Emergency Response
Google Acquires Metaweb in Pursuit of the Sematic Web
The World is Built Entirely of "Things" and Metaweb Has Classified Over 12,000,000 of Them.
In perhaps their most serious play towards developing the concept of the Semantic Web, Google announced a few days ago that they were acquiring San Francisco-based Metaweb, as well as Metaweb's free and open database of over 12,000,000 semantically-linked data objects. Now, this is pretty big news, especially if - like me - you're a self-proclaimed disciple of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British engineer / computer scientist / MIT professor / Knight who pretty much invented the World Wide Web and first coined the phrase "Semantic Web". If you're not like me and don't yet have a good grasp on how the Semantic Web will forever change the Internet, the following is a short video clip from the Metaweb.com website to get you up to speed:
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) - A Chat with GIS Experts
A Bit of Background Information
This blog entry probably requires a bit of background information, as it is actually a repost of an article published in May 2010 on the popular job board Odinjobs.com, included here with permission from the author. About six months ago or so, I was contacted out-of-the-blue by the Marketing Director of Odinjobs, inquiring if I would be interested in participating in an online interview, along with several other experienced GIS professionals. The idea was that Odinjobs would ask the panel of experts a series of brief questions concerning their skills and knowledge of GIS and the answers posted on the Odinjobs blog, with the goal of providing other professionals and job-seekers with detailed insight into specific areas of the technology, the industry and the opportunities available. Although I was initially skeptical of the educational value of such an endeavor, I decided to participate. Well, to my delight, it turned out that the panel discussion was simultaneously insightful, interesting and very well done. I wanted to take this opportunity to both thank Odinjobs for the opportunity to share my thoughts and to share the resulting discussion with the readers here.
Augmented Reality and Google Earth - Is This "Snow Crash" Realized?
How Snow Crash Changed the Future of Mapping
For anyone who has ever read the 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson called Snow Crash, it is easy to appreciate how closely real life can sometimes imitates art. Never mind the parallels between Stephenson's "Metaverse" and the popular online game "Second Life" - that's a blog discussion for another day. I want to focus instead on examining how closely today's Google Earth and Microsoft's Bing Map (formerly Virtual Earth) emulate the "Earth" application in Snow Crash". Consider the following excerpt from Chapter 13 of the book:
America's Infrastructure Receives an Overall D Grade in 2009
On January 28, 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) published the 2009 Infrastructure Report Card for the United States. The Report Card is an assessment by professional engineers of the nation's status in 15 categories of infrastructure. The report cards is as follows:
Introducing the Advanced-Infrastructure Toolbox
Overview and History
From the time ancient humans first abandoned their nomadic ways and began to construct permanent shelters, society and individual quality-of-life have been both bound and enhanced by the technical proficiency of civil engineers---their ability to invent and apply tools and technologies as new challenges arose. During the course of history, these engineering tools naturally evolved from the groma used for surveying
roads in ancient Rome, to the slide rules that helped humans land on the Moon, to the spreadsheets and computer-aided-drafting tools used by civil engineers today. As a result, the Civil Engineering Toolbox of this generation is vastly different than the toolbox of my grandfather's generation.
About Advanced-Infrastructure.com
Welcome to Advanced-Infrastructure.com - an online community of engineering professionals, researchers and others interested in the promotion of advanced computing, sensing and continuous state monitoring and proactive decision support technologies to help address our long-term civil engineering and infrastructure management needs.
