Sydney is the the home of the Google technical team that were originally Where 2 Technologies who developed Google Maps and now are the folks developing Google Wave. Raul Vera, who is a member of the Google Sydney team, gave a presentation in which he predicted a paradigm shift in spatial applications.
First of all he said that 70-80% of all Google searches have a geographic component. In 2011 he expects that there will be more usage of Google Maps on mobile phones than on desktop/laptop computers. As a result the future will be web applications (web apps), that are loaded on demand and run in a browser. This means that you could be using a new or updated web app within hours of it being developed. This defines a new level in agile development.
The future also means mobile geospatial applications without maps. His example is Google Skymap that runs on the Android OS and provides a map of the sky for your location. If you’re into astronomy you will know that you need your location to provide a map showing the constellations and stars visible to you, but otherwise you may be unaware that location has been used by the application. The key to applications like this this is a location API, which can be either the W3C’s open location api or an underlying location api developed by Google or another vendor. The location api returns your location, but different vendors compute this is different ways. In my experience you need to know how each vendor’s location api works, because in the case of Google, for example, it returns the location of your server, which is not necessarily where you are.
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