Earlier this week Google released their Buzz. Essentially it’s a Twitter-like system (service is probably the correct now a days). The essential component of the service is to provide a means to type in what you are doing, what you are thinking or similar in few or limited characters. This is nothing new. Facebook has it, Twitter has it, and probably 20-50 others.  Of course each has their own elevator pitch – the one thing the other does not have, although marginal differences and only small additions to the service not affecting the core component greatly.

I have observed this phenomenon for many services. If you remember in 1999-2000 the web search market was like this – a lot of actors fighting for the market, more recently the social networking scene was also like this, Facebook won (although others exist very well also). However, what is happening more and more is that the users (us) are avoiding to choose one service, we believe we are capable of updating all services at the same time and also keep track of everything at the same time. Both of these notions are in fact possible through feed-readers and meta-social systems where you can post to several systems at once or get the newest update from several systems at one place.

However, I’ve also noticed, and experienced, the extreme redundancy of this. Say, if user A is posting something to her blog, which is fed out on her feed, simultaneously she posts to Twitter and Facebook something in the lines of “posted new blogpost at http://trata.ter.te”. Say that user B is interested in A and follows her on Facebook, Twitter and the blog feed. Well, user B is ending up with the same information 3 times – at least. Expand this to the average distinct friend rate on users have on all their social systems – it is becoming a lot of redundancy.

So what is the problem with this? I think users are more and more eager to get only the relevant information – and they want it as it happens – this is what triggers us to join all services – we do not want to miss out. However this is somewhat of a paradox, we are pursuing more information but we only want a small subset of it. So how do you manage this? Are you a deliberate redundance-oholic? Are you manually aggregating and filtering the information?

More importantly – is there a service or system that actually tries to manage this information pool through aggregation and filtering – which works?

I certainly does not possess the answers to this – but I do predict that this kind of service will be the “new trend”, we have enough ways of putting the information into the pool – now we need a way to get it back, filtered and smooth. I think location is one important asset in doing this – although not alone, but in conjunction with very clever algorithms. So who will take the challenge?

A general problem in GIScience is that there is too much data, from an arbitrary number of sources represented in a enourmous amount of languages. Therefore the solution is typically to use only one source of information and hard-link it to the map-rendering system. Such as Google Maps and similar.

A vivid discussion on NRKBeta’s pages (norwegian) started from their post on user’s comments on how they should develop a new system intended to be used by the norwegian trip association (typically hicking off road) for planning trips of any sort and be a portal for everything tour/trip/hicking related.

Not surprisingly a suggestion on using OpenStreetMap came along – spawning a “wild” discussion on the capabilities of open source maps/geoinformation and even open source in general.

I took a more lean approach to this and argued that combining “the best of every world” would be the best solution. And thus referencing to trends like service-orientation, loose coupling and similar. I believe this must be a quite good approach to the “problem” of having too much information, where subsets of different providers is appropriate to the task in question – regardless of cost, licensing and other more managerial issues. Atle posted an idea of making a similar approach in his master thesis. In response to this idea I sketched an architecture that could enable this, the architecture is inspired partly on the INSPIRE directive in addition to the general service-orientation.

Service oriented architecture for a geo-centric system

The architecture aims at illustrating where complexity of implementation may adhere. I believe however, that an implementation is feasible and possibly a rapid prototype feasible when taking a low-level approach while maintaining the conceptual idea. The numbered circles are to indicate reference points that is made in a wiki-page (norwegian..) regarding this architecture, the MS Visio file can also be found there.

What do you think of this architecture? Is it feasible? Is it overly complex? Is it good? Has anyone tried to implement something similar?