blog: Book recommendation: The Geospatial Web

All,

I can very warmly recommend Arno Scharl and Klaus Tochtermann (eds) 2007: 'The Geospatial Web: How geobrowsers, social software and the Web 2.0 are shaping the network society', Springer-Verlag (London). It looks to be an excellent summary of current research on geospatial platforms and data, and the contribution these have to make to information management on the internet. The first chapter, which I read in detail this morning, makes the point that one reason why platforms like Google Earth are so successful is that they harness the creative input of many people by using APIs, online groups, and facilitate Web 2.0-style content creation mechanisms. It strikes me that this raises an interesting parallel with the work of the Methods Network, and how it can be taken forward after the funding finishes. If this works for specific technological applications, can the same thing work for individual research methods that employ them? Can the model be adapted to more abstract research concepts?

Stuart