Locative dynamics, locative media and urban dynamics mashed up. Exploring heterogeneous data sources with geospatial and time-sensitive information will be the foundation for my master thesis (German: Diplomarbeit).

I already wrote on our Tagcrumbs startup blog about User-Generated Content & The Sensor Revolution and that I finally found a very interesting and relevant topic for my master thesis at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, from now on referred to as DERI.

The DERI is one of the world’s leading semantic technologies research institutes and its mission is “to explore semantics for people, organisations and systems to collaborate and interoperate on global scale“. With over 120 researchers working on topics from Semantic Reality, Semantic Sensor Networks, Semantic Web Services to Social Software Research.

Research focus will be obtained by picking very specific examples for semantic data integration in an urban environment. More information and entries about relevant findings will come soon.

Research Goals? Integrate, aggregate & visualize geospatial activity. As data sources user-generated content (e.g. geo-referenced photos or place-based communication) as well as sensor network data (e.g. wireless network activity or traffic data) will be considered using a semantic vocabulary to create a homogenous data layer. The novelty lies in aggregating many kinds of data sources to get a more complete picture about the main question surrounding my thesis:

What happens at a specific place at a specific time in a city? Think about conferences, large events, earthquakes, fires, long-term fluctuations,…

As an outcome I would like to see a convincing web-based prototype implementation for one specific scenario to express the urban dynamics. (maybe a conference?)

If you have any relevant research work, publications, urban studies, location-based projects or any interesting open geospatial data sources feel free to contact me or leave a comment. I am still in the period of collecting and getting the whole context.

Relation to Tagcrumbs: All research work will be public domain and Tagcrumbs is yet another data source provider for place-based annotations, although a really nice one by supporting GeoRSS with meaningful markup. The research about urban environments, places or location-based services provides a great source for new ideas and use cases for Tagcrumbs, more announcements will follow.

I am still writing about entrepreneurship and technology topics on this blog as time allows but the category ‘Locative Dynamics‘ will be the focus for the next months.

If you want to see all the buzzwords related to my thesis, check out the large version of the Locative Dynamics Map on Flickr. The image was generated with Wordle.net.

It creates an interesting perspective if you collect all relevant keywords to your research topic and visualize it. For completeness here is the list:

urban dynamics
digital footprinting
sensor networks
social networks
semantic technologies
wikicity
real-time city
urbanism
system dynamics
social
citizen journalism
citysense
sensing
citizen empowerment
citizen science
urban economics
urban efficiency
real-time systems
mobile
mobility
mobile evolution
iphone
sensor
location
location-based services
lbs
earthquake
digital cities
urbanization
spatiotemporal
geospatial
geo
events
map
mapping
neogeography
place-based conversation
places
disaster scenarios
urban informatics
data integration
semantics
web 2.0
semantic web
pervasive systems
real-time control system
real-time urban environment
semantic reality
semantic sensor networks
web services
semantic web services
dynamics
mobile 2.0
mobile internet
future
social
android
ubicomp
ubiquitous computing
senseable city lab
sensor data diffusion
data visualization
pervasiveness
web science
connectivity
API
activity vocabulary
ontology
urban planning
urban development
social media contributions
user generated content
ugc
location-sensitive
locative
wireless
emergence
geo-awareness
real-time infrastructure
place annotations
visualization
geocoding
reverse geocoding
street view
heat maps
movement
local
local business
tourism
ambient sensing
mobile web
social placemarking
ethics
geo-referencing
wireless networks
gsm
wifi
communities
georss
location-sensitive
what
where
when
gps
interfaces
tags
local authorities
broadcast
agents
city wifi networks
infotainment
entrepreneurship
public sensors
traffic
physical context
real world
mobile media
sensor revolution
participatory planning
digital traces
urban space
public space
virtual urbanism
virtual city
social dynamics
vicinity
proximity
social environment
proximity detection
device detection
event-driven
technology-driven
societal change
real-time information visualization
digital walls
social media
physical proximity
social proximity
place blogging
creative urban intervention
architecture
urban hub
locative media services
metropolitan area networks
body area networks
building information system
city life
networked city
sentinent city
social location
location-based social networking
urban professionals
urban studies
geo-notes
ad-hoc
community
networks
mobile navigation
personal navigation
context-based services
geoweb
social objects
place-based privacy
socio-locative practices
locative metadata
mobile networking
location-tracking
urban landscape
public authoring
urban tapestry
urban screens
urban interfaces
geospatial data
geospatial technology
geospatial web
remote sensing
geomatics
spatial analysis
urban area

IBM’s Next Five in Five, mentions the innovation trends for the next 5 years:

1. Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
2. You will have a crystal ball for your health
3. You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back
4. You will have your own digital shopping assistants
5. Forgetting will become a distant memory

These trends are based on IBM’s research and the impact on society.

I am sceptical that speech interfaces will become really dominant. Mobile search via speech input is already deployed by Google but as mobile phone keyboards and touch interfaces are getting better speech is just a good alternative.

The digital shopping assistant scenario is already an attractive business opportunity for new startups like Barcoo, that facilitate barcode scanning to retrieve product information and price comparison data.

The distant memory is a scary scenario in which all your activity in social networks, on the web plus the sensor data of your mobile phone (GPS) is collected. Your whole life is one data stream including all your interactions and if everything from every point in time can be accessed this would dramatically change the way we behave and live. Problematical ethical questions would arise but you don’t have to take the perspective of all of your personal data must be collected, instead consider use cases where it makes sense to collect very specific data in health scenarios (diseases) or business scenarios (workshop protocols). In more closed scenarious you have better control on privacy issues and the big brother is not watching your whole life.

We will see what happens… locative media is becoming much more influential and important, especially with the rise of ubiquitous location-based user generated content and sensor networks data.

Yet another post about the copycat attitude of Germans, this time by VentureBeat. So why not state some subjective opinions about this frequently mentioned claim…

This kind of annoys me because as an interested person in the Internet startup scene you always read that Germans are just doing copycat startups, meaning copying existing ideas from other countries and introducing it (only) to the German market, with the hope of pioneer gains. Also referred to it as the Second But Elsewhere strategy, which puts a focus on the underlying strategy instead of just saying yet another boring startup. Seems like everyone is hoping to find spontaneously a killer innovation in a startup but innovations are not a big bang process and also have to evolve and a wide distribution is what makes something to be innovative and useful.

The annoying point is, that this fact is always repeated by the media, founders or investors (customers don’t care if they get value delivered), so it is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. What is the problem with that? First, as long as you create profitable companies and customers love you application, nothing is wrong. Second, the term copying is pretty broad, identical copies, copies of features, ideas or concepts? The car was invented in Germany and I can see a lot of copycats (with close to identical products)… No one cares. If you go to a shopping mall you see various  products of different manufacturers and this is how business works, there is a market with competition and you can compete over the price, the quality or the time to deliver. A normal process of idea and product dissemination with the goal to provide the best customer value, because the customer can select out of a variety of products the one that fits best. It is a consumer market where the consumers decide what the company should provide and not vice versa. There is a need for really similar applications that have something special for specific niches or geographic regions.

Ok, now we have a fast-paced Internet economy with less protectable intellectual property where it is even easier to go with a second but elsewhere strategy, so why complain? That’s just the case and the market is really big with a distribution channel like the Web.  But I admit, I wish there would be more innovative and creative Internet startups in Germany with an international focus. At the point two companies compete on the same market it does not matter anymore who copied whom. There have to be more good examples of how it can be done but continuously speaking about copycats is just annoying.

To conclude, stop the copycat posts and give a more detailed analysis of Internet startups and their potential markets if you care but don’t create a general hypothesis of Germany’s copycat attitude over all industries, just tedious to read! You can call every company a copycat if you want, Google did not invent online search, YouTube not online video, Facebook/MySpace not social networking but still they did provide something new and attractive to customers.

By the way, Germany is still export champion world wide and the number of patent application in relative and absolute terms is pretty impressive. Nothing to worry about the copycat attitude or the missing technology transfer. Still, the Germans are the calm hard-working and smart persons with there strengths in the non consumer-oriented industries. Or does anyone has one of the fabulous Heidelberg Druck printing machines in their office?

The Chinese culture and economy is much more focused on developing close to identical copies but no one cares in the Internet economy because they are working behind walled gardens in their own market. If they get the chance to become more international no one will speak about the German Internet copycat attitude anymore…

P. S.

As the co-founder of Tagcrumbs I have to say it is born out of an idea where we took different concepts like user generated content, tagging, folksonomy, mapping in the GeoWeb, social media trends to create a product that we and hopefully customers like. Of course there are competitors with similar ideas, otherwise there would be no market. But Tagcrumbs distinguishes itself in many ways, not just some unimportant additional features.

The tone of this post is not as bad as it sounds, it is caused by the bad weather here in Galway, Ireland. Keep on the reporting about German startups.

The ‘Never Hide’ picture was taken by Svadilfari, thanks.