sylvain carle people suck at naming places (version without notes)

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People Suck atNaming Places

IgniteWhere

San Jose2010/03/30

If a search falls on a map...

and nobody isaround to map

coordinatesdoes it exist?

“To be is to be perceived”

Awareness.2

Places names are...

๏Relative๏Fuzzy๏Temporal๏Variable๏All about

Perception3

Places names are...๏Historical๏Cultural๏Personal

๏Based on convention 4

Humans define places

Humans are imperfect,“namespace” of placesis really, really, messy.

Add politics, religion, ownership, language...

#l10n #i18n #hard5

Language and approximation๏ J’ai quitté mon domicile qui se situe à la

frontière des quartiers Outremont etMile-End à Montéal.

๏ Vers l’aéroport de Montréal, nommé Pierre-Elliot Trudeau, situé à Dorval, code YUL, au Québec.

๏ Direction de la côte ouest américaine, plus précisément vers SJ qui est ma destination finale.

๏ De plus, cette fin de semaine, je serais au WhereCamp chez Google.

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The Cathedral and the Bazaar

๏Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

๏Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

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One ID to Rule Them All๏ Three IDs for the WEB kings under the MS, AOL & Y!

๏ Seven for the LBS lords in their halls of stone,

๏ Nine for GIS Men doomed to die,

๏ One for the G Lord on his “non-evil” throne

๏ In the Land of the Internets where the Shadows lie.

๏ One ID to rule them all, One ID to find them,

๏ One ID to bring them all and in the darkness bind them (under a restrictive license).

WRONG!8

TIMTOWTDI

๏Find by...๏Lat/Long (duh)๏Name๏Nickname๏Neighbourhood๏Proximity๏Activity

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TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE

๏Lightweight Identifiers๏As simple as possible๏Distributed (webwide)

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Name Repositories๏GeoNames๏Geocommons๏Placemaker๏Wikipedia/DBpedia๏ Freebase

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TextOthers? Tweetsuggestions to

@afrognthevalleywith #ignitewhere

Geographic Indexes๏OpenStreetMaps๏Maps API (you know them)๏Open Data Repos๏geodata.gov

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Others? Tweetsuggestions to

@afrognthevalleywith #ignitewhere

Linked Data & IDs schemas

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๏ WOEID (Twitter)๏ Flickr place_id๏ Google place URL๏ Freebase GUID๏ Geohash๏ Not 4SQ/GW (yet)๏ but machine tagsOthers? Tweet suggestions

to @afrognthevalleywith #ignitewhere

Activity Streams Mining

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๏Status updates๏RSS/ATOM feeds๏ActivityStrea.ms๏ Explicit๏ Implicit๏Derived

๏PlaceStrea.ms?

Most Data Licenses Suck

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Be a Data Hippie

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The World is Messy

I like it like that

It’s more work

It’s more fun

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Bootstrapping

๏BOF on matching location in unstructured text anyone?

๏WhereCamp session on Places in Activity Streams...

๏Machine Tag Exchange?

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Places are Social Containers

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Thanks!๏ http://afrog.in/ (activity stream)๏ http://afroginthevalley.com (blog)๏ @afrognthevalley on twitter๏ http://code.google.com/p/praized/๏ www.praizedmedia.com