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Yesterday's GeoTec opening keynote was given by Peter Morville. Here's some notes I took during his great speech revolving around information architecture and ambient findability (which is also the names of Peter's books). The main concepts when it comes to information, of course including geospatial information, form Peter's honeycomb: usable, useful, desirable, valuable, findable, credible, accessible. Peter quoted Herbert Simon, nobel prize of economy, who said "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention". He told us the most important and visited page on a website, after the actual homepage, is the search results page, which generally receives little attention from the site's designers/managers. He also discussed the revenge of librarians, claiming librarians are key players not only to archive information, but to propel information into our future. The concept of pace layering was also discussed: some elements evolves faster than others and this has a direct impact on information management ((quicker) fashion, commerce, art, ..., governance, culture, nature (slower)). Above everything, Peter's speech was to the point, clear and supported with adequate explanations and examples. Hear Peter Morville interviewed a few months ago by Very Spatial or read Ambient findability's review. There's also the Cartography blog covering his first day at GeoTec.

Here is some last notes on the GeoTec 2006 event that I deemed worthed to share. See me three previous entries regarding GeoTec. It was also nice to meet Paul from the Cartography blog. Read more below for the notes.

The Rise and Shout blog links to a summary of ArcGIS compatible formats and the extension to get maximum interoperabilty. The geometrybag blog discuss the Data Interoperabilty Extension: "Not only does it have great support for a wide range of data formats, but it can also go a lot further than just reading data natively. You get a full support for defining custom transformations, which allow you to convert data not just between formats, but use a whole bunch of “transformers” on the way." Additionnaly, Chris'GISmo shares interesting thoughs, including: "the fact ESRI expects its consumers to purchase *another* extension to read open standards that they “openly support” is questionable and laughable at best."

The GeoFactor blog reports on last week's Open Geospatial Interoperability Day, part 1 and part 2. From the blog: "While there are some ongoing discussions on and changes upcoming to some of the OGC standards, the industry has clearly arrived regarding at least the major technical issues of geospatial data sharing. [...] Standards are great but they must be transparent to end users. Vendors are working to provide that transparency."