GeoWeb is the industry-leading conference focused on the collective impact of the Web on geographic information standards, architectures and technology and the convergence of GIS and the Internet and the resulting economic, social and technical consequences. GeoWeb 2010 will feature well known keynote and invited speakers, workshops and tutorials, technical presentations, panel sessions, and product showcase opportunities. No other geospatial conference provides this level of knowledge intensity and is a must-attend conference for anyone involved in shaping the future of the geospatial industry.

Theme: The emphasis for GeoWeb 2010 is Going Real Time. GeoWeb is about the technologies for information sharing and collaboration respecting events and activities in the real world. It is about designing our world and reacting to the changes in the world around us. It is about managing our way in the world using the best information about the current and probable future state(s) of the world.

Download the official Call for Presentations: GeoWeb 2010 Call for Presentations & Workshops

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• James Fee GIS Blog
• GeoThought Blog - Peter Batty
• It’s All About Data - Don Murray
• Spatial Explorations - Stu Rich
• Landscape Visualization

“The eventual integration of all business processes that relate to the physical world.” That’s the mission of GeoWeb, which is designed to “automate the aggregation of information about the physical world,” according to Ron Lake, founder of the GeoWeb conference (going on this week in Vancouver, http://geowebconference.org) and inventor of the Geographic Markup Language (GML) that’s used by geographic information system (GIS) professionals.

Basically, GeoWeb is the convergence of GIS and the Internet to provide fast, easy access to information about the physical world. This would enable people to find data based on its geographic location instead of just by doing keyword searches. Think Google Earth and Yahoo Maps, which have increased awareness of the role of geography as a way to index information on the Web.

Who would need this information? Well, governments for one. “Information is captured into a model of a city to support a variety of applications related to development, construction, public safety, flight zones, environmental issues and smart energy management,” Lake explained. He said that this hasn’t yet happened in a uniform way but that we’re moving in that direction.

Europe is moving more quickly than North America, Lake added, saying that Germany is taking the lead. “Hamburg and Berlin already have city models with several million buildings,” he said.

Think how vital this type of information about the physical world would be for fire and police departments during an emergency. It could literally make the difference between life and death.

As someone who works in New York City, I feel strongly that our federal, state and local governments should be “moving in that direction” a lot more quickly.

Originally posted at BaselineMag.com: http://blogs.baselinemag.com/bottom_line/content/government_it/lets_get_physical.html

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.

An annual conference on the convergence of Web technologies and geographic information systems kicked off in downtown Vancouver today (July 27).

GeoWeb 2009, which is focused on urban environments, runs until Friday (July 31) at Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue.

Today’s and tomorrow’s programs consist of workshops, such as Registries for the GeoWeb by David Burggraf of Galdos Systems and 3D Geospatial: Project Implementation Methods and Best Practices by Tim Case of Parsons Brinckerhoff.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday offer keynote addresses, speakers, panel discussions, and technical sessions.

Alex Miller, founder and president of ESRI Canada, will deliver the keynote on Wednesday. Michael T. Jones, chief technology advocate for Google, will present Thursday’s keynote.

The conference’s Web site states:

GeoWeb 2009 is open to all businesses, academic institutions and governments that are interested in:

* the development of new GeoWeb technology
* the impact of the GeoWeb on businesses and government policies
* the emergence of new business models for the GeoWeb
* the multitude of applications associate with the new GeoWeb technology

According to the site, on-line registration is closed, but prospective attendees can still obtain a pass at the conference.

A one-day conference pass for Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday costs $450.

The annual event dates back to the first GML Dev Days in 2002.

You can follow Stephen Hui on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenhui.

Originally posted at Straight.com.

It’s an unfortunate trait of human nature to think only in the short term, so John Stutz will have his hands full on Wednesday when he tells GeoWeb attendees to think about what life will be like 50 or 100 years from now.
Keep reading at VancouverSun.com.

By Marke Andrews VANCOUVER SUN July 27, 2009

If, say, you want to start a chain of coffee shops in the Metro Vancouver area, Sean Gorman recommends using visual intelligence (also called location intelligence) which provides digital maps and data to give a snapshot — actually more a panorama than a snapshot — of an area. Keep reading at VancouverSun.com.

The NASA Apollo missions were well named, in that Apollo was the God of Colonization. His rise in the pantheon of Greek Mythology coincided with the expansion of Greek civilization in the Mediterraean in the period 750-550 BCE. Many will see the Apollo project as the beginning of a new era of colonization as we move to become a “multi-planetary species“. For others, this is just the continuation of the great westward expansion of European civilization, now elevated to a global initiative.

Of course, there is another way to look at things. The Greek colonial expansion was driven as much by the denuding of local forests and the collapse of farm lands than it was by the desire to seek new frontiers and travel into uncharted waters. (see http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3108) Clearly the Greeks, for all their learning, had not mastered the art of sustainabilty.

Likewise, one can see the European expansion and westward colonization as driven primarily by economic factors and the need to settle and feed a rapidly growing population. The impact of that expansion on plant and animal species around the globe, from the forests of India to the bison of the American plains, underscores how little had been learned about provisioning for society in a sustainable fashion.

Now, on the anniversary of the end of the first great “moon race”, some people talk about the “need” to go to Mars, and how the U.S. and international public has lost the spirit of adventure that drove the earlier explorations. These same people want to build a new momentum and the budget for a new adventure into space, claiming that it expresses man’s deepest and most basic desire.

Some people talk of an expansion into space also as an economic activity - to find new worlds to populate - to find new mineral and energy wealth. It is, for them, a continuation of the great ocean voyages and the “opening” of the Americas. This, of course, neglects both the energy cost of moving anything off the surface of the earth, and fact that the Americas were already populated long before European arrival.

I believe that it is a time to challenge such ideas. As someone who grew up in the Age of Aerospace, I fully understand the romanticism that is being peddled. I am no tree-hugging environmentalist, and I am as guilty as the next in terms of personal responsibility to the environment. At the same time, I think we need to “put aside childish things” and recognize things for what they are.

We may indeed one day become a multi-planetary species, but this will not happen until we become a planetary society and learn to manage ourselves, and our impact on the world, in a manner with less implied hubris, and with firm grip on the finite character of our planet and ourselves.

This is not to say we should not have big dreams, nor that we should not be optimistic about our ability to rise to the challenges that face us. It is about realizing where we are and re-orienting our thinking and our priorities. Solutions to problems on earth that enable us to feed, clothe, and house our society in a modestly equitable fashion should be just as exotic, just as deserving of praise, just as worthy of the dreams of our young people as reaching for the distant stars or the nearby planets. NASA captured this very well a few years ago with its program “Mission to Planet Earth“. Let’s get that part right. Let’s embrace our planetary society while making peace with one another and all of the species with which we co-habitate upon this planet. Then, when we are ready, when it makes sense - we can go to the planets and beyond.