The official Sensor Web Track Call for Papers has been issued. Learn more. at GeoWeb-SensorWeb.

On Wednesday, July 29th - the opening session of the Academic Track (9:30am - 10:15am) will be presented by Thomas H. Kolbe and Sisi Zlatanova.

More detail: Digital cityscapes are investigated in different research domains like geoinformation sciences and photogrammetry (GIS), computer graphics and computer vision, and computer aided architectural design (BIM). In the opening session the different origins, their corresponding modeling approaches and their interrelationships will be reviewed, being a key motivation for the Academic Track.

Furthermore, the use of virtual city and landscape models for disaster management will be highlighted and an introduction to the corresponding ISPRS working groups will be given.

So its my task to defend SOAP and so with a heavy dose of jet lag, I woke up this morning and intended to dive into the technical detail and start a technical ‘Battle Royal’ (one of my favourite films by the way) with my fellow panelists. However, my Sales Director keeps telling me that its time that Snowflake stops thinking technical features and focuses more on customer requirements. SME businesses like Snowflake often adopt a “build it and they will come strategy” – attracted by the latest technology and believing that customers want the latest big thing. That’s the line I want to take in putting my case for SOAP. Not a technical one, but a business one. SOAP is requirement its not a matter of whether there’s better webservices technology out there.

Snowflake supplies Data Exchange solutions to communities with large data volumes and complex data models. These communities are like super tankers, they define a course and stick to it. As it stands today a lot of these tankers left the dock and long time ago, way before the likes of RESTful became the next big thing. Communities have done the hard work, they’ve agreed exchange models and defined an architecture for data exchange. Its based on SOAP and its now time to implement. People want SOAP because its defined in their architecture, yes the new kids on the block are more agile, easier to use and hold a good technical argument, but you can’t get away from the fact that SOAP has momentum and people bought into it many years ago. There are many huge communities who are building with SOAP and the WS-* stack. In fact, entire countries have web services standards that mandate SOAP as a means of participating in centralized government infrastructure . No matter what technical argument, SOAP wins because it’s the building blocks of infrastructure.

By Ian Painter, Snowflake Software

GeoWeb’s first Business Issues Panel brings together a panel of experts in executive business issues, technology, and standards to discuss the impact new applications, the availability and accessibility of data, and the GeoWeb infrastructure have on the ability to solve such pressing business problems as finding new customers, increasing productivity, better financial management, developing better products, becoming more competitive, developing more efficient and safer operations, increasing speed to market, and improving internal and external communications. Find out how the GeoWeb infrastructure creates new business opportunities and new business models. Find out the business questions and answers you need to implement location solutions into your business—what data? Where’s the data? When is interoperability an issue? What’s the ROI?

This panel will be moderated by Natasha Léger, Editor of LBx Journal, the new multi-media resource for location intelligence exclusively focused on translating geospatial applications in the language of business for business professionals interested in exploring the location dimension of business. Panelists are Craig Bachmann, ITF Advisors; Clemens Portele, Interactive Instruments; Sean Gorman, FortiusOne; Sam Solt, Clear Path Labs. Each panelist will tackle a different business issue.

Sean Gorman, CEO of FortiusOne will be talking about how to harness the deluge of data emerging from location aware devices, dynamic feeds, sensors, web services, enterprise warehouses and the public domain to provide business insight. It is the convergence of enterprise data with the “Web of Things” (Web connected locationally aware devices) and web-based GIS that increases the business intelligence value of internal and external data.

For instance this map of Brightkite (social networking data from a location enabled mobile device) check-ins and Starbucks locations:

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/5825

You can now track the proximity of mobile customer activity to retail locations and also crawl to see if they are talking about coffee or the brand. Traditional demographics could also be added to the map to look at correlations with a target market segment.

The same way we have dashboards (Google Analytics and Omniture) to map web traffic to our sites we’ll have personal dashboards to map our mobile application patterns. Whether those are your patterns, your customer’s patterns or potential customer’s patterns.

Specific to Vancouver GeoCommons has a map of TransLink Sky train usage

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/6552

Vancouver carbon emissions compared to the rest of Canada

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/6553

Lastly an article the Vancouver Sun ran this year where they used GeoIQ to map out parking tickets in Vancouver then contributed the data to the public domain.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/most-ticketed-areas.html

Find out more at the panel session about this search-based approach to location intelligence can help identify new revenue growth, what FortiusOne calls visual intelligence.

View the the technical sessions details page to read the abstracts of over 50+ presentations.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have been around for some time now, and are often used for file sharing applications over the internet. In a P2P topology, every computer connected to the network can be a peer, and no central server is required. This makes P2P networks very flexible, scalable, and reliable as there is no single point of failure. These capabilities also make P2P networks very suitable for the GeoWeb, as their architecture easily allows sharing and synchronization of heterogeneous, distributed, geospatial data over the Web.

All peers are equally capable of providing and consuming resources, and they can advertise resources that they want to share to other peers that maybe interested in sharing them. Given the dynamic structure of the GeoWeb, where new geospatially-related data appear rapidly and in ever growing quantities, this is the only architecture that can handle these proliferating environments. This has already been proven in other application domains, such as the use of Voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) technologies like Skype for tele-communications.

But a Peer-to-Peer structure alone is not sufficient for a pervasive, dynamically-changing GeoWeb. The architectural infrastructure of Event Driven (ED) capabilities are also needed, for enabling the automation of data sharing and replication as well as for handling notifications about changes and their metadata. An ED architecture is particularly necessary in collaboration environments, such as in crisis management, that require realtime data exchange to gain a common operating picture.

SOAP-based web services, as well as RESTful architectures, are still following a client/server paradigm as they expect a specific functionality to be returned by a request even if the request response is asynchronous. This impedes agility, as the consumer and the provider of the functionality are depending on each other. Both architectures allow a decoupling of the message or interface level from the implementation, but not from the functionality. Even in an orchestrated controller environment, such as a BPEL-driven service component architecture, the controller needs to know which functions to call to get an expected result.

In contrast, in a ED/P2P architecture, the functionality of distributed system components is totally decoupled. The component that creates an event does not need to know what a subscriber to this event will do with it, or even whether any component is interested in the event at all, and the publisher of an event does not direct any event directly to a consumer component. The subscriber to an event relies only on the information published, and is unaware of where and by whom the event was created. The subscriber may change the functionality that is driven by this event at any time, without the event producer having any knowledge of such a change.

Paired with the scalability and flexibility of the P2P network, the GeoWeb becomes a dynamic horizontally- and vertically-scalable infrastructure that can support and integrate many application domains, especially geospatial applications that are driven by realtime information, such as in Aeronautical Information Management. In such an event-driven architecture, the more rigid orchestration component of a web services architecture using SOAP or REST is replaced by a Publication/Subscription framework that is totally decoupled and autonomous. This fulfills the general notion of the Web as having no centralized administration point or authority that drives the overall functionality that is available anywhere to its users.

Be sure to plan your schedule in order to attend the following panels:

Business Panel

• Finding Gold in Location! or The Changing Geo Business Landscape - Sponsored by LBx Journal

Architecture Panel

• On what architecture should we build the GeoWeb? REST-ful? SOA? Event Driven? SOAP? Peer to Peer?

Learn more on the Panels page.

Talking with VerySpatial, Ron Lake shares his view of the GeoWeb as being a digital nervous system for the planet. Mr. Lake explains how the theme for this year’s conference, Cityscapes, was selected to emphasize ways that the GeoWeb can support high value sharing and collaboration of urban infrastructure data around the building of cities. Mr. Lake also discusses the introduction of an Academic Track to this year’s conference, how the interaction between academia, industry, and government may spark new perspectives and ideas, and how bringing such a diverse audience together is what makes the conference work. Listen to the interview.

GeoWeb 2009 registration is now open.

GeoWeb 2009 and its organizers are very excited to announce the following keynote and invited speakers:

KEYNOTES [Read More]
Michael T. Jones is Google’s Chief Technology Advocate, charged with advancing the technology to organize the world’’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  He is a prolific inventor, developer of notable scientific and computer graphics software, an engineering and business executive, and an avid traveler and photographer.

Alex Miller is founder and President of ESRI Canada Limited, a privately held Canadian owned company specializing in the design and implementation of geographic information systems. Mr. Miller is a graduate of the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton with a Bachelor of Science in Surveying Engineering. Mr. Miller has over 35 years experience in surveying, mapping, engineering, information systems design and management consulting. He is past Chair of the Geomatics Industry Association of Canada, Co-Chair of the GeoConnections Policy Advisory Committee, Chair of the Geomatics Canada Advisory Committee and a member of the Federal Department of Natural Resources Minister’s National Advisory Board on Earth Sciences.

INVITED SPEAKERS [Read More]
David Boloker is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Officer for Emerging Internet Technologies in IBM Software Group. David is recognized in and outside IBM as a technical leader in the Internet software space guiding IBM’s investments as well as internal product development in the Internet space.

Dr. John Stutz helped found the Tellus Institute in 1976.The Tellus Institute is a non-profit organization providing research and consulting services, primarily to clients in the public sector, in the areas of energy, environmental policy and sustainable development. Dr. Stutz has worked for the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well as various U.S. state and Canadian provincial agencies, on issues of regulatory, economic and environmental policy.