Geospatial Meaning

CINeSPACE, experiencing urban film and cultural heritage while on the move, is a 6th Framework Programme european project in its second year. One of its main objetives is providing a rich media delivery platform for distributing specific, location-based urban, cultural and film information. The access to the content is semantically enhanced, so information can be filtered according to the context or user profiles.

As part of this project we are studing how humans interact with our physical context. The scenario changes when humans interact with the context, and with the multimedia available in that context. To model his scenario we should consider not only where we are but also where we are looking at.

We have analyzed geotagging process in social information spaces and found that there exists an ambivalent meaning for geographic points in such process. The geographic lat/long usually refers to the target of the video or photo, but sometimes the place where the photo was taken from is recorded. We call this issue the source-target problem in geotagging processes. Again, location and sight concepts are merged.

We have devised Geoconcepts ontology, which attempts at exploding the source-target problem. The results of this research will be presented at ICGIS 2008 conference.

Several new proposals are focusing on the “vision aware” context, and thanks to image recognition, providing related information. Some days ago Mans Shapshak introduced us Photosynth, a virtual 3D photo browser. It’s a pretty cool tool, which allows walking or flying through a virtual scene to see photos from any angle. But one thing is getting this working in a PC, and a different one to incorporate it to a mobile device.

Eyephone, in the other side, makes a realistic proposal for mobile device leaving all processing costs to server side. A demo is showed below. Using advanced object recognition from SuperWise Technologies they take as an input the GPS position, a photograph taken by the user, and the relative angle of vision to provide information about the location the user is looking at. You will think, It is perfect! Well, it would, if they had a prototype in the market…

We have made a small step in order to integrate vision and location to geospatial semantics, but more research is needed. Both meanings should be taken into account in systems which provide multimedia content while on the move, as in CINeSPACE.

The list of location aware services grows every day. I have special interest on those services which aims at reducing the gap between human geospatial thinking and computer machine reasoning. I bring a nice example today, outside.in project.

An important percentage of worthwhile information for us is located near our home, or work place. That is our neighbourhood. But there exists a long distance between people who provide that information, and people who consume it. For instance, the street where we live could be closed for traffic because of an accident or for some repairs. Perhaps we are lucky and our council notifies to all citizens affected on time. Alice in wonderland. Most of times we’ll get notice when we take the car.

There are hundreds of examples: an special offer in our supermarket, a party in a bar near hour home, the birthday of hour neighbour, etc. etc. Sometimes interested people try to give us that information, but sometimes this is not posible. And this problem becomes bigger as the number of information sources also increases.

Outside.in project focuses on this problematic. They propose a web page where people can access information of their neighbourhood in an easy way, choosing the city + state, the neighbourhood and the city or just a zip code. Then you access to a map with the last news. Let’s see an example from Brookline neighbourhood, in Boston:

And for information providers, the mechanism is easy. You have just to add your blog to Outside.in, and submit content to it directly from your blog. There are four ways to indicate that your post has an specific location:

• Placing a link to a Google Map anywhere within a story.
• A piece of content tagged with a zip code.
• Using the where tag.
• Using GeoRSS (obviously the best).

A great article talking about this idea.
But we have bad news, It’s designed just for the USA for the time being.We’ll have to wait (or we’ll have to develop) to see it in Europe.