It is only fitting that the day after I posted “Moving Push Pins Off the Map” I saw the post on Ogle Earth about a new geotagging icon….which is?
A GIANT PUSH PIN!
With my interest peaked we did a little digging and found another geotagging icon:
ANOTHER GIANT PUSH PIN (actually when I dug into it this icon was a first version that evolved into the red one.)
I of course blame this all on the Google monolith for perpetuating push pin mania. Last time I saw Mike Jones he even had a push pin tie tack. Joking aside the reason for creating a geotagging icon itself is worth discussing.
The stated purpose on the GeoTagIcons.com website is “The Geotag Icon is intended as a web “standard” icon for identifying geotagged content to humans.” So, if a photo or blog post has been geotagged then there is an icon on it to let you know. The thought being many times geotags are hidden in microformats or the URL, thus not visible to the user.
This seems like a straight forward approach to the problem, but also seems to have overlap with existing icons such as KML and GeoRSS. The tutorial on GeoTagIcons has examples of using it for links to both KML and GeoRSS content. This could lead to some ambiguity and confusion for users.
One of the most interesting parts of the pitch for using the GeoTagIcon is, “Reason 4: It encourages development of the semantic web”. On first blush this got me excited, but reading a bit deeper realized they meant it acts as an advertisement for linked content that could help support an evolving semantic web. This is in and of itself is a worthy cause and advertising has been directed at far less useful goals.
The link between geotagging and the semantic web does bring up a good topic for debate. How will all these geotagged objects (KML, GeoRSS, geo-microformats, GPX, etc.) be tied together in a method that creates semantic meaning? What questions will the semantic technologies answer? The GeoTagIcon site provides an example of , “Show me a plot of other bloggers in my vicinity”, or “I’d like to see a map showing which of my friends have also visited Australia”, “Who else has photographed this location?”, etc.
While these are interesting I think the examples and the direction many folks are taking geotagging misses the real potential of the semantic web. The geotagging premise is based on doing increasingly sophisticated things with geo-coded annotations – 99% of the time taking the form of a pushpin. In each of the examples above users or a screen scraper and geo-coder (most likely) have added a latitude and longitude to a piece of unstructured data (bloggers, my friends, photos). While this all useful information it is often relegated to only answering trivial questions.
There is only so much you can do with a bit of unstructured text or html that has geographic coordinates. You can measure vicinity (bloggers nearby), intersection (friends that have visited Australia) and union (show me all photos from a location). There might be a few that I am missing but it is fairly small universe of questions that can be answered, and the semantic web is all about answering questions. Hopefully a very large universe of questions.
From my limited perspective the semantic web is all about bringing vast data resources to the web in an easy and intuitive way. While turning unstructured text into geocoded annotations already on the web is important I think the bigger challenge is blending existing structured data (largely in databases and not on directly on the page web) with organized unstructured data through the web in a seamless way like we have for text, pictures and video.
Metaweb has done some compelling work with Freebase. They have even been doing some interesting geo work with their database. To date Freebase has largely been working with conceptual data, but from the look of their GIS app could be getting into more quantitative data.
As you get into quantitative data the power and tools available for asking sophisticated questions increase exponentially. Unfortunately so do the technical challenges, both computational and creating an intuitive user experience for something not intuitive to most people – numbers, math, statistics, etc. Despite the challenges I think this is where some of the greatest potential awaits for the emerging semantic web. That said I do think the new icons are quite nice and serve a useful function – despite the push pin. 
3 Responses to Are Push Pins Inescapable?
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“…overlap with existing icons such as KML and GeoRSS.” Not overlap, rather close relation. Whereas the Geotag Icon describes a general concept (“This item is geotagged”) the KML icon and GeoRSS favicon each proclaim a file format. This is analogous to the Feed Icon: can you imagine having a different orange icon for each web feed format (RSS, RSS 2, Atom, RDF, etc.)? There’s no reason why the Geotag Icon can’t sit side-by-side with file format icons if that’s what folk wish to do. But a well-recognized Geotag Icon (in time!) adjacent to the text description “Download KML file (opens in Google Earth)” could well be more informative to the majority users than what is otherwise sure to be a growing set of vaguely-related file format icons with which to become familiar. The power of de facto standard icons is in instant recognition—and the fewer the merrier!
As regards the semantic web, I think what we were trying say is that people will see the icon, discover geotagging, and do it themselves—thus increasing the breadth and depth of data available. If people don’t share data there can be no semantic web. But Sir Tim Berners-Lee agrees with you (or you with him!) that much of the potential data resources are locked away in databases. Maybe encouraging individual users to geotag helps create a demand, and the corporate database owners will follow and release their geotagged data too? Small users started using feeds and now big players are using them eagerly, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.
As for answering trivial questions, I don’t think this is a given. We are territorial animals and much of what goes on in the world has geographic ramifications. As an example, see WhoIsSick which uses geo-location in combination with other user-contributed data to model the spread of disease in a way that has significant implications for Internet-mediated public health surveillance. A simple set of coordinates has a lot of utility when combined with other simple data: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
An interesting read, thanks, and I was relieved to read “quite nice” and “useful” at the end!
P.S. The “giant” pushpin and globe in the Geotag Icon are not to scale
Hi Bruce -
Thanks for the feedback. I do like the icon and the motivation for it – sorry to emphasize it more till the end. I figure the community will pick up what is most useful and having options always helps produce the best result. The geotag icon is a good option and I’m sure folks will pick it up. I do think it is useful for some guidance on how it works with existing icons, but that is more a nit than anything.
On the semantic side I don’t disagree that annotations are and can be useful. More to the point, the vast majority of usage tends to be trivial (pictures of my vacation and favorite bars etc.). It gets eyeballs and that drives many things. I think the real potential going forward is combining structured geospatial data (i.e. databases) with unstructured annotations. For instance – if in addition to having the lat long of people that are sick you had a structured dataset of demographics or disease mortality rates to overlay them on you could answer some very interesting questions. If you had an automated way to answer the question is there a correlation between a certain ethnicity or disease mortality rate you could really make some potential progress. That in my opinion is where the power of the semantic web lies. While there is power in annotations I hope to see more combinations with new datasets rather than more mashups of existing annotations. Just one perspective and opinion though.
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