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Google announced yesterday that KML is now an official OGC standard. With this step, KML has taken yet another step in a remarkable “career”: originally developed by Keyhole (hence the name Keyhole Markup Language) for their product Earth Viewer, the format was adopted by Google for Google Earth, which was developed based on the Keyhole Erath Viewer after Google’s acquisition of Keyhole in 2004. KML has since been added as a supported format to numerous (Web-)mapping and GIS tools. With the adoption by the OGC, KML is no longer under control of Google. OGC regards it as complementary to their existing standards (especially GML) and will probably harmonize future versions of KML with other OGC standards. I think this step will bring the two worlds of map mash-ups / online GIS and professional GIS a bit closer together and make exchange a lot easier, which will finally also make professional use of volunteered geographic information (VGI) a lot easier.

The Institute for Geoinformatics here at University of Münster is looking for a new Junior Professor, this time with tenure track. So if you are looking for a job - here is the advertisement.

I really enjoy reading Wired every time a new issue is out (and I manage to get one here in Münster, which is not always as easy as it sounds). It’s articles like this one that cause my fandom for this mag.

Have you ever wondered why people still move into crowded cities, with incredibly expensive rents, crowded public transport systems and hardly any green spots to relax, when you can live for cheap out in the green, and still be connected to the world through the Web? The answer is pretty simple:

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh.

Given the fact that there are also other factors like better cultural offerincs in the city, I am pretty sure that the situation when it does really not matter any longer where you are is still a long time coming. In other words - geography is here to stay.

Somehow, I have missed the OGC press anouncement, or will there be none? Whatever, the WPS has been released as an implementation specification at OGC after a long trail. All the documents are available through here. The schemas can be also downloaded from here.

Just in time, 52north released a new version of the 52n WPS, which implements this new version of the WPS interface specification. The 52n WPS is available as open source and implements all the features as described in the specification. You can get more details about it at the 52north wiki.

Day 2 was pretty short, because the keynote had to be cancelled because the speaker was sick. The afternoon and evening was reserved for winery tour and conference dinner, so there were only two sessions. What I liked most were the robotics-related talks – it is quite impressive what these guys can already do today. I skipped the winery tour, so I cannot report on that, but the conference dinner (Australian barbecue) was very good. For those of you interested in COSIT-related journals, it might be interesting to know that Dan Montello from UCSB is going to replace Stephen Hirtle as the main editor for the Journal of Spatial Cognition and Computation.

COSIT really has the perfect size for a conference like this. With roughly 120 attendants, it is a single track conference, so you never miss an interesting talk because you are in another session. Moreover, since only about ¼ of all submissions have been accepted, the level of the presentations is very high. Yet, the topics are pretty diverse. Today’s afternoon session was completely filled with presentations by current or former ifgi-people, all dealing with different approaches to similarity. The other sessions dealt with cultural studies and semantics. The opening of the poster session then was quite entertaining, since every poster author had exactly 1 minute to briefly outline what their poster is about. I am a bit afraid that the doctoral colloquium on Sunday will also consist mostly of talks which are cut off in the middle because the presentation time is over, but seven minutes is still seven times as much as the poster authors had today. So I hope people really keep in mind that there is a strict time limit for the presentations.

In general, COSIT has a very nice atmosphere and being here and talking to people is really interesting and also fun most of the time. And it is very good (both for our project and my PhD research) to see that similarity and context seem to be the hot topics at the moment.

Conference blogging, second try. This time it’s COSIT in Melbourne and the chance that I will find time to give you some updates is much bigger than it was at GI-Days, because I’m just one of the attendees in this case. We arrived Tuesday morning (after a 24 hours flight), so we still had one day left to have a look at the beautiful surroundings of the conference venue. On Wednesday, the activities started with a series of pre-conference workshops. I gave a talk at the semantic similarity measurement workshop, with some quite constructive feedback. A lot of good ideas were presented at the workshop, with lively discussions. At the dinner, I found myself sitting next to Deborah McGuiness from Stanford (one of the developers of OWL), so that was quite interesting for me, too, as OWL is one of the things we are heavily using in our SimCat project. Today will start with a keynote talk by Deborah, so I will have to take off now to make sure I don’t miss it.

Write to you later…

Obviously I have been promising too much. I must admit that I completely underestimated how time-consuming GI-Days would be. There was not even time to think about blogging about the conference. However, I will give you a short wrap-up of what happened in Münster from September 10-12 now.

The conference started with a little unofficial ice breaker event on Sunday evening, which already turned out to be quite nice. The actual conference then started on Monday with a keynote by Max Craglia from JRC, in his usual very entertaining way. In the first session of paper presentations, it already turned out that people were not at all as reluctant as we thought they might be - there were very lively discussions, and people got in touch very quickly during the breaks and at lunch. So it very much seemed like organizing a separate events only for people who are just starting their academic career might have been a very good idea. The other sessions on Monday and also Tuesday were full of very good presentations – apparently young researchers spend more time on preparing their slides than some of the experienced guys. The conference dinner was also a nice event, and I think a lot of connections were made during the two days of conference that will hopefully last a long time. The program was rounded of by some tutorials on Wednesday, which also got a very good feedback.

Summarizing, GI-Days were a very good conference, actually much better than a lot of people (including myself) had expected before. It looks like there is really a need for a distinct event only for PhD- and masters students, so we have to figure out in the near future how to continue this new series with another young researchers forum.

Tomorrow, the GI-Days 2007 - Young Researchers Forum will start in Münster, Germany. Since the people behind GISBlog are also among the people behind this year’s GI-Days conference, we will blog here about interesting news from the conference now and then.

This was originally intendend to be a live blog from the ongoing OGC TC Meeting in Paris, but live blogging relies on an internet connection. And as usual on conferences, wireless has been promised but fails in the moment it is needed. Anyway, I managed to get online somehow.

This is my first TC Meeting, and my collegues warned me before. The discussions will be exhausting they said, and they will argue about every word in the documents. The day started with the plenary, which was interesting. There was a short review of the recent ISO Meeting in Rome, and a small discussion started about the involvment of OGC in the ISO standardization process. The commen sense here seems to be that ISO should adapt OGC standards and OGC should take care that ISO does not break the OGC standards during adaption and modification. There has alo been a major rewrite of OGC’s IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) policy. In the future OGC tries to make their standardization process more transparent by making everything available to the public. To make the process better traceable, everything is getting a bit more formalized, which means even change requests are now official OGC documents and have to follow a default procedure. Nice move, I think.

Afterwards I attended the Geosemantics WG, which was really crowded. As long as somebody uses the words “semantics” or “ontology” in his work, everyone seems to be interested and pretends to listen. That only few at OGC have an idea what adding semantics to an application could mean, is pretty sad though. The next sessions were Data Quality and Context. The latter was really weird and an interesting example how one can spent one hour of talking about absolutly nothing.

To summarize the first day, I would say that the warning of my collegue was plainly wrong. No fierce discussions, no arguments, nothing at all. I wonder how standards can be developed in such boredom