Theme review
- Complete the sections below to help you learn more about what has been discussed and implemented in this theme by previous classes. We will use this page to help guide our class discussion on Thursday.
- I suggest adding just short notes, questions and pointers below - don't write any long summaries, etc - that's what the actual theme site is for! (also - feel free to edit anything on the theme sites... they are in your hands now.)
People Interested in working on this theme - indicate your preference (1st, 2nd, etc)
- Bruce Harpham (1st)
- Alison Benjamin (1st)
- Matt McPherson (1st)
Here is a link back into the Layered Information Systems theme.
- Note: some of the themes are more well-developed than others. One of them was new this year, so it might be tricky to find implementations from previous years. We will help by e-mail and even co-editing the wiki as well! Whatever we can get ready to present and discuss is fine. If your theme is under-developed, maybe spend a bit of time fleshing out the page to the best of your ability (that could be one person's assignment)
1. For our class discussion of the relevance and interest of this theme
- What are some of the interesting ideas you encountered?
- This technology has the potential to reinforce the importance of place (e.g. supporting the views of Richard Florida who has argued for the importance of major urban centres in the connected 21st century rather than Thomas Friedman who has focused on how the Internet might make place and physical location irrelevant). Might it encourage trends toward greater urbanization?
- How are privacy concerns impacted by the use of location-sensitive devices like the iPhone?
- Is there some accepted standard for exchanging location data (latitude and longtitude perhaps)? Would this enable greater ease of use?
- Can location based information services be made easier to design and use?
- Walk Score: This service offers people a way to rank addresses (and neighbourhoods) on a walkability scale of 0-100, using an formula that measures proximity of a variety of services such as libraries, bookstores, restaurants, parks, coffee shops, drug stores and more. I used this website during my hunt for an apartment in the summer of 2008. Even though I found it to be a useful tool, there is much room for improvement. For example, I would like to find a way to add information in the way suggested by this article on Google Maps. I would also appreciate a way to manipulate the ranking system; what if I ranked the availability of bookstores and restaurants to be much more important than parks? This kind of customization would be great. Finally, Walk Score should aim to provide some easy way of linking itself to real estate or rental listings.
- Smart Campus in Your Pocket: "an open-ended student research platform focused on accessible, intelligent, context- and location-aware mobile technologies. SCYP partners with students and faculty from various fields of study who explore the mobile problem space, evaluate existing products and solutions, and contribute research to the area".
2. Knowledge media
- What are some interesting knowledge media that exemplify this theme? Maybe link to some that are discussed in your theme site.
- GIS Environments** Google Earth
- Location-Aware Technologies** Global Positioning Systems (GPS)
- iPhone, Blackberry, smartphones
- RFID
- Non-Geographic Spatial Information Systems
- Anatomic (ASME)
- Genome Mapping
- Conceptual Mapping
3. Knowledge communities
- What are some knowledge communities where you think this category of knowledge media is making an impact, or could make an impact?
- Common Industry use of GIS (ESRI)
4. Implementations
- How was this theme implemented in previous classes?
- To find implementations from previous years, go to the bottom of the page where there should be a section called "implementations" - with links to the specific "implementation pages" for 2006 and 2007 (when this particular format began). Each implementation is suppose to have a section on homework, where you may find actual homework that we did as a class, as well as a section on "in class" work that describes how we were to proceed and may have links to other documents or pages that were actually completed by students during class. Also a "resources" section and even, if they were well behaved, an Evaluation section where they talked about what worked well and what didn't. Particularly this last section was prepared with YOU in mind...
5. Designs
- Have a look at a couple of the designs from previous years that connect with your theme.
- Find at least one to present in detail. We can look at two if you really find two that deserve our notice.
- Title: Community Freeway Museum
- Main idea: The concept of that project is a satellite Internet connected automobiles providing locally relevant content as people drive in cars.
- Authors: Jes Koepfler and Aliki Tryphonopoulos
- Knowledge Communities: Families, commuters, local historians seeking an audience
- Extensions: Deploy content by cell phone or SMS; the Toronto cell phone stories project (murmur) does something like this.
- Limits or Problems: The project designers note that this may be limited to those with satellite connected cars; this is a major social limitation at the time being. The project description mainly looks at people experiencing content that is pre-loaded on a system. Could there be a way to allow for commuters to contribute?
- For your chosen design(s) please present
- title
- authors
- main idea
- knowledge community that it might target
- some ideas that came to you for possible connections or extensions
- if possible, the class can follow along by going to the link in the wiki site.