Maps – GeoLife
Matria do The Guardian de Jack Schofield aponta para mais um sistema de mapeamento e tracking de posicionamento com possibilidades de adicionar fotos, compatilhar com amigos, agregar sensores que podem indicar condies ambientais. etc. O projeto, GeoLife, est sendo desenvolvido pela Microsoft Research’s Beijing Lab.
Trechos:
“If you’d spent a day seeing the sights in Beijing, it would be nice to be able to review your trip afterwards by watching an avatar trace your route on a map – with popup photos, if you took any.
If you wanted to give other people access, your friends and relatives might enjoy the trip too. And by comparing the routes and photos taken by thousands of visitors, Beijing’s city planners would be able to make improvements. They could, for example, highlight the most popular regions, and install helpful English language signs at the spots where tourists typically take wrong turns.
This sort of “life experience tracing” is not something you can do in Beijing today, unless you know Yu Zeng and his colleagues in Microsoft Research’s Beijing lab, where GeoLife is just one of many projects. It was also one of about 40 shown to the world’s press on the first day of TechFest 08 in Redmond last week.
(..) GeoLife could, of course, use a version of the wearable SenseCam, developed in Cambridge, which is being used in the company’s long-running MyLifeBits life-caching project. But Yu’s approach is to use ordinary mobile phones with location detection or increasingly common global positioning satellite technology. “In the future, phones might be able to detect pollution and other things that we could incorporate,” say the researchers.
(…)The idea is that you have a lot of small sensors and spread them around the environment to monitor something, such as a glacier. Being practical, Microsoft is using them to monitor some server farms, where heat is a problem.(…)”.
Outra matria sobre o mesmo tema vem do Le Monde, sobre como o Google Streer View foi enquadrado pelos militares americanos e forado a retirar detalhes de uma base americana no Texas.
Trechos:
“Google Earth ou Google Street View rvlent des petits secrets que les services gouvernementaux militaires et de renseignement se passeraient bien de voir diffuser. Un vnement a fait ragir le gouvernement amricain : il concerne une base amricaine du Texas, Fort Sam, Houston, investie il y a une dizaine de jours par une des quipes du service Google Street View, qui permet de visiter une trentaine de villes amricaines en prises de vue panoramiques. Le conducteur du vhicule spcial de Google avait simplement demand l’autorisation d’accs la base, qui avait t accepte.
(…) Le dpartement de la dfense amricain, aprs avoir ‘reu un rapport (…) informant que Google avait collect une imagerie dtaille et des vues 360 degrs d’une base au Texas’, a demand la socit de retirer l’ensemble de ces clichs. Ceux-ci reprsentent, selon le gnral Gene Renuart, chef du commandement militaire amricain responsable de la dfense intrieure, ‘un vritable risque pour la scurit [des] installations militaires [amricaines]’ (…) Google a accd cette demande et retir ces images de son service de cartographie locale.(…)”.
Mapear produzir uma representao do mundo, uma construo ideolgica, e isso desde os grandes imprios do passado (Roma, Portugal, Espanha, Gr-Bretanha) at hoje com os “imprios” das tecnologias informacionais. Embora ampliando e democratizando as formas de produo de mapas e contedos localizados, sistemas como o Google Maps/Earth/View no so neutros e esto a merc dos poderes constitudos (vejam post sobre evento em Madrid onde comento palestra de Julian Oliver sobre esse tema). Alm disso, os sistemas, embora gratuitos, no so de cdigo aberto e um API do Google Maps que usamos hoje livremente pode ser requerido no futuro pela empresa.