attack here; this is just one of many examples of sites who try to use geographic lookup but end up making life difficult for their users (but which London do I pick?) and for themselves (now, how many users in London in the UK do we have?). I’d happily offer to help them; if only I could find any contact information anywhere on the site …

When I tell people I’m going to talk about my theory, a Mexican wave of shoulder slumping passes through the room, coupled with a prolonged sigh from an audience who’ve just resigned themselves to a slow painful death over the coming minutes. Luckily things perk up when my introductory slide of Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory appears but even so, it’s time to quit whilst you’re ahead.

But before I do …

One of the great thing’s about O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference is the vast number of people you meet who just fizz with ideas and intelligence in this somewhat nebulous space that we call location, place or geo. One such person is Sally Applin; she owns the domain sally.com so that’s got her off to a good start. After Where 2.0 she pointed me to her own theory that voyeurism and narcissism sell software.

People like to look at themselves and at other people. If they can do it at the same time–then the application will succeed! Look at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Skype–basically any software that allows for both looking at others and self viewing, self reading, self posting etc…will sell. We’re on the chimp ladder. We like to compare ourselves and compete.

If you generalise software out to the slightly more generic terms ofservice or product; you’ll see that Sally’s theory complements the Theory of Stuff quite nicely and even provides an exemplar of those businesses and ventures that prove the theory.

This is especially interesting when you look at the success (to date at least) of ventures in the social space, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. What else are these is not an online way of saying “look at me, here I am, this is what I’m doing” and in doing so generating a vast sea of highly localised and personalised data into the bargain?

Thus both myself and the ever readable James Fee were vastly amused to see Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch refer to CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap.

Many people describe CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap project as “Wikipedia for maps,” and they aren’t far off. The project allows anyone to add and edit map data around the globe, and the project is now a viable open and free source of mapping data for third party developers.

Now is probably a good point to mention that CloudMade was founded (by OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast amongst others) in 2007 and OpenStreetMap launched in 2004. Geo chicken … meet Geo egg.

I look forward to reading about other TechCrunch exclusives including the discovery of RedHat’s Linux and British Airway’s airplanes.

The focus of the Horizon event was to discuss the infrastructure needed to support location in its role as a key context and to identify any research theme that came out of the discussions; a classic case of the ill defined and fuzzy interface between the commercial world and that of academia.

The day was split into three thematic tracks:

• The Location Challenge
  • What are the challenges specific to the capture and management of location data?
  • What is the state-of-the-art in the technologies available to store, query and present location data?
  • How do we understand location in context, especially in real-time, on the move?
• Whose Data Is It Anyway?
  • What data should be considered “personal”?
  • Should I “own” data about me, such as where I am, my home electricity usage, my bank transactions?
  • How can users be enabled and encouraged to manage this data?
  • What technologies are available to do this?
  • How, when and by whom should “personal” data be exploited?
  • What checks and balances should be in place to protect all stakeholders, including both citizens and service innovators?
• Can Crowds Be Authoritative?
  • Crowd sourcing is a powerful technique for data collection enabled by modern handheld devices, but how far can user-contributed data be trusted?
  • What are the processes required in order to meld crowd-sourced data with existing, authoritative, datasets?
  • What are the legal implications of generating, combining and using such user-generated datasets?
  • For example, what environmental details could citizen sensors collect?
  • How might this change our understanding of the live state of the world?

The location challenge session was a basic introduction to geo and to location, just to get everyone on the same page. A small wry cheer from myself and Ed was caused by the mention of slippy maps after half an hour of pure GIS but the session was also notable for reminding us that GPS isn’t just the domain of the US NAVSTAR system, though it’s the one we’re most familiar with and which is considered pretty much synonymous with GPS (the Wikipedia entry for GPS redirects to the NAVSTAR entry). But there’s also the Russian GLONASS, the Chinese COMPASS and the European Galileo systems chafing at the heels of NAVSTAR and threatening it’s hegemony. We also touched on the accuracy of satellite navigation systems, ranging from the fictitious, with Dan Brown asserting that “(GPS) is accurate within 2 feet anywhere in the world”, even when in the toilet in the Louvre, to the technically feasible, with accuracy of 1 cm being touted as possible. Though no one in the room was able to articulate precisely what use 1 cm GPS accuracy would be.

The low point of the session was a rambling and tedious sales pitch from Oracle which can be summarised concisely as “there’s an explosion of (geographic) data coming, you need to buy our (highly priced) servers in order to cope with it”. It’s a shame no-one’s told Flickr about the need for Oracle servers as they’ve been making MySQL and commodity Linux servers cope with an explosion of data for a while now.

The high point of the session was a (rather hip looking) Doctor who’s name escaped me who’d managed to do something that eludes many commercial concerns. They’d managed to put together a prototype, intelligent car pooling and routing service, complete with web, mobile and SMS interfaces, together in just a few weeks. Oh and it worked as well; this was not only deeply impressive but illustrated the positive social and community facet of this thing we call location.

An an erstwhile privacy nerd, the session on whose data is it anyway? was fascinating, defining and categorising a whole range of what can be considered personal data:

• access data (name, address, phone number)
• direct data (photos)
• intrinsic data (fingerprint, genome)
• state data (location, activities)
• transactional data (finance, journeys, purchases)
• interaction data (things I say and do)
• indirect observation data (energy usage)
• things I create data (emails, texts, documents, photos)
• things I’m given data (emails, texts, documents, photos)
• things I’ve seen data (documents, tweets, locations)

With all of this data being out there, in a variety of data sinks, both personal, governmental and commercial, the concept of a distributed, durable, scalable and trusted personal data store was floated as a theoretical solution; much emphasis should be placed on the word theoretical by the way. A worthy theoretical concept, the notion of if you need to know about me, ask my PDS, is alas one that the majority of the audience who hail from a commercial background, view as interesting but flawed and not viable in the real world.

The high point of the session was a recommendation to read Paul Ohm’s Broken Promises of Privacy; the low point the need to Lynne Truss to visit the room unannounced to pounce on the person who thought that “Who’s Data is it Anyway?” was acceptable for a title slide.

The final can clouds be authoritative session started aptly withe a quote from Wikipedia and paired Muki Haklay from University College London against Glen Hart from the Ordnance Survey. Whilst the pairing may have been unintentional, following a strong proponent of the crowd sourced OpenStreetMap with a pointed, if tongue in cheek, talk from the OS made comparisons difficult to avoid. Stephen Feldman’s write up of the day has more insight on this final session and is well worth a read.

Acronym of the day goes to BHP, which left the audience looking perplexed until it was revealed as a Bloody Hard Problem. Days like this are essential to draw academia away from a pure research perspective and to get representatives of commercial organisations and academia talking on common ground … that in itself is a BHP which Horizon goes a long way towards solving.

Entering the longitude and latitude above into one of the many online mapping sites on the web will  show you the St. Pancras branch of wallacespace, close to London’s Euston and Kings Cross St. Pancras rail termini and seems a fitting and apt way to write a blog post about WhereCamp EU, the first geo unconference to be held in the United Kingdom and in Europe.

WhereCamp is traditionally held in California’s Silicon Valley after the Where 2.0 conference and is based on the BarCamp unconference ethic to be a counterpoint to the expensive and corporate outlook of Where 2.0. Last year, both myself and Chris Osborne were at both Where 2.0 and WhereCamp and both came up with the idea of “wouldn’t it be great to bring WhereCamp to Europe?”

Just under a year of planning, organising and wheedling cash out of sponsors, Chris and myself, with the support of the rest of the organising team, welcomed 180 people to Europe’s first WhereCamp.

I was both proud and privileged to kick start things off with an introduction to how WhereCamp EU came to be, explaining to the slightly bemused but thoroughly enthusiastic audience just what an unconference is and how it all worked.

I’d decided that a good way to introduce the event would be to define where, unconference and WhereCamp EU:

• where – the question asked by people when they try and work out how much it will cost to get to Where 2.0 and WhereCamp in Silicon Valley.
• unconference – a conference without all the things you hate about conferences, such as massive corporate involvement, sales pitches and formality
• WhereCamp EU – a two day, free unconference about all things geo, place and location

I then handed over to Chris who totally upstaged me with a gorgeous visualisation of how OpenStreetMap mapped Central London, courtesy of his day job with ITO.

The key to WhereCamp EU, just like any other unconference is “the wall“, which is where the days of the conference are marked off in half an hour slots. An unconference is a user or participant driven conference; if you want to see what’s going on, you check out the wall, if you want to participate, you grab a PostIt note, write your name and the talk title down, find a free slot on the wall and make sure you turn up on time. Participation is usually a brief talk followed by a, sometimes passionate, Q&A session, but it can also be an open forum discussion, a demonstration or some good old fashioned hacking.

Unconferences are common in the US, where the concept originated, but less so in Europe, so the organising team made sure that we seeded the wall with initial talks to get things started and to show people how it worked. Our initial fears that the wall would remain empty were quickly quashed as a sea of yellow PostIts took over the wall, fuelled by a melee of talk proposers, anxious to get their talk into a free slot, and participants who wanted to see what the next session was all about.

My initial talk in the main room was on Location, LB(M)S, Hype, Stealth and Stuff and provided a series initial thinking points around the LBMS hype, around gathering stealth data and on how my Theory of Stuff validates the success and failure of location based ventures.

Yet again I was upstaged by the (err) creative and passionate talk titles which appeared on the wall.

After a totally exhausting day we retired to a local bar for geo-beers, courtesy of one of our sponsors, and to review the day. I wasn’t able to make the second day of the unconference due to family commitments but my sources tell me it was an equal success.

High points for me were standing in front of a room full of people at the kick off session, a lot of whom had travelled a significant distance to be there; watching the ladies toilets being used furtively by the men; seeing the youngest participant in a conference I’ve even seen (3 months) and watching Hal Bertram from ITO produce jaw droppingly gorgeous data visualisations.

Out of all the things I’ve done in the geo industry, being involved with putting WhereCamp EU together has got to be a personal and professional high. It would be good to do it all over again next year wouldn’t it … ?

Angus Fox, one of the organisers of the DevNest, had first got in touch with me last year after the launch of the Yahoo! Placemaker web platform that allows recognition of place references in unstructured text. Placemaker plus Twitter status feeds seemed an ideal candidate for a mashup and Angus was keen to get me to talk to his hard-core Twitter and social media literate developer audience.

Then in November 2009 Twitter announced their use of WOEIDs, the language neutral geographic identifiers that underpin Placemaker and the other Yahoo! Geo Technologies platforms, in their new Trends API. Naturally all of the Geo group at Yahoo! were excited, verging on ecstatic, at this. But getting our respective schedules in synch with each other wasn’t the easiest of things and 2009 came to a close without getting a firm date in the diary.

2010 arrived and Twitter launched their Trends API and exposed WOEIDs to the world and Angus got in touch again and we both put the seventh DevNest in our respective schedules.

Come the evening of Wednesday March 10th and I made my way to the Sun Microsystem’s Customer Briefing Center, just north of London Bridge where I was joined by Ewan MacLeod, the straight talking and highly entertaining and informing editor of Mobile Industry Review,  Paul Kinlan, Developer Programmes Engineer at Google and a plentiful supply of beer and pizza.

Ewan went first and you knew he was tapping into a rich vein of mobile geekery when a slide of his tee shirt drew such loud chuckles and guffaws from the audience, myself included.

Ewan’s deck is on SlideShare.net here and it speaks for itself even without an accompanying video; I strongly urge you to browse through his deck for some fascinating stats on mobile phone usage, breakdown and penetration and for the low down on exactly how much impact the iPhone is, and more importantly, isn’t making.

I was up next and gave a talk on (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Geo (with WOEIDs), which attempted to give this tech savvy audience a background on what geocoding, reverse geocoding and geoparsing are, why this isn’t a trivial task, what WOEIDs are and why they’re important for geo and for deriving meaning from content, such as Twitter status updates.

My deck accompanying the talk is above and there’s also a (slightly shakey) video to accompany it as well.

Closing the talks was Google’s Paul Kinlan who gave us the low down on Google’s Buzz and showed that the adage of never work with children, animals and live demos still has life it in.

Accompanied throughout by beer and pizza courtesy of the event’s sponsors, the Twitter DevNest was thoroughly enjoyable, a bit of a revelation in places and showed that Twitter has a deep and very enthusiastic developer following.

And so almost a year later I went back and started to research exactly how the United Kingdom, Great Britain and the British Isles are actually put together. It was an educational journey because, even with being born and bred in London, it turned out that even I didn’t fully understand this subject. So I tried to codify it with a variation on The Great British Venn Diagram, which looks something like this:

Let’s start with the easy bit. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries at an administrative level; they’re shown in yellow on the diagram above.

Great Britain, so named as to distinguish itself from Brittany, is a geographic island which comprises the countries of England, Scotland and Wales.

The United Kingdom is a sovereign state, shown in red, which comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ireland, also a geographic island, contains the administrative country of Northern Ireland and the sovereign state of the Republic of Ireland or Eire.

So far so good, but what about the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? Both of these are not part of the United Kingdom, instead they are both Crown Dependencies, shown in purple, and are part of a federacy with the United Kingdom. And a federacy? That’s a type of government where one or more of the member administrative units have more independence than the majority of the member administrative units.

Finally, there’s everything else; those remnants of the British Empire scattered across the globe which enjoy the slightly nondescript appellation of British Overseas Territories (or British Dependent Territories prior to 2002 or Crown Colonies prior to 1981).

To be more precise, these are parts of the British Empire that did not gain independence and that the United Kingdom asserts sovereignty over.  They take in Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Of course not everyone agrees with these definitions …

Written and posted from the Kempinski Hotel Bristol in Berlin (52.5052405, 13.3280218)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous