Environmental Engineering
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:
Sustainable Infrastructure: The Role of Innovation, Computing and Emerging Technology in Sustainability
I have been meaning to cover this topic for some time now. In my opinion, an exploration of the role of advanced infrastructure in sustainable design is both relevant and long overdue. Certainly, technology has changed the way we live, do business and think about the world. However, whether technology can also be leveraged to create a more sustainable society is an entirely different question. Many people, for example, might argue that we need to simplify our lives to make them more sustainable. I think this is largely true. However, I also believe strongly that we need better ways of measuring exactly how sustainable
