You're listening to A Very Spatial Podcast, episode 744, August 18th, 2024. Hello and welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast. I'm Jesse. I'm Sue. I'm Barb. And this is Frank. And this week we're going to kind of reminisce. It's not quite our 20th anniversary, but it is. Others 20th anniversary. So we'll talk a little bit about what was going on back in 2004. But first of course, there's always news.
First up this week, there've been a couple of recent cases that have made it up to the federal level that have looked at the idea of geo fencing warrants. The most recent one is the fifth circuit stated that. They're not constitutional, but they did accept the one that was being done because it wasn't something that there was a lot of precedence about for the people who had sought that particular warrant.
This kind of is to the counter of what the fourth court or fourth circuit last month stated, which was that they were constitutional. So we've got kind of two different perspectives on it.
And I think both of them are saying it's somewhat constant contextual, but it's one of those things where, you know, whenever you're talking about, okay, tell me everybody who was in this area that goes beyond, of course, looking at an individual and the main things that are the, the precepts behind the fourth amendment.
And so it's, it is, it is one of those things that it is a question mark of, you know, how much, especially in our data era, is appropriate whenever you're talking about warrants and things that can, you know, have very significant impacts on people's livelihoods. Both that are involved or potentially involved in those who are just near the incident. How much of that information should be shared yet?
Just for edification for those who aren't U. S. citizens and won't necessarily know all the amendments pretty particularly well, even if you are U. S. citizens, the 4th Amendment is the protection against unreasonable searches and senior seizures, as well as indication about how warrants. Can and cannot be issued and particularly it relates to probable cause. So that's why this is, you know, basically butts up against a lot of things that are stated in the 4th amendment.
The flip side of this is that if you've got 2 circuits, the 4th and the 5th that are at odds with each other, that does increase the probability of this ends up at the Supreme Court at some level. And to, to clarify the nuances. So there's a good chance this ends up at the Supreme Court, given this particular court, it's kind of a crapshoot how that gets interpreted. So it will very much be up in the air.
And that's, by the way, another part of the us justice system is that when you appeal a decision made in a court. The U. S. is divided up into appeals districts at the federal level. And so that's what the, the Fifth Circuit and Fourth Circuit refer to is which, which sort of federal appeals district you're in for that case. And so decisions handed down as precedent in one, as in this case, right may not Be the same as what gets handed down in another.
And then the next level up is the Supreme court. So it can make for differing interpretations. One case has come through. Yeah. When I was reading this and I saw the one that they had said, well, they, they, you know, we're letting it through. Because they hadn't realized the, the scope of what they were asking, it made me think beyond the law to what we understand about technology and I kept thinking about when we watch police procedurals, and we see people go enhance, enhance, enhance.
I felt that very, that very much. This was very similar and that it can feel like. You know, let's just do the G offense and collect everything in it without understanding that it's not going to do exactly what you think it is, or that it's possible to do what you think it does again, the idea that we see things on TV that we think are possible, but aren't really possible at this time.
Next up in the news Overture Maps has released its general availability of a lot of its global open maps datasets. I think all of them actually, this is the, the Overture members are a Meta, Microsoft, Esri, and TomTom. So we're talking about a lot of data capabilities. Yeah, there's a lot more too. Yeah, there's a lot more, but there's the big ones. Obviously, we're talking about a lot of data and a lot of stuff that can be out there.
They're all global data sets are all the open data sets, and it's kind of nice that because they've released this as a general availability. That means that anybody can use them. More or less for any purposes. I'm sure if you look at the details of the license, there are some limitations, but, you know, the generally available, I'm guessing that they're gonna be centered around. You can't repackage it and sell it. But if you're doing anything else, they're open data now.
So, of course, we talked to over trip maps about a year ago, and that was when they were first going into their first alpha release and beta and moving through beta. And. You know, it's, it's exciting for them to get to that point where they are releasing these to general availability. And in addition to that, they're also releasing an alpha of 200, over 200 million addresses as well. So they're starting a different data theme.
In addition, so for addresses and this is going into alpha and I don't think that one is global. I'm not sure. I didn't look to see what the extent of that was, but 14 countries, I guess. I think it's the intent is to move beyond alpha into global. Cause the other, the other alphas weren't quite all global on all the themes. So, so, but it's, it's another one, if you're looking at their data sets.
This one is one that you can, and, you know, whenever we talk about arbitrage maps data, it's been available. You've been able to use it, but, you know, they did have that caveat of it's not finalized data. Now they've moved on. People have used it enough. They've fact checked it enough. That's not the right word. They've QC'd it enough. There we go. So used to hearing fact checked in the news these days.
It just stuck in my head, but it's now been QC to the appropriate level that they're comfortable putting it out as general availability. And again it's made available through overture maps, but there's so many organizations who are feeding into this both open source and for profit.
Organizations that are feeding into the data because they want their goal is to have a shareable kind of consistent data set that everybody can use if they choose to for commercial products for their day to day use, whatever it is. Yeah, really cool thing is that one of the layer themes is buildings, and it's 2. 3 unique built 2. 3 billion unique building footprints worldwide. But it's what's already in beings and Esri's living Atlas. So if you like that data, you can just now get that data.
That's pretty cool without having necessarily be a Microsoft or an Esri customer. Moving on to some drone news. The Beyond Visual Line of Sight rules are coming. That's kind of it. There's not a lot of details yet. Basically as part of the reauthorization that just took place for the FAA it was mandated that within I don't know, 6 months or so that the FAA had to put into place initial guidelines for beyond visual line of sight, you know, more than what they have in place right now.
And so those initial. Expectations and ideas about what it will be should be out before the end of the year. And they're suggesting, or at least one of the upper levels in, in the UAS space at the FAA was saying that, you know, by 2026, these should be going into play. So if you are someone who's looking at some of the beyond visual line of sight and, you know, for monitoring, for Just mapping in general.
There are use cases for being able to do things where you can't, you know, necessarily see or have someone in the flight line that can see the drone while it's going over. So, you know, looking at things like linear features, such as utility lines or pipelines. And using a drone to inspect those, you know, your drone can go 10 kilometers without having too many issues with frequency distortion and can come back to you right now. You basically have to drive along with the drone.
So you keep it in sight. So you have a driver. You have the pilot and other observers or have different people along the line. So it's a whole thing right now. So, you know, for the mapping portions of this you know, there are, you know, Reasons for beyond visual line of sight. Of course, most of this is for the People who want to deliver packages, but whatever.
I think that what's interesting about the the news is how much there is mention of, it's so surprising that the implementation is happening along the timeline they set. That that was the unusual thing that this is, you know, go, proceeding is planned. I mean, if it's, if it's in the, the legislation, that's what they got to do. That's what they did. Last round.
So it's how we, we got some of the, the nighttime flying and things like that, that came through in the last and of course the Licensing of, of non commercial pilots. That was also part of the last reauthorization bill. And then So University of Maryland has created what they're calling a topography of the news ecosystem. And there is a lot of convergence a lot of times between the media and mapping especially in recent years. And this is looking at scale. They don't use the term scale in here.
But what they've done is the first of its kind look at, at the scale of the state. So instead of looking at news deserts in across the US, they're looking at a very, very at a scale of what's happening in the local news. And let's look at how this is spread. The local news is spread and where those dead spots are and where are parts of the states that are getting coverage. So it's really interesting what they're doing because it is taking a look at local news. at a very local level.
And what they're trying to do is create a framework for these news ecosystems. Right. And I think this is a really important and really interesting study in the United States because coming from a small area, I can say that I've seen even just monitoring, I've moved away from my hometown for a long time ago, but to see kind of the changing landscape there of local newspaper, what was local newspapers first and what you have is kind of a, a local TV market.
But these types of news sources that you know, allow people to see kind of not just the events in their area, but how they maybe relate to what's going on at other scales I think are really important. And when they go away. Right. That connection that you have with what's happening in the news, I think you know, starts to erode a little bit. So I think this is a really interesting study to like take a look at.
And like you say, Barb, it's that conversion kind of of how we see things across space. But you know, look at those different scales. So I noted, I think I noted in the the news article that we were looking at that they're actually going to make this structure available to other universities if they want to do a similar type of study.
Yeah. The interesting thing here is, is the, it would be neat to overlay this with other, they don't, I don't think they use the term deserts, but really you're talking about somewhat news deserts when you're talking with a local, it'd be interesting to overlay that with common rural deserts, like food deserts and healthcare deserts and education deserts.
You know, I obviously, I think it's going to be fairly obvious that we see a lot of overlap, but it'd be kind of interesting to do that to see what degree. And that's it for the news. You know. This is 2024 and 2004. A number of things began podcasting first began about this time of year. With, well, what was his name? He was an MTV. vj, the blonde guy. Mark, mark something. Yeah. I can't think of his name right. The guy. Go look it up.
On, in Wikipedia, you'll figure out those of you who are old enough to remember the beginning of vv, there are others, others of all too, so, yeah. Well, he was kind of the first one who used RSS to push out audio files. And then a lot of people within the next month or two were like, that's a great idea. And started doing it as well. And then by 2025, of course we had the, the first wave of podcasting. I could see his, I could see him too. 20, 2005, not 2025. Adam Curry.
Why did I tell Mark is the other one? Mark is the black curly hair, isn't he? Isn't that Mark? I don't remember anymore, but yes, Adam Curry was the one with the big flowing locks and all that was his big thing in the day. I don't know where I was going with the Adam Curry thing, but so yeah, yeah. That started at that time. We saw the transition of course, of keyhole to being bought by Google.
And the introduction of a lot of those technologies, of course, of course first, of course, you have in 2004, the rollout of Google maps as a separate product. And then of course, the introduction of Google earth and that's kind of, I think that happened more in the transition. Yeah. So that was more of the transition. But all of these things were happening at this time as well. So we began to see more open open source software coming out for mapping.
We saw more companies getting into mapping and we saw a larger attempt to create open data sets because places like the UK were still charging for the ordnance survey data. And so for people to be able to actually use GIS data. For the UK, they were like, Well, I guess we have to create it instead of spending millions of millions of pounds. Sorry. I'm gonna use the wrong monetary in it. They could have done in dollars, but there's an exchange rate problem. Yeah. To the to the ordnance survey.
And so, Hence was born the open project, open stream. Well, I think to add in that, that another, another really important thing or other important things that are going on at this time was the rise of high speed internet, because that's the thing, right. Is that one of the things that drove this was people could access it because GIS will remember that there was online map sharing, but very few people could take advantage of it because of the.
hardware requirements or the, you know, network requirements and then the development of web 2. 0 that allows stuff to pass quickly, right? So all those things are converging around the same time in this, this mid 2000s. But those are the things I remember because I remember, for example, and those of you who are ancient in GIS like us will remember things like the early versions of ArcIMS and things like that, which if you had the connection but most people just couldn't access those things.
So once you had High speed internet available to more people and you had now with the web 2. 0 technologies that for on the podcasting side and on other types of technologies where now you can pass things back and forth much quicker and do more things. Then you start to see this and, and that, but that was when people realized, wow if we want to do something like this a lot of the data isn't available for us to do ourselves.
And for the mapping portion of it, perhaps for me, the most important part was at that point, you no longer had to have a download. You didn't have to download an extension for your browser to be able to run the software. And we were talking about it with burn with silver light and things like that. But just the, the XAML, the Javascript and XML core of Web 2. 0. AJAX. Yes. Thank you. Asynchronous. Asynchronous. That was the, that was the hot word at the time.
Yeah. AJAX is It was asynchronous JavaScript and XML. These. Thank you. We, it's, it's, it's everything. I mean everything in the web now is basically Ajax. We just won't call it that anymore because at the time we talk about silver light, 'cause it didn't wanna remember, but Adobe had one too that was arguably more popular. Yet I cannot for life of remember its name even though I developed in it for like two years. You mean flash? Mean? We had Flash, but there was another one as well.
Oh no, there was the thing. Oh, the other one. Okay. The thing was built on flash. Flash was built on a bit of technology that's like Silverlight. And I cannot for life remember what brief. Reflex, something like that. Something like that. I can't remember what it's called. It doesn't matter. It's a historical thing that nobody uses anymore and it's gone away, but it required the flash plugin to run. Silverlight was built in Microsoft. It was Microsoft solution.
I think it was built into one of the updates to IE Internet Explorer, or like if you downloaded. Not. net because of predated. net, but one of those things that you up, you downloaded, it kind of just stuck it in there automatically. And for a long time, those, it was really to get to date ourselves even further, it was really the Blu ray HD DVD. Nobody knows what's going to come out on top thing that was happening. Let's go even older. It was the VHS Betamax. I wasn't going to go that long.
I feel that more people remember VHS Betamax than the very small blip. It was the Zune iPod. Don't hate on me, Zune. I still have one. I mentioned Zune first. I mean, I, But the point is, is that it was a three way race that was going on at the time. And honestly, Ajax didn't, wasn't the silver bullet there. It was harder to develop in.
And there was a lot less standards and you could do anything, which was the reason at one because you could do anything and like, there was nothing that would say, no, you can't do that. Whereas the other 2 had very well developed software packages and software principles that said, no, that's not a good idea. I'm not gonna allow you to do those things. So the fact that it would run natively in the browser was a big help because nobody had to download anything.
Not that it was a big deal because a lot of times people were downloading it anyway. So it wasn't. Yeah. It tended to exist everywhere. And then it annoyed me. I didn't like, I didn't like to have to do the downloads. Well, there were, there were people who balked, but for the most part, it tended to exist everywhere. And then one of the challenges was one of the browsers, I, I don't think it was Chrome, I think it was Firefox, one of them said, this is a problem.
This is like a massive security hole, and it could, you know, cause the queen to lose the war and make you get scurvy and all sorts of terrible things that would say it would do. And you would go, Oh, I shouldn't do that because I can very clearly remember a conversation with my parents that they were like, we went to this website and they wanted to download this flash thing. And I don't think that's a good idea because I saw in the news and I was like, okay, this is turned.
This is when this has turned that. Okay, download these plug in things isn't going to work. So more so much for a development suite. So that's really when Ajax exploded. And furthermore, the other big thing that really made a positive difference to Ajax is that it was free and anybody could get it. Whereas the other ones were Harder. You could do it using text editors, and you could do it using compilers that you could download for free, but it was a nightmare.
Whereas with Ajax, you just did it in text editor and hit refresh on your browser, and you knew whether or not things were working or not. It was a very quick development. And that's why a bazillion kids got out there and started doing everything. And that's where it really exploded. And you can see why keyhole and then Google sort of developed on that platform. Primarily, this gave us you know, our entree into what would be the next 20 years of technologies and data.
Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I think because I think it's an interesting question, right? Because prior, again, I'll go back to, I think I mentioned it right prior to when all this technology kind of exploded at the same time there were segments that that knew that that geospatial data was being collected and used it. But yeah, Kind of the push to say that more people should have access to that.
I think, I think, and, and, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, like in the timing of it, but I think awareness was a big part of what drove that. Right. Is that you see people using it and then they're like, oh, but you can't yet. And then you're like, well, why not? And they say, well, you got to pay for it or it's government restricted or something like that. And, and I don't, and it wasn't just in the mapping sphere that this happened, but I think that that was a big push, right?
You didn't know to, to try to access it or to ask for it until you knew that it was out there. And that was really cool. Right? So that's the Google maps push is like, this stuff is really cool, but yeah, there were professional sites that had access to all the imagery in the United States for people to go find their house and the rest of the world as well. But it was Google and it being a place people were going to more and more anyway.
And suddenly there you could go and not have to download anything and just go to a site and be able to find your house. That was so powerful. Yeah, and this is the time period when you're thinking about Google, and it's a term you don't hear as much anymore, but the neo geography where, you know, people are out there using this that aren't professionals.
But I remember at this time period this is where you hear a lot, like Sue said, of who has access and who can do things with it and who controls it. But the, the beginnings of talking about what's a gratuitous use. Because a lot of people saw it and were like, there are things I want to do with it. But they didn't have the ability to access and do something with it.
But like Frank said, you know, you had a whole bunch of especially young people who now had access to all the data and to the technology to do something and to make something and to see something that they imagined in their heads was missing in the world. I'm going to make a bit of. Radical assertion, but I can't defend I have, this is my opinion feeling. So I remember very clearly working at the technical center before 9 11, and we had a data set out.
That was the oil and gas pipelines in West Virginia. And it was just public data. Anybody can get to it. Download it was there. It was in the topo sheets. That's why we had it is because we made a digital line conversion of all the topo sheets and that's where it came from. And then we got an update from, I think the geological survey gave us an update. And then I think it was Homeland Security called us October, November 2001 and said, why is that on there? What the hell is that doing there?
You have to get that rid of that because of security issues after 9 11. There was a lot of data that was pulled that was, was publicly available. It was annoying. You had to go to every damn state individually, and some of them had a bunch of stuff and some of them had nothing. And it was minimally irritating. I actually think that that desire need.
Whatever word you want to use to hide data for several years, help fuel this more open street map approach, not open treatment itself, but its approach of we need to get our own publicly available data out there that isn't controlled. Necessarily by a government agency that can say, no, that's no longer. Information you can know, I think that really gave a lot of people an impetus to say, I want to make sure I have a data set that I can always access.
Well, I think that helped spur it in places like the United States. But again, just the lack of access. Even to what, you know, we take a lot for granted the United States because because of the way things are set up, whenever we pay taxes, anything created with our tax dollars should be unless there's some reason such as that to keep that data. In a closed off area, then everything else should be available to us. And we just take that for granted.
And for so long, there were a lot of other countries, especially those that were under the British crown and such. They didn't have that because the data was the Queens. And so if you wanted to. You know, the permission and privilege to be able to use that data, you had to pay the queen for it because she had collected that data, not to the people and it was stupid expensive. I remember at the time, quote, they're like, yeah, I just want to cover. I want to say, I want to say like Edinburgh.
It was a city and it was like thousands and thousands of pounds. I was like, who the hell can do that? And at the time, you know, this is where I remember, you know, I wasn't even yeah. Really adjacent to G. I. S. yet, but working with research companies that work with technology that were the early days of drones and things like that, where they had the technology, but they needed the data. But yet they couldn't.
Afford or get the location based data they needed to basically keep moving forward with the ideas and they had they had in their head for these type of technologies that we would know, you know, later on and be very familiar with. So that was also coming from outside the geospatial realm and, you know, not just individuals, but to small companies that were growing at the time and probably a large, a lot of larger companies that were outside the, that realm.
And so that swung the door open for the, the need and people to start doing it. Well, yeah, the need and also again, seeing examples of, of that and people, I think that's it. how quickly it grew just so the people did want to contribute because a lot of the idea behind having that data available is not, is not just the, I can find my house, but also look at all of the, the problems that we can address by seeing conditions, right, that are spatial.
And also, I think one of the things that was learned too in these early days is if you had to rely on government data sets, those were data, data, which we now all know to call them data layers, right, that were collected for specific purposes.
So, If you want something, so in addition to that, right, having that some kind of authoritative thing of what's on the surface of the earth, you, if you want other things you either have to find somebody who's collected them and we'll sell them to you or give them to you, or you have to collect them yourself. And so that was another thing that came out too, is, is look at all the things we can collect. But we do need these, these base layers to help make that happen.
And of course being able to have the technology in the background, right? Kind of takes us back to where we were talking about having the ability to do these things in a web editor which was basically a wiki style event. Provide a lot of opportunity, I think two seminal events really exploded the use of this data and the public consciousness because all this stuff that we're talking about, like getting data and all that stuff is just map nerds doing map nerd stuff, know anything about it.
I did say I was gonna say 2 things. The 2nd thing I was going to point out is that actually in the beginning, you did have to download something else to get a lot of this data or this information. If you're just a general public, and that was Google earth, which was its own is still is, I think, but it was basically its own standalone thing that was for other data, not specifically for open stream app. That was web based and download, right?
But I'm just saying is that as the public started, you know, getting this AJAX generated data, you did download a standalone application that eventually got folded into the browser anyway. And Google Maps was AJAX! I don't want to use the word lesser, but that's the word I'm going to use lesser version of the two. It just had less data and functionality. And then it turns out most people really just needed Google maps most of the time. So that's kind of how that evolved.
But I think two similar events really pushed the utility of mapping to the public. And all the while in the background, we're using Google maps to try to figure out how in the hell to get to. A city I've never been to and all these things because map quest, which existed from, I don't know, 96, seven, six, something like, yeah. So it was, you know, kind of clunky and weird compared to Google maps.
The 2007, I think wildfires in California around the San Diego area really pushed the utility of mapping. Because what happened was, is that we were, you, the people were using a lot of social media to say, Communicate information much quicker than governments could communicate information and say, what this shelter is closed. This is Iran or this fires are spread here and that sort of thing.
And it was going into tweets and tweets were then being mapped by news agencies and people could pull up a map and figure out, oh, where can I go in this crisis? And I really think that that was kind of a culmination event, all that kind of stuff had been happening up to that point. But at that point, people started realizing that there's broader utility here that we can use it for a lot more. And by people, I mean, the general public, not map nerds. We knew it for a while.
The 2nd big event, I think, was the 2010 Haiti earthquake, where Literally and this directly impacted open street maps, like the day before the earthquake. If you, if you could, I'm sure there's images out there. You can find on the Internet. If you look at what was an open street maps for Haiti, a couple of days before the earthquake, the answer was here is Haiti. And that's about it. It was a dot. There's very little information that was in there.
But then this, this catastrophic earthquake happens and, and, and, Thousands and thousands of people are trapped and killed and we didn't know anything. And suddenly the community came together and did this massive map out of Haiti at a level that, you know, if you look at just a week after the tragedy, what the data looks like. And we knew so much more by weaving in the general public knew so much more than we knew the week before in terms of what was in the map data.
I think that those two events really got people to think about We can use this stuff beyond just Matt nerds using this stuff again in the public consciousness. Yeah, I think, and I would add to that on a lesser scale, like, in terms of of how much Katrina Hurricane Katrina. Yeah, as well. But the technology hadn't quite evolved at that point.
So yeah. And I think, I think the great thing too, has been that, that those types of, you know, efforts have been sustained that, you know, now OpenStreetMap and other, other open source projects like that, you know, a lot of them are incorporated into things because the recognition of their value.
Because, I mean, A lot of that gets started too with the, we want to make sure this is available because on the one hand you have the government sources, but Google maps comes along, but Google is corporate. So you never know, right. Access there could also be, be changed. And the API key. What's that? The joy of the API key. Yes, the API key, right? That little, that little thing that, that you have to have that magic. So you know, so those are important considerations.
But the interesting thing has been the embracing of those data layers in turns around. And, and a whole ecosystem of third parties that utilize the data and they're, they're Their companies but they're, they're kind of leveraging that as well. So I mean, that's over the 20 years and, and you know, with the state of the map conferences the community that that's built around open street map and, and all of that is, it's just been pretty amazing actually.
And I think that one of the, the visions of open street map that have led to his longevity is what, Everyone's been talking about is before everyone was sort of looking at use cases or you know, limited areas but open street map was holistic. It was interconnected you know, what they were doing was worldwide at the same time which made it stand out.
You know, I, I also think that people don't realize exactly how disruptive this was to the mapping world in a negative way to, I can remember very clearly conversations with I unfortunately didn't have connections to the legislators, but people who did. And what the legislatures were saying in the states were, why should I have the state agency or why should I pay you for this information? Or why should I have you collect this information when it's just in Google? It's just use Google.
Google has all that information without the people in charge who control budgets and control decision making and come up with, you know policies and that sort of thing. Didn't realize that Google at the time was getting all the free data that governments were putting out and they were incorporating it into their platform. And I pick on Google because I remember that very that conversation specifically, but it's not like Microsoft or Tom Tom or Esri wasn't doing the exact same thing.
So, They're needed. We had to do some very fast education to explain to our legislature that, yeah, Google has it, but they have it because they downloaded it from the official state agency, which we're asking you to keep funding so we can keep generating more data so that Google has access to it. And it's a little reminiscent of. The AI thing going on right now, where, you know, AI is training, AI is creating problems instead of having original information to train from to get the AI.
It's like you need that basic information to start. And a lot of times that governmental role is critical for that. And a lot of times I argue almost always the governmental role is critical before it ends up in these other products. Similarly, you saw and I fought with this in the mapping community a lot is every at some point. I'm gonna say 2015 incorporated open street maps into 1 of their base maps.
I can't remember exactly when they did that, but it was a layer you could add to the base maps. And then suddenly, everyone kept saying every open street map. And I had to yell a lot and go, no, it's not Ezra's OpenStreetMap, it's OpenStreetMap. Ezra's just adding it in there. This exists that has nothing to do with Ezra. It's just they, they said, we can add this in, you know, as a base map. So, which is great, but getting.
Even experts to understand there are things out there that exist that is the culmination of a lot of work and important basic work that you're just kind of putting a bow on at the end. Yeah, it's great that that bow exists and it's there, but. Understand this takes a lot of effort, and it needs to be recognized and supported. There was a dichotomy going on because I remember that the data was being used. That was generated by open street map.
But at the same time, there were discussions about can the contributions by the public to open street map. Is that accurate? Is that useful? There was a pushback against this idea of collaboration, especially open data collaboration. In, in ways that I, you know, there were people in rooms yelling when I had gone to a national conference and I was a little surprised by that because at the, I don't think we realized at the time this was actually something heated.
In the map community, well, I think, and that continues, right? Part of that is that ongoing question of expert collected knowledge versus, you know, general you know, collection is, is there a separation? Should there be separation for the reasons that you're talking about? Right? So the question of, you know how is it collected, right?
We can't know necessarily did it meet certain, you know, accuracy standards, which we have, you know, standards that go along with the data sets and, and, and so that is, has been a question that has I think been worked through quite Intensely for a lot of these things as to how to how to address that, because especially in the early days, it really was, you know, an issue. Just now that you have access to this you may not have access to the same level in different places.
So how do you match what's already there? Maybe from you know, more well developed data sets. So, so a debate then, and I think still a debate now, just It's kind of evolved a bit anything else I have. I watched a recent interview with the founder of OpenStreetMap. And what I thought was interesting in there is is when he saw this, he described it as a hobby, like, how do you get people to put in this data? You know, they're not being paid for it.
But a lot of times they get a sense of accomplishment from from doing it. But the, the other thing is this, just the vision That he had and how he saw this and he went out and found a way to bring it together like this confluence of the, the wiki idea of the, and the technology being there and the software being there.
And then the, you know, Google maps haven't come out to make this something that was creating an awareness of the need and the ability for spatial work that it's still continues that we see all this innovation going on that it didn't stop. Within the past 20 years, like what's after open street map? Because I'm sure someone's looking at open street map and going. This doesn't fulfill all my needs. And it is open. But what's next?
Well, and that brings us back to news items like overture maps doing general availability. You know, it's it's a different thing. It's not something that everybody is involved in creating, but it is open. So it's, is it where we're going after this? But again just wanted to talk about what was going on 20 years ago. Cause we have a perspective cause we were in the world geospatial and physically.
And it played out in, in events to like where 2. 0, that brief moment in time where they, they held those, a lot of the discussions about these, these topics are going on there. Go out, check it out. If you've not used open street map. Go out and go over to the website. Check it out. If you're not used over to your maps, go over and check that out. You know, it's, there's a lot out there that we can utilize as geospatial professionals and get involved if you can.
On the events corner, as always, you should check out events and, you know, go to them if you can. First up, your Ricardo 2024 is going to be taking place September 9th through the 11th in Vienna, Austria. GIS in the Rockies 2024 is taking place September 26th in Denver. Of course, if you'd like us to add your event to the podcast, send us an email to podcast at very spatial. com. If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at very spatial. com.
I can be reached at barb at very spatial. com. You can reach me at Frank at very spatial. com. And I'm available at Kind of Spatial. And of course, if you'd like to find our contact information, head over to various patient. com slash contacts. As always, we're the folks from very spatial. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in a couple weeks.