GeoWeb 2008 Conference – Infrastructure: Local to Global » Blog Archive

GeoWeb Morning Keynote Day 2 community

Vector1Media
July 24th, 2008

The morning keynote today was given by Michael Jones, chief technology advocate at Google, with responsibility for Google Maps and Google Earth. Jones started his talk by stating that in his past two keynotes at this event, he’s covered all the technical details and so the topic of his talk would be on the promise of the technology, with the title The Power of the GeoWeb.

Jones stated that the vision for the technology is working, the idea of marrying the web and geographic information has worked. The power has been brought to bear and now the focus is on how to harness the technology into the future.

Jones started by discussing the power of scale and that some things inherently need to be big. He stated that in the last 10 years, 1 Billion people are regularly online. With 6.5 billion in the world, that’s one in six that are doing things that they didn’t do just ten years ago. Following are some metrics that Jones posted on screen.
- About a Billion searches are done on Google daily
- Every day is a day that each user searches (before it might have just been librarians and geospatial folks)
- 400 Million Google Earth users
- 250 Million involved in social networking (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)
- 80 Billion e-mails and IM sent daily
- 10 Billion YouTube videos streamed monthly in USA

The way the world talks isn’t yet through geospatial browsers. The growth of the GeoWeb is five or so years behind mass exception. In another five years, it will be another factor of 10 larger than it is now.

Jones shared a video with interviews of broadcasters at KBPS in San Diego that placed a map online for fire tracking, and the use just took off. A quote from one of the fellows involved really struck home for most, when he said, “It’s pretty simple, it doesn’t take super geeks to create a map.”

The map became a central method to manage the fire. It was a citizen-managed disaster response, but not the first time that it has been done. A similar thing happened in New Orleans, and Jones revisited that disaster, saying that he spoke with Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu who asked him to, “Please put New Orleans in Street View. Help us tell our story to America. So that maybe Americans will feel like fellow Americans.”

The issue in New Orleans is that rebuilding isn’t happening quickly enough. Money has been approved, but the way it was approved makes rebuilding very slow. The power of maps, and particularly street views, is critical to telling this story.
Jones discussed the company’s 3D modeling strategy, saying that the vision is user-generated content, and that recently that effort is gaining critical mass. There are now twenty to thirty cities that have really engaged on creating their 3D city within Google Earth. Washington, D.C. has added all of their buildings and others are getting involved.

The effort is imminently scalable, because it isn’t Google needing to create or buy the data. Jones said that the world wants to describe itself spatially, for the benefit of all the world to see. Publishing full details makes sense for a lot of cities, but businesses are a year ahead.

Walt Disney World had artists take pictures of every possible thing to model their environment. Every pole, every item is completely modeled. Jones said that he would describe the level of detail as ridiculous if he didn’t work for Google Earth. But the beauty is that people can live the experience ahead of time and after the fact and tell stories in a way that are emotionally real. This level of modeling will make sense for a lot of areas, particularly for public places that you are proud of.

As an aggregate the commercial outfits that are serving the commercial GeoWeb are serving a lot of people, and it’s a momentum thing that will continue to grow. The beauty is that it’s not someone selling, pushing or visionaries telling people to create maps, it’s real people saying that if it worked for my friend it will work for me.

Jones said that Google doesn’t have the money to buy all the data. There are places that from a practical standpoint are undermapped. Maybe data exists, but it’s too expensive. To answer the problem, Google created Mapmaker (google.com/mapmaker). The service has been online for just a few months and it’s starting to populate. Jones has personally taken on the responsibility for mapping Nassau, Bahamas and locals are starting to fill in the details. Jones stressed that local people are the experts, and what they post should be considered 100% reliable.

He indicated that there’s still value in commercially-provided data, but it doesn’t cover the world. With maps that have been posted by companies and cities, he said you should look at the copyright. Google attributes data to those who created it, and suggested that if anyone builds data they’ll be happy to render it.

Jones got a bit philosophical at this point, suggesting that the power of scale won’t work unless everyone is doing it and quoting a stanza of T.S. Eliot (Gidding, No. 4 of Four Quarters)

    We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.

Jones interprets this stanza as a need to keep redefining our confidence in our realities as we age and know a little bit more. We gain wisdom through lessons learned from experience. The web will at some point give us a chance to explore things and learn things about the world without experiencing them.

Jones got a bit emotional when speaking about meeting with Condoleeza Rice, secretary of state, and showing her Google Earth details about the mass destruction in Darfur. He showed her the villages that have been destroyed and the children’s stories about seeing family killed or about girls being raped. Rice then responded, “Wow, I had no idea”, secretary of state Condoleeza Rice “We can use this.”

Jones was quick to point that he’s certain that Rice was aware of the issues with all the national agencies to help her stay on top of things, but that seeing the details in context sunk in. It’s one thing to see the details in a spreadsheet, and another to be flown to someone’s house that has been raped or killed.

Jones said that we tend to perceive things at two scales. One is the long-term, judgmental way for large problems and then there’s the reaction to problems directly in front of you. When a problem occurs right in front of you, you just act quickly, with no analysis or professorial pipe smoking. At the big scale we are very deliberative and not reactionary. Geovisualization is the tool that allows us to see everything in context and at different scales. It’s a very important tool to create action.

Jones also discussed meeting with Henry Kissinger alongside Sergey Brin. Kissinger uses Google, but has a gripe that searching is not knowing. He wants to know if Google can empower knowing, where what we find is not the anwer, but all the answers. Not ‘what’, but ‘what next?’ Not just information, but information in context. Not only now, but past, present and future, and helping people know what’s right.

The geospatial Web is the best answer. The Geospatial Web and its browsers, such as Maps and Earth, have the power of scale in terms of data and allow users to contextually organize the world’s information using the power of place to touch hearts and minds.

Jones closed by saying the opportunity to leverage the information in a geospatial browser allows us to build things in a better way to make wholesale change of human’s behavior. We’re alive in the fulcrum moment where we can change things and the huge reward for mankind is just over the hill.

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