we did http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_hats over the topic:

 

 

white hat (facts, figures, info)

 

theres lots of data

federations connect multiple independent data sources / many nodes that act as one (much like the BORG)

there is a difference between raw data and URLs

there are lots of formats

lots of different licenses

federation is many nodes that act as one

person generating data could be responsible for it

estimating sychronicity is hard

there are different metadata formats (stuff)

google is indexing this stuff

esri bought the dream

there are huge efforts on GIS side to do this

libraries are a similar model

GeoRSS is a federated format

 

FORMATS

GeoRSS, KML, Microformats, Atom, GML, shapefiles, .osm, OGR, WKT(B), Raster :-( GTFS, GeoJSON, HTML, CSV, TSV, Excel, GPX (standards are great there are lots of them)

 

 

red hat

federated is more valuable than centralised

Google might be evil

Scared of Google not doing what we want to do

Google changed definition of open - transit spec - urbanmapping guy. ian white - who owns the data?

Federation might just be too hard to achieve

There is no One True Format

KML is horrible

Needs to be format agnostic

People are standardising on REST

There are other formats - REST might FAIL

how the fuck do we pay the rent? - biz models

Are we locked in to the advertising model

Licenses are going to stop much of the cool stuff happening

 

YELLOW HAT (positive happy thoughts)

Google are not evil

GeoWeb is super cool / has a lot of momentum

Federation is a nice dream

There are viable biz models

People are supporting standard formats (mikel keeps hitting them on the head)

OGC is taking notice IFTF, W3C etc

There are lots of success stories / tools - mapufacture, UN things... the internet / google maps / Earth

People want this stuff

Build it and they will come

It's getting cheaper / (easier?)

People need to read the Hirsch report on peak oil (DoE report)

Federating creates meaning

SemWeb++

There is more and more data (say, oil deposit data)

In the future there will be even more Geodata

 

 

BLACK HAT

This stuff is fucking hard

Security

Not much international data :-(

Licenses suck :-(

Govts are super unhelpful on this

Licenses might not even work (See the Open Database License ODbL)

i18n is hard

Trust models are hard / dont mach real world / disfunctional as ths UN

GeoSPAM

Conflicting datasets - who to trust?

There's too much information

Privacy of location might be hard

Centralising this stuff is hard (unless you're google)

some People dont like google centralising things some of the time. sometimes.

Our fun and games can be used to blow up iraqis

Timing is going to be hard... data gets out of date fast

The big formats are not necessarily useful (KML?)

 

 

GREEN HAT

Maybe we should look out of the box

GeoTorrents!

maybe we could be format agnostic

Realtime models... not thinking about caching and stuff

feedsync? ray ozzie dev.live.com/feedsync - federated feeds and stuff

XMPP pubsub spec atom over jabber

Yahoo! pipes for maps

feedblender - gone!

GIS industry have been debating this for 30 years - maybe we will be for the next 30

JFDI ?

release early, release often - lets JFDI

this stuff needs to be up to date - is the chinese resteraunt still there / open?

Maybe there should be more than one way - realtime vs bulk

 

build something that works to demonstrate value of federation to get more data onboard (examples: http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFeeds)