I recently participated in XTech 2007: a conference for those working with web and standards-based technologies. I've had some time to ruminate on the experience and I thought I'd share some ideas which rose to the top as I submerged myself in the deluge of information and interactions. I attended a talk on OpenStreetMap, which looks like a very interesting solution to creating and annotating detailed maps. I find their list of public GPS traces particularly interesting. There was one problem that Steven Coast brought up which stuck with me, and that is inconsistencies in tagging. OpenStreepMap allows users to tag locations with anything they like, this simplicity and flexibility can lead to rich information, but can also lead to confusion when different people use the same tags for different things, or use different tags to describe the same thing. It's a difficult problem to deal with, and we've tried to tackle this in Google Base by providing an attributes feed. The attributes feed is a dynamic and searchable list of the tags, or attributes, that people are using when describing items of a particular type. I think it certainly helps with the problem of recommending annotations, but we're working to make it better.I was also pleased to see several discussions centering on XMPP (the protocol used by Jabber, Google Talk, and other instant messaging clients), and I was surprised to see some of the applications people were building on top of this technology. A few years ago, I built a small application which used XMPP to dynamically edit a web page, and it seems others were thinking up even grander schemes. Twitter makes use of XMPP, and I saw a great demo by Massimiliano Mirra which showed how XMPP could be used as a programmatic communication channel to make single user applications into collaborative ones. There were many other interesting presentations, people, and ideas at XTech this year, but I've rambled enough. Check out the XTech's website for more information on talks you may have missed, and keep an eye out for details on next year's conference.Jeff Scudder - The Google data APIs team
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