Slashgeo

Here's a summary of Google's CTO Micheal Jones keynote address during GeoWeb 2006. From the summary (point form): "30,000 Developer Sites in first 12 months using Google Maps employing API [...] Google Earth/Local/Maps Mission: to geographically organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful [...] Change in Emergency Respsonse. Change in Science Publication. Geospatial Publishing."

All Points Blog links to an article on the recurring debate this summer about the democratization of GIS and whether GIS professionals will still be as much valuable as they are now. From the article: "With the arrival of online mapping services such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth, geographic information systems (GIS) are now at the fingertips of every Tom, Dick and Mary with an Internet connection. This strikes Vint Cerf as good news. The chief Internet evangelist at Google Inc., and one of the founding fathers of the Internet, says he’d like to see a geographic equivalent of Wikipedia — “Geopedia,” he dubs it — where anyone could add to the world’s geographic know-how. Jack Dangerman is skeptical. He’s the president of Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., a leading GIS software vendor in Redlands, Calif., known as ESRI. He worries that even the best-intentioned amateur could provide inaccurate data that could lead to a disaster. “Who wants to dig a hole and run into a pipe?” Dangerman asks. [...] “Let’s not just democratize GIS data usage; let’s democratize data creation,” he says. Ron Lake, CEO of GIS software vendor Galdos Systems Inc. in Vancouver, says there is a place for “crowd-sourcing data,” and GIS professionals need to be willing to work with it. However, he adds, “there is such a thing as expert interpretation of information.”" See also related stories.

A mix of last month news and some more recent; the Spatial Miscellany blog discuss and links to The Economist long and interesting generic article on the GeoWeb, virtual globes and webmapping: "Here the neogeographers, as mash-up enthusiasts are known, have crossed into the terrain of “geographic information systems” (GIS), the fancy software tools that are used by governments and companies to analyse spatial data. Geobrowsers are still quite primitive by comparison, but are much easier to use. [...] Taken further, the result could end up being a sort of extrasensory information awareness, annotation and analysis capability in the real world. “When that happens”, says Mr Jones, “then the map is actually a little portal on to life itself.” The only thing that can hold it back, he believes, is the rate at which society can adapt." Here's a new review of the book The Geospatial Web (previous review in related stories below). And finally, All Points Blog discussing the momentum the term "GeoWeb" is gaining.

The theme for the GeoWeb 2008 conference is Infrastructure: Local to Global. To advance the development of the GeoWeb, they are sponsoring a contest, which is open to all full time students attending an educational institution anywhere in the world. The objective of the contest is to materially advance the development of the GeoWeb with either: a theoretical solution or a piece of software (All software must be open source and free of any royalties or other encumbrances).