[Geowanking] LazyWeb request

[Anselm Hook]

One of the blocking issues seems to be GML and OpenGIS itself - insofar as
they act as a bit of a tarpit for errant hackers who are interested in the
space.  These are fine standards but tend to dominate where other lighter
standards might do better.

If you look at how well the blog space is taking off you see fairly
lightweight standards that tend to be pretty easy to play with - a lot
more people are able to get their feet dirty without getting mired down.

Actually it really does seem like these barriers to having a richly geo
annotated internet are pretty much history... if one views it from the
perspective of rdf/rss.  Services like typepad will undoubtably begin to
offer location as a property attribute of blog posts and probably more and
more people will begin to decorate their RDF graphs with location
information.  It looks like the real remaining barriers are just adoption
of the pattern.

What still impresses me about rss/rdf in general is just how robust an
idea it is.  I can remember reading Berners Lee's article in Scientific
American and just not getting why it would be valuable - but now I see
that if you turn the entire internet into a database you get a system that
with vastly superior characteristics to that of any single hosted service.
You get peer to peer, scaleability, better trust, retention of ownership,
division of roles etcetera.  The one hassle with distributed content
serving is that you need beefy aggregators to aggregate, organize and
present the content - but this provides an opportunity for services such
as feedster or google to add special value... and it doesn't diminish the
public weal.

Ben Russell raised the possibility of some low hanging fruit in the geo
app space that could be a 'killer app'...  the idea of a geolocal stuff
trading service - where people would geoblog things that they wanted to
buy or sell and the service could have hordes of little software agents
scampering around the internet trying to match up complementary interests.

An app I kind of have a soft spot for (being so shocked by some of the
things that criminals get away with sometimes) would be a forensic crime
reconstruction tool where police officers could have all the citizens in a
neighbourhood blog everything they could remember about a point and
location in time.  If the crime was particularily heinous and the evidence
unusually slim then perhaps a peek into the shared knowledge commons could
elucidate a few clues.

 - a