Talk of the Town: Data, LBS and Wireless, Visualization by Susan Smith Conversations and technical presentations were the norm for the busy GIS 2001 Conference. Vendors, GIS users, university graduate students displaying map projects and government entities comprised the attendance. A large amount of GIS is done in Canada, and some of their most well known universities are located in outlying areas, such as Nova Scotia and northern British Columbia. In a conversation with Steve Smith, Earth Science Sector for Natural Resources Canada, I learned that large scale mapping in Canada is generally very expensive. Natural Resources Canada's National Atlas Information Network offers some free data and some inexpensive data. The situation is changing however, as copyright restrictions have been lifted for current maps, so Natural Resources Canada is able to scan maps of Canada and make them available for distribution. Three sites make up National Atlas Information Network: CEONet lists geospatial data suppliers and offers an opportunity to promote products and services. The National Atlas of Canada provides limitless maps to visualize geographic information. GeoGratis allows you to access geospatial data sets by downloads free of charge. Location based services was another hot topic on the agenda. Xmarc's vice president of the Americas' sales team, Steve Lytle, had this to say about the wireless industry. "There is a huge potential for the U.S. to move to the wireless world," says Lytle. In Japan, Xmarc technology powers the J-Navi service for Japan's J-Phone, a live deployment of personal location-based mapping services. Japan has over 5 million users. J-Navi is the "world's first mass market location based service for wireless mobile phone," and J-Skystation is "the world's first mass market location based service for "push" information services. In Japan, Xmarc markets their product on phones that can display 16-bit color maps. According to Lytle, one of the biggest challenges for LBS is that "there is no government mandate for quality in the Americas. Mobile network quality lags behind Asia-Pacific and Europe." This, plus location determining technologies, opens up a whole arena for opportunity. "Analog to digital and 2G to 3G is still happening in the U.S.," Lytle adds. The main reason why wireless is so much more popular in Europe and Japan, according to B.J. Holtgrew, technical evangelist, Business Tools Division, Microsoft, is that the wireless operators there own the infrastructure. "They have buddy lists that culturally won't fly in the U.S. In the U.S. the FCC passes wireless costs onto wireless operators. Wireless needs a killer application." What that killer application will be is anyone's guess, but Holtgrew believes that e911-the U.S. emergency mandate-- will be big. George Moon, Mobile Location Awareness Group Vice President of Research & Development at MapInfo says that the killer application for mobile services will be voice. "The number of voice minutes are going up," Moon says. "While the prices are going down. We will push hard to go beyond voice." Jean-Philippe Nicon, marketing director for North America for Webraska says that there are over one billion digital mobile phone subscribers in North America. Predicted for 2005: "over one-third of the new cars sold will be equipped with LBS." By the year 2005, $33 billion in LBS revenue is expected in Europe alone. Why LBS has such potential, Nicon says, is for the following reasons: Increased revenue Increased "stickiness" Personalization Ubiquity-user-centric vs. device-centric In Europe, traffic maps services, proximity services (nearest service, zoomable maps, multimodal) and call center interfaces work well. Itinerary services are still under development. Automotive location services are also in the works, such as GPS assisted call centers, PDA-based navigation, thin client real time traffic, and vector map compression. Another interesting topic was that of Visualization and GIS. Jeff Thurston of the University of Alberta says that " Visualization is not working toward GIS. If you went to the SIGGRAPH show, you didn't hear about GIS. Both visualization and GIS use the same language: they talk about meshes, grids, speed, interpolation. But what makes GIS distinct from visualization is its analysis ability-overlay analysis and metadata." What would accurate "geo-visualization" look like? "GEO-VRML," says Thurston. "It would have scalability, animation support, and geographic support." Geo-Viz goals include: Making GIS objects available to higher visualization programs for probabilistic modeling, trying to hook GIS objects to rendered objects, linking databases to visualization topology integrated interactively in real time.