Evangelizing the “Pillars of a Changing Computing Environment” #comgeo

Dan Kasun, the senior director of Developer and Platform Evangelism for Microsoft's U.S. Public Sector described the trends that are changing computing. I thought it was a succinct way of describing the disruption taking place today that encompasses, cloud, mobile and social media. Kasun shared his three pillars this way:

• Near limitless resources
  • Cloud computing is creating economies of scale with up to 80% reduction in IT costs; e.g. Microsoft's Chicago data center is a 700,000 square foot facility that is managed by 35 people.
  • He sees that cloud computing's new business model is an agent that will spur economic growth.
• Ubiquitous computing
  • Broadband networking has created inexpensive and low infrastructure costs.
  • In a populated society, sensors are everywhere (and eventually many of these sensors will be connected to the network)
  • Gartner is predicting that by year end 2012, physical sensors will create 20% of non-video internet traffic" (i.e. temperature,  air flow, humidity, navigation, sound,  pressure, vibration … all tied to a location)
• Natural "human" interfaces
  • Socialization is everywhere and communications have been molded to allow consistent interaction.

Kasun used an example that Microsoft has created call Eye On Earth, a mapping application of European sensor locations that display the status of air and water conditions. But the platform also allows users to rate the status of any place using social media to update the status of the environment with certain rating factors (dirty, clean,  etc.). Kasun believes that this platform is a good example of mixing cloud technology with social media and human interaction.

Indoor Positioning and the Navigation of Small Spaces - Presentations from the OGC workshop at COM.Geo #comgeo

Indoor navigation comprises the collection of 2D mapping data, building information models (BIM)  and 3D visualization. Presentations delivered at COM.Geo this week nicely framed these issues.

Carl Smyth, director at MobileGIS Ltd, characterized the situation by stating that small scale spaces are inherently 3D, but for true navigation applications, human cognition is challenged. Applications must consider that the obfuscation of objects is prevalent.

Perfect knowledge models break down because there might be too much detail; too many sources; no consistency; and details are incomplete. In contrast with large spaces, most small space features are "areal" and not "linear." So, how does the paradigm change for indoor navigation? Smyth suggested these principals:

• Pay attention to human cognition.
• Incorporate mobile device sensors.
• Offload "hard" conversion, mining, rendering, image processing, or line of sight remotely to a cloud service.
• Agree to work with partial and contradictory information from multiple sources.
• Build on a self-sustaining web of consumed and created resources.

Not surprisingly, the company that has invested so much in vehicle navigation, NAVTEQ, is looking closely at facilitating navigation to objects as well, or what Paul Bouzide of NAVTEQ calls "highly-context-focused 'around me' use cases." Citing the not always obvious issue that geospatial features and properties are dynamic. He mentioned that in the case of building models, walls and fixtures change, color schemes and décor change and signage can be altered both purposely and otherwise. Any change can matter crucially to the contextual behavior of the application and to maintaining believability and realism. Most changed features or properties exist in relation to others and can depend on prior changes for consistency. NAVETQ also considers adjuncts to road navigation such as parking spaces, road edge, or sidewalks as a component of small space navigation

Geoff Zeiss, Autodesk's director of the Utility Industry Program, discussed how BIM has significant cost savings not just in pre-construction visualization but also during the entire constricution process so that project managers can keep the project on schedule. But Zeiss pointed out that the biggest use is in operating and maintenance management after construction where, as mentioned above, objects properties change and keeping track of these changes is critical to good building maintenance. Zeiss truly feels that BiM may represent an inflection point in engineering design.

Dr. Eyal Ofek, a principal researcher at Microsoft on the Bing Maps team demonstrated how the problem of "data freshness" and currency can be mitigated by using crowd-sourced information like photos. Microsoft Photosynth has been used to illustrate changes to both indoor and outdoor environments.

Michael Loushine, a senior scientist with Telcordia Applied Research presented information about how to "Move E911 Indoors" thereby extending the scenarios we use for emergency response to indoor situations. He said that standards are being used to Improve situational awareness in e911 prototypes such as those from the OpenMobile Alliance (OMA), 3GPP, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Presence Information Description Format Location Object extension (or PIDF-LO) and the OMA Secure User Plane (SUPL) to perform network-based position determination and context. However key to any implementation would be also based on OGC specifications and the use of CityGML would be important.

Summarizing this session that was organized by the OGC was George Percival suggesting that from here, much collaborative development needs to occur to expand the Geoweb to an "Internet of Things." While the session focused more on the platform development rather than the positioning device environment (i.e. RFID tags or other RF sensors), sensor web enablement (SWE) was a central theme to the entire discussion.

See also OGC's resources.

The Internet of Places and Things in a More Thoroughly Observed World #comgeo

At the COM.Geo conference today held at George Washington University in downtown Washington DC, there were several presentations on the "Internet of places and things." While none of the information presented by the speakers was new or earth-shattering, the body of material was more about the patterns of location data and a more semantic approach to search to understand those patterns.
 
In a presentation by Giuseppe Conti of the Fondazione Graphitech  (Center for Advanced Computer Graphics Technologies) in Italy he wanted to better enable the "Internet of Places"  with a virtual structure of space-time-tasks to find and use Internet resources more easily. He believed that when crawling the web for information that searches should be implicitly spatial. In fact, later in the day, Richard Barnes from BBN pointed to the obvious case where if you used a browser in a public place such as a library, and searched on "Starbucks," for example, the results would automatically suggest those nearest to the location where the person issued the search. This kind of search is not brokering location from a device like a cell phone but rather something like the browser's IP address or perhaps even other searches from that browser.

Conti also suggested that searches on the Internet should be indexed to accommodate the "vast range of scales" defining "different spatio-temporal tolerances." The implication for both of these examples is that today's Internet searches are entirely inadequate . Both Barnes and Conti where suggesting that Web search architecture needs to change and Barnes suggested that location services based on context is much more relevant.

Kipp Jones, chief architect at  Skyhook Wireless, presented his thesis on how data from aggregate user behavior could be used. Skyhook Wireless collects historical and real-time data from the aggregate uses of its location server. These data can be viewed as thematicized surface or "heat" maps.  Baselines of these patterns could be cataloged so that anomalies to these patterns might show some unique demographic characteristic. For example, what might these data indicate about "groups" of users (think "flash mobs") patterns associated with "events" like a sports event. Skyhook has marketed these "SpotRank" to retailers and others in hopes of getting them interested in looking at a new kind of demographic data that can be gleaned from aggregate, anonymous location requests. Could retailers react to this new kind of search that reveals data for which they could offer coupons and other offers.

Finally, in a presentation on another kind of data search, Jon Gosier of Ushahidi presented information about using QR codes in crisis events. To Gosier, QR codes are very much like "check-ins." They would be easy to integrate into a well-coordinated crowd-sourcing project and a quick and effective way to augment participant experience. But Gosier suggested that QR codes could be used in a few different applications:

• Sending instructions or transmitting messages
• Triggering a remote process (API call)
• Triggering a process on the device itself - like triggering a phone to send a message to people who do not have smartphones
• Authentication; the QR code can serve as an identification measure
• Logistics/resource allotment - sender may know what resources are available at sender location

So, I took away from this first day that more people are thinking about the problem of location-based context searching and the mechanism by which we explicitly or implicitly use location in search criteria.