Mike’s Digital Laboratory

I’ve got my club pass and am ready to bolt out of the office as soon as I can to head to this years Rochester International Jazz Festival. Club passes have long since sold out, but you can still pay at the door to get into most events.  There are also a lot of free events, so check the schedule and look for me on Jazz street.

Tonight in particular I’m looking forward to seeing Mose Allison at Kilbourn Hall and the Oberg / Petrescu quartet at the Nordic Jazz series (at Lutheran church.) And as many other events as I can slip into.  The great thing about the club passes is that you can hit 4, 5 sometimes 6 events in an evening. If you didn’t get one this year make sure you get one early next year.  Compared with paying at the door they pay for themselves in a couple of evenings, so it’s a really good deal.

On another exciting note  there are two new venues this year,  I’m amazed at how this festival grows bigger and better every year.  The Rochester Club is right on east avenue and is easy walking distance from most of the other venues.  Also the Abilene – Roots & Americana Stage is new over by liberty pole way, and should easily be worked into an evenings plan as it is a quick walk from Harro East or The Lutheran Church. Confused? just check out the new map, it’s all there. Oh, and there is also a really nice mobile festival guide for your iphone, or other mobile device.

Earth Hour approaches.

“On Earth Hour hundreds of millions of people around the world will come together to call for action on climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. The movement symbolizes that by working together, each of us can make a positive impact in this fight, protecting our future and that of future generations. Learn more about how Earth Hour began, what we’ve accomplished, and what is in store for 2010.

Participation is easy. By flipping off your lights on March 27th at 8:30 p.m. local time you will be making the switch to a cleaner, more secure nation and prosperous America.”

At Pictometry we have created a video of the images of Haiti that we donated to the GIS Corp in order to support the relief effort.

“Within days of the earthquake in Haiti, Pictometry captured more than 45,000 aerial oblique images of the damage in the capital city of Port au Prince and its surrounding area. The imagery was then donated to URISA’s volunteer GIS Corps to assist with the recovery efforts.”

Next Wednesday, (Feb 3, 2010) I’ll participating in another webinar with the folks at Earley & Associates. This time I’ll be discussing three important aspects you might want to consider if you are bringing Social Media Tools into your organizations. It’s easy to get lost in the many cool, whiz bang features that are available, but I feel it is important not loose sight of what I’ll call three aspects or dimensions of participatory activity in social media;

• Restricted vs. freedom to publish content with content metadata.
• Restricted vs. freedom to identify audience and method of notifications.
• Restricted vs. freedom to connect with people via groups, relationships, followers and so on.

Think of these as continuous dimensions on an X, Y and Z axis.  Where do you see your intranet tools in this space?  Where would you like them to be?  These are some of the questions I’ll be exploring next week.  Hope you’ll join me.

If you happen to be attending Enterprise DataWorld conference this March then I’d recommend attending this session by John Biderman and Cameron McLean.  John and Cam are sure to tell an interesting tale of how they’ve wrangled Semantic MediaWiki into harvesting a world of MetaData from one of their legacy relational databases and made it organized, accessible,  annotatable, and well… in a word wikified.

” We were given an imperative from our business leaders to provide a friendlier and more collaborative front end on our metadata…

… This in turn led us to MediaWiki and the rich and diverse array of add-ons developed by the Open Source community, particularly its semantic extensions.”

I was happy to play a small part in this project last summer.   I suppose I was more of kibitzer than anything else, but It was enjoyable to solve a few problems for the team as well as get an inside look into this very interesting project.

As the year draws to an end I look forward a brief vacation and then it’s on to a new job. I’m happy to announce I will be joining the engineering team at Pictometry in January. Pictometry is an exciting place to be these days. They are a growing company in a fascinating field. I’m particularly interested because it gives me the opportunity to develop software applications in an area that has been a very long time interest for me. An area where I have not previously had the opportunity to take the deep dive to the extent I believe I will be able to in their shop.

Oblique aerial view of my house from the south

Pictometry creates and provides oblique aerial imagery combined with geospatial data to deliver unique mapping applications to it’s customers. Not sure what that means? Well in plain english here’s how it works. The guys from Pictometry fly their airplanes in a pattern over an area of interest. All the while taking digital pictures of what’s below and storing these images with the geospatial data that represents exactly where the image was taken. Now you may be wondering what makes this different from satellite photos. The difference is that the images are take at an angle instead of straight down. (this is the “oblique” part) And a single location is photographed 4 times from 4 different points of view (east, north, south and west).  Finally the images are later combined into large browsable maps.

Pictometry has developed their own software application (Pictometry online) to view this data for their customers. For some examples of what these images look like take a look at the Pictometry Image Gallery.  Another way is to browse bing.com.  For example follow this link and take a look at the Sydney Opera House. In the upper left you will see some control gadgets. Hover your mouse over “Aerial” then from the drop down menu choose “Birds eye view”. You should now see an what is called an oblique aerial image. You can even rotate the view, north south east and west. Compare this with the other option that gives you a satellite view. A satellite view only gives you an image looking directly down.

My house from a satellite photograph

The advantages of oblique aerial photography are many including the obvious that you can see the sides of buildings, not just the roof.  Another advantage is that we can  combine the imagery from 4 different angles give us a rich data set that lets us explore an object of interest in 3 dimensions, and in some cases construct 3D models of an object on the ground.

Another big advantage is the use of oblique aerial photography in public safety and law enforcement.  Here’s an interesting story of a man who tracked his stolen iphone using a combination of location based technologies including Apple’s Find My iPhone service and Pictometry images from bing.com to see the location where the phone had been take to.

There are many more potential applications, imagine the possibilities as the number and types of ground imagery increases Just how much of the planet has been mapped with Pictometry’s images?  As I understand it today the Majority of US metropolitan regions and more than 1,500 cities around the world have been mapped by Pictometry.  It’s an impressive portfolio. Although there are a lot open spaces between cities that are not mapped today this too may change as the application list for what we can do with this technology grows.  I’m happy to say I’m really looking forward to being a part of developing these some of these new applications. I think it’s going to be a real  challenge and a lot of fun.

Don’t miss this new blog on collaborative computing.

Collaborative computing and the next steps that will evolve as traditional corporate email crosses paths with mobile devices, social media sites, instant messaging, knowledge matrices, and keyword tagging. Vendor independent discussion of everything from iPhone, Blackberry Enterprise Server, Lotus Notes & Domino, Exchange, Google Apps for Enterprise, and email compliance and archiving solutions. Beyond Messaging is solely the work of veteran collaborative computing specialist Marianne Case.

Ok, so I admit, I may be related to this particular blogger, but hey genius runs in the family I’m sure…  You go sister.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the new WXXI website launched this week. It has been an intense development schedule but loads of fun.  The web development team at WXXI has been a great crew to work with.  And I have found myself diving deeper into Drupal than I ever imagined.  I also found myself sharpening my CSS and Javascript skills along the way, not a mention a bit more PHP and MySql as well.

The fun part of architecting  this new site has been the rapid design cycle enabled by Drupal and all it’s myriad modules and theming capabilites. Got an idea in the morning? You can see it implemented by the afternoon.  Or maybe even in a few minutes depending on the situation.   Drupal ( or I should say Drupal and all it’s companion modules) succeeds because the granularity in component construction is at the web design pattern  level.  If a good idea for the web has been thought of, there is probably a Drupal module to support it.

Calais for semantic tagging and we’ve added Facebook Connect to the site, both work well.  We’ve also successfully integrated with NPR and PBS, we pull feeds fresh headlines from NPR news every day using their API and you can watch some of your favorite shows now, right from your web browser in very good quality video. There’s much more, but too much to list here. All I can say is check it out and let us know what you think.

Tomorrow afternoon I will be talking about  Content Management and Social Media for the Insurance Industry. This talk  is part of  the Jumpstart series offered by Earley & Associates.  I’ll talk about some of the current troubles of traditional content management solutions and offer up some ideas on how wikis in the enterprise can help.  I also provide a brief introduction to Semantic MediaWiki (SMW).  (For those of you who may have seen my other presentations on this topic, this will be a shortened version of the same material.)

Looking ahead I’ve been thinking about how to offer more services around Semantic Wikis and what potential customers might want when engaging a consultant in this area.  It’s an area worth pondering because building applications with SWM changes the game of software development a bit.  For one things it’s a lot faster to develop SMW applications and it’s a bit easier. However it still requires good old fashioned thinking.  Also it requires combining skill sets from a variety of traditional areas in software development.  In a phrase I could say “traditional software engineering skills still apply”.

What do I mean by this?  Well here’s a quick  list off the top of my head of the skills I’ve been using and sometimes  redefining (or at least refining) as I build or help others build these semantic applications in a wiki environment.

• A good head for requirements analysis.
• Techniques for building semantic models to jump start the design.
• A standard approach to prototyping that establishes the basic framework of the application
• Inclusion of traditional web site design techniques to cover all the bases of building a usable application.
• And a complete development methodology that is agile and includes the customer on a regular basis.

Does this approach work?  So far it seems to be. The only other thing I think I can add to this at the moment is that when developing Semantic MediaWiki applications there seems to be a recurring need for what I can only call “applied cleverness”.  What do I mean by this? Well it’s hard to say without being specific, but lets just say that the rising tide of new web 2.0/3.0 tools and techniques that are available today are continually inspiring me to combine these tools in new ways that (I believe) have never been done before.  There is a tremendous amount of “invention” going on today in this industry.  And it’s a heck of a lot of fun to be a part of it.  But now I’m wandering into a new topic so I’ll stop here and save this for another post yet to come.

Back from vacation. Just like last summer we set out for a 5 day paddle at Algonquin. This time just Stefanie, Percy and I. Lydia was at Camp George and Melanie is touring Poland and Israel. A few photos of the trip are now online. Also new this time is a GPS track of our trip that you can easily view.  I made this with Motion-GPX on my iPhone, I also have a KMZ file which is viewable with Google Earth if you’d like to see it let me know.  The track only shows one way traveling down Smoke Lake to Ragged Lake and then on again to Parkside Bay.  Not included is the return trip (done in one day) and two side trips to Otterslide and a couple of ponds just north of the west side of Ragged Lake.