On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Andrew Turner <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Andrea Moed <[email protected]> wrote: >> As a consumer, or at least, someone not currently building the geo-web or >> other geo-systems, the question I'm hoping to see more about is, how broadly >> accessible can we make geospatial analysis? When will it be possible for a >> non-cartographer on their own to use maps, public geodata, and geo-indexed >> private/personal data to answer a question like "Where should I plant my >> garden?", "Where in the region should I live if I want to lower my carbon >> footprint?", "Where should our neighborhood advocate for adding a park, or a >> supermarket, or more beat cops?"... etc. > > Well, there are definitely a few of us trying to tackle that > particular problem. ;) > > However, this question has come up a few times in the past year or so. > I've attributed it to a few things. By my own mention, many of us that > started hacking on new things in the space ended up starting or > joining a business that migrated our time from pondering many new > ideas to executing a growing a single (or at least fewer) ideas. Not a > great reason, but more of a practical one. > > The ideas that we were pondering but didn't tackle have somewhat been > 'proven out' by others (location gaming, friend finding, photo > sharing). Consider Path, Color, FourSquare, Facebook Places, et al. > doing a bit of "sucking the air out of the room". They're no longer > interesting demonstrations or ponderings but active projects or > businesses and the discussions have fractured off to those channels or > just become an aspect of another discipline (e.g. "big data")
One I haven't seen done, on any sort of scale yet at least: something which is akin to the location gaming but instead uses old maps (easy if you're in the US; harder elsewhere) and old photos to let you tag locations of old photos and do simple "then and now"s yourself. But yes, what has already been done probably makes this mostly gluing together existing pieces and not very much new. It's not "if" but "when". -- Derrick _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
