January 2007 ISSUE
Your World View Is Changing
GIS Day Highlights New Realities in Mapping
BY GEORGE LEE
The PEGG
Earth People
Dr. Vincent Tao, background, and Michael Jones speak to
GIS Day conference-goers. The two friendly rivals described their companies’ contribution
to the online mapping revolution.
The map, said the great semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, is not the place. The statement was designed to underline that words and other symbols are just that — symbols — and should never be confused with reality.
If he were around today, however, Hayakawa might want to revise that statement. The map is closer than ever to being the actual place, thanks to global information systems, global positioning and even your faithful camera phone.
Plenty of proof beamed down to NAIT on Nov. 16 for the school’s Computer Training Centre GIS Earth Day Conference. It brought together two of the top executives involved in turning maps into virtual worlds, where people shop, book hotels, research Africans elephants and cruise streets for good restaurants.
Speaking to a crowd of more than 250, the conference’s keynote heavy-hitters were Michael Jones, chief technical officer of Google Earth, and Dr. Vincent Tao, director of Microsoft Virtual Earth. Dr. Tao is the man responsible for Virtual Earth’s technology and business development.
Paper maps, said Dr. Tao, are going the way of the dinosaur. In fact maps and directions form the second largest reason users go online, at 75 per cent and behind only specific research at 88 per cent.
Combine that with local information, online annual advertising revenue worth billions and growing, and the 51 per cent of web users who shop online, and you have a marketplace Virtual Earth is doing whatever it can to develop.
“We connect you not only to the location but to the business,” Dr.
Tao explained. From there, you’ll find user reviews and other online communities.
You’ll even find virtual billboards — with sold space.
The picture is improving, too. Microsoft is moving to street-level, three-dimensional,
or “oblique” views, from the bird’s-eye or “ortho” view
which look down on locations.
For Michael Jones of Google Earth, the message was about breaking down information into more and new geographical frontiers. Africa, for example, is becoming less dark all the time. A GPS device can now be driven along a previously unmapped road, for example, and different locations attached to different conditions.
Information from National Geographic Magazine is attached to different places. “You basically take every magazine published, rip out the articles and attach them with little sticky notes to the globe,” said Mr. Jones.
Applications go beyond finding information and places, however. Today’s online maps can model everything from how a building or chemical plant will affect a local environment, to how a disease will spread across the world.
Dr. Joseph Berry of Colorado State University said the world is in the midst of a “graphical interface” between the real world and maps. The cell phone, the personal camera and the GPS are merging into one unit.
It means every picture you take will be automatically stamped with date, time and location. You’ll feed it directly to the virtual universe, where it will become part of the growing catalogue of photos available online.
Nearly real-time imagery will be created regularly from a torrent of amateur
photos. An online, 3-D representation of the Eiffel Tower, for example, could
actually be a software-generated amalgamation of thousands of tourist photos,
taken from thousands of different perspectives.
So the map is still not the place, Mr. Hayakawa. Not quite.