A data-centric view
Justin’s been talking about viewing the future from a data-centric perspective, rather than application or software-centric. I came across an interesting example of a data-centric approach over on flickr. Flickr hosts a huge number of images, and quite a bit of metadata alongside these. This metadata includes camera used, aperture, lighting information and dates among others.
Here, however, they’ve been taking a look at their geo-data. With increasing numbers of cameras and camera-phones capturing geographic location, flickr have been able to create some very interesting visualisations which illustrate the surfaced connections amongst this huge stockpot of data. By plotting shapes to encompasse these locations, and mashing them up with names at various levels (e.g. neighbourhood, city, province, country continent); they could begin chipping away regions which are not photographed. The resulting alpha shapes strongly resonate with named geographic locations.
in other words, flickr, without recourse to a map, have created visualisations of their data which represent named geographic locations.(http://flickr.com/photos/straup/2972131146/)
Check out their project page for more (and better-explained 
) details.
The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed.
By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud.
The good stuff is where the data are.
November 7th, 2008 at 6:41 am
[...] much screaming out for the importance of open data. First a couple of posts on Nodalities. In A data-centric view, Zach Beauvais talks about a rather fascinating blog post over at Flickr, where they have used the [...]
November 9th, 2008 at 4:29 am
[...] Beauvais (another Talisian?!?), found to a really cool project that uses geo-data from flickr images to create fairly accurate [...]
November 16th, 2008 at 11:35 am
[...] A data-centric view. "The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." [...]
November 17th, 2008 at 1:00 am
[...] Nodalities » Blog Archive » A data-centric view "The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." Yes, it is. (tags: data flickr reuse information tools geodata mapping ) [...]
January 19th, 2009 at 4:47 am
[...] for 2008-11-08 Nodalities » Blog Archive » A data-centric view "The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, [...]