Spatial Awareness for Kindle?
The geospatial community has blogged about Kindle (like High Earth Orbit, Henri Bergius and Peter Batty and AnyGeo)
I don’t see anyone asking about spatial awareness though. I think it would be great if I could download some sort of spatial documents to a device then query those documents using location. Doesn’t EV-DO support some sort of geolocation capability that amazon could tap into and let me browse documents relevant to my location?
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“query those [spatial] documents using location” — are you kidding me? Get a tablet or a UMPC if you want that.
While a UMPC platform would certainly have more horsepower, it seems like what Amazon could offer is a way for data creators to publish their work and receive royalties. This sort of economic incentive has allowed the book market to grow a “long tail”. I’d like to see the geodata market do the same.
You need to be able to parse those documents and extract places, match them against a gazetteer or geocoder, and there’s the old “Paris France versus Paris Texas versus Paris Hilton” effect…
Not such a simple undertaking, and beyond the scope of a simple document viewer – though at some point in the near future, certainly pre-tagged documents could be visualized with a UMPC or other lightweight viewer…
Seems like the parsing/extracting could be done by something like Metacarta. The important thing I see in Kindle is how it ties into Amazon’s business process and creates a market for proprietary digital data. If Amazon could include geodata then our industry would benefit.