[OSGeo-Edu] a brief report on my summer stint at OII

[P Kishor]

Dear edu-ers,

Earlier this past summer I had the privilege of attending the Summer
Doctoral Program (SDP) at Oxford University's Oxford Internet
Institute. [http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/teaching/sdp/Y2008.cfm]. Following
is a brief report from my experience (yes, I proudly wore and waved
the OSGeo hat around, metaphorically speaking -- is there a real OSGeo
hat that I can wave around?).

The theme of the two week long workshop was "Web Science," a term
coined to describe the emerging "science of the web." The logic is
that "in order to: understand what the web is; engineer its future;
ensure its social benefit, we need a new interdisciplinary field that
(we) call Web Science." [http://webscience.org].

Among the several program tutors, the notable personalities (for me)
were Hal Abelson (co-founder of Creative Commons), Gerry Sussman
(co-founder of Free Software Foundation) and Tim Berners-Lee (inventor
of the web).

The presentations could be broadly aggregated under the themes of
social networking and Second Life; semantic web; and privacy and
security. There was an all too brief digression into matters of public
policy, and I was the only participant from the geospatial arena. Most
of the presentations can be accessed from
[http://students.oii.ox.ac.uk/sdp:sdp2008:readings].

My very over-arching, broad take-away impression is that from the
social science side there will be continuing and intensifying focus on
social networks as a proxy for studying human interaction at all
scales, from inter-personal to society levels; from the computer
science side, there is a great push to advance the state of the
semantic web -- getting computers to understand other computers with
minimal human interaction. Semantic web is really where Tim B-L sees
the future headed, or, dare I say, wants the future to head. From the
public policy side, there are issues of privacy and security that get
quite a bit of high-profiling, but the issues that continue to be left
behind are those of access to information and digital inclusion
(briefly addressed by a visiting Member of Parliament one morning), as
well as making preservation and archiving mainstream.

>From the geospatial perspective, the bottom-line is that while
"geospatial science" may be under-represented, geospatial technology
is definitely a hot item, much of it due to the profile raising role
that Google Maps have played. Location is now the center piece of much
development, particularly in the area of both social networking and
semantic web. Fortunately, Hal Abelson too believes that geospatial
*information* is important enough to be the next big focus for the
activities of Science Commons (SC is the sister-agency of Creative
Commons, its focus being on open access to scientific data).

Please feel free to contact me if you have any further queries or
interest in any of the above.

-- 
Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/
Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) http://www.osgeo.org/