"A (Mostly) Complete & (Mostly) Accurate History Of Location (Abridged)", presented on 6th. October 2010 at the British Computer Society Geospatial Specialist Group in Covent Garden, London, UK.
Novo Nordisk's journey in developing an open-source application on Neo4j
A (Mostly) Complete & (Mostly) Accurate History Of Location (Abridged)
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Editor's Notes
But what to talk about? I was being gently encouraged to provide a title and theme for this talk by a certain Mr Andrew Larcombe.
… so with that in mind, and after using a short geo-timeline in my talk last week at the AGI’s GeoCom and watching Chris Osborne do something similar I decided to try and address both of these questions
So ifyou read the tech press and blogs you’d think that location is a relatively recent invention, coincident with the rise of the smartphone, it’s certainly a hot topic but …
… let’s see. Jump intoyour personal location time machine and see how far back location really goes
And join me in a (mostly) complete and (mostly) accurate history of location (abridged)
Well not quite, but the greekmathemetician used long/lat to uniquely identify a location on the Earth’s surface
Earliest noted use on China's Great Wall to alert of enemy attacks. Message could be transmitted as far away as 300 miles in a few hours.
Persian Scholar Al Biruni proposed earth rotated on its axis
First astrolabe invented by Ramon Llull, a Majorcan Astronomer, to determine latitude
If the Mappa Mundi looks a bit odd it’s because early maps used the convention of north at the bottom and south at the top. It’s a little bit more recognisable if you flip it 180 degrees
Maps are easyWe’ve been making them for 1000’s of yearsLots of established standards and principles
Octant (and later sextant) jointly invented by John Hadley (UK) and Thomas Godfrey (US) … enables the latitude to be calculated accurately … but not the longitude, that needed a standard time reference
… that had to wait ‘till 1760 when John Harrison invented the marine chronometer, allowing both longitude and latitude to be correctly calculated
.. Co-founded by Dennis Crowley … of whom we’ll hear more about in a while …
5 months later the Google Maps API launches
One of the first mass market GSM phones with GPS capability
So what does this all mean?
There’s a lot of hyperbole around place, POIs and check-ins
Places are geo-tagged POIs with rich, high quality content and up-to-date information. But there is a rush to “own” places on at the moment and it’s accelerating
But who wins? … the early adoptors and early entrants into this space aren’t always the most successful …