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Have any thoughts about “integrating cartographic data with geo-tagged knowledge repositories” and how “the emerging Geospatial Web will revolutionize the production, distribution and consumption of media products”? If so, you may want to be in touch with Austria’s Know-Center project, which is seeking chapter submissions for an upcoming book on the geospatial Web. There’s a whole list of possible topics in the submission guidelines, including:

• State-of-the-art and emerging trends of geo-browsing platforms
• Knowledge acquisition and management in a geospatial context
• Knowledge relationship discovery and management (e.g. matching geospatial relationships with semantic or temporal relationships)
• Knowledge-intensive, location-based services
• Marketing of products and services via the Geospatial Web
• Content, annotation and ontology services as enablers of the Geospatial Web

Submissions are due by October 10, 2006 — so get to work.

CNet’s Daniel Terdiman has been on a bit of a 3pointD-style road trip lately, visiting five states with a carload of travel gadgets that help connect him to the rest of the world. Fun, interesting reading, including a few good 3pointD insights: “While I would reach my destination exactly as planned, I had absolutely no idea how I got there. I couldn’t even have begun to tell you what roads I took, or how to get back from there without this digital helper.”

Tony Walsh notes a post from Linden Lab VP for community and support Robin Harper in which she talks about a new system planned for identifying whether Second Life users are anonymous accounts that signed up under the new registration rules or have been “verified” by having paid money to LL at one point or another. Tony worries that making such information public will in effect create two classes of SL citizens and make it easy for residents (and LL?) to discriminate against one or the other. Note that there are already two classes of SL resident — Basic accounts, which pay no monthly fee to LL, and Premium accounts, which do pay for land. And that information is already public. Why that’s not sufficient is a bit unclear. (more…)

Attention, SL resident Jeffrey Gomez! Jeffrey, of course, is the guy who brought us the ability to export SL objects to Blender. Now comes the news from Ogle Earth that the latest release candidate of Blender can also import KMZ files created in SketchUp. Of course, this doesn’t imply it’s an easy step to get those into a format that SL understands. But Jeffrey was close to writing something that would export from Blender to SL, but held off because of IP issues. [See comments thread.] Here’s a great, non-IP-infringing use for such an app. It would be great to see Jeffrey or someone else complete the process. SketchUp is a fun tool, and there are great resources for SketchUp models out there, including a free warehouse and a marketplace for user-created models. Being able to get this stuff into SL would immediately open things up even more than they already are. The potential seems pretty exciting to me.

[NOTE: Second Life now supports maya and soon other formats in the form of scultped prims.]

No sooner did the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) re-launch SLBoutique, the shopping site for items created in the virtual world of Second Life, than they find themselves stumbling over the kind of intellectual property issues that crop up in SL every day. Apparently, an SL resident had listed a virtual reproduction of the surrealist artist Salvador Dali painting Landscape With Butterflies on the site. But when the Salvador Dali Museum got wind of this, they sent a letter to the Sheep, asking them to remove the IP-rights violating reproduction from the site — which the Sheep, quite properly, promptly did. Dali’s rights-holders have been notoriously tight about this kind of thing, as I recall (though I can’t find the link at the moment), as have the rights-holders of Joan Miro’s work. What the episode indicates, though, is that SL, the Sheep and SLBoutique are getting a higher profile, and that the many other IP violations in SL may soon come in for similar treatment. (more…)