GeoWeb Presentation at the Texas GIS Forum

I was invited to present at the Texas GIS Forum by the Texas Natural Resources Information Systems on the topic of the GeoWeb.  It was a great session, that also included Dave Bouwman and Kirk Kuykendall.

Dave’s talk dealt with the technology required to help GIS programmers be more responsive to the needs of a larger, less GIS-focused, web community.  It included the most slides that I have ever seen in 25-minute talk (140!).  What struck me the most about his talk was the level of web expertise that had to be acquired before beginning to address the location or GIS issues that would best serve an end user of the web service.  It makes me wonder if there might be a need for a middle-ware solution between the producers, who have high value geo-content but do not have Dave’s web expertise, and the consumers of that content.  In some respect, I think that is part of what Dave’s organization provides.

My talk focused on a theme that I have been developing for the last couple of months, which is how should we index and search all the hidden geo-content that exists within the deep web storage networks of the world.  Indexing and discovering this content would make the jobs of millions of professionals, who create GIS and CAD grade content a whole lot easier, as well as opening the information to a lot of other uses.  My slides may be found below.