Oracle 11g, Spatial support expanded and OWL ontology support too!

over at the location intelligence blog there is a very interesting post about Oracle 11g improvements in spatial support. Interesting enough in web services infrastructure they support WFS 1.1 nd CSW 2.0 in addition to the already supported WMS 1.1. This is great news for OGC standard based service implementations.

One other note over at the ebiquity blog has to do with OWL support in Oracle 11g. It will be possible to do inferencing for a subset of OWL on Oracle. this means you can build queries enhanced by some OWL axioms or queries. So much for OWL into the commercial world. I expect those will be primarily targeting biotechnology markets where OWL based systems seem to be gaining more momentum.

Googlemaps API with KML and GeoRSS support

Interesting news, been around for a few days though! Google have enabled KML and GeoRSS integration into Google Maps API. This cool stuff is announced today on the googlemaps blog since it was badly needed, Also geoRSS was already supported by Yahoo API for a long while now!

GeoTagging Foot Prints.

Geo-tagging is already part of mainstream tagging. I have been thinking of implementing something that resembles regions that are derived from geotags. Simply one can use a foot print algorithm to create regions out of points. The points in this case are the geotags. And the resulting regions can be returned when the geotags are queried. The benefit is that those regions will have all the relevant tags enclosed and one can difrectly see on a map how people are tagging a certain area. You are easily able with such mapped tag foot prints/regions to figure out for example that a certain region of down town Paris has so many restaurants or pubs. This would be useful don’t you think?. Moreover people can start to tag the resulting regions and make them even more well defined.

Written From: home, Weather: rainy and windy, Mood: energetic

Mapping Social Networks

It is interesting how web social networks let you make new friends with minimal effort. I wonder if these are friends in the conventional sense though. They are more like e-pals. Research on social networks shows that geographic proximity is probably the best determiner of how often friends get together. It would be interesting of online social networks are sensitive to the location of it’s members to provide more geographic based functionality and categorization. It makes sense then that those who are geographically closer will tend to trust each others more over time as an artifact of more interaction. If social networks are location aware maybe they can eventually help us make more real friends out of our e-pals. The question remains, which is better? friends or e-pals? e-pals or friends?

Written From: office, Weather: sunny and temperate, Mood: jumpy