Introduction to Neogeography

GeoStack

There are a lot of technologies and tools that have been presented so far. Individually, these tools provide some nice features for gathering or showing location data. You now know how to mix some of the tools together, like GPSBabel and Google Earth to get data from your device into the 3-D global viewer.

Neogeography is working to bring all these technologies together into a "GeoStack". The GeoStack is a collection of tools and mechanisms that together cover all parts of collecting, gathering, and sharing location information. It enables using a GPS system to capture a waypoint and eventually have other users around the world view and comment on that waypoint.

The GeoStack can be divided into the various steps of data management. Along these steps, there are numerous paths the data can come from or take, depending on the actual application (generating maps, 3-D visualization, adding to my GPS unit POIs). These steps are laid out and illustrated in Figure 5 below:

Capture

GPS unit, camera, WiFi/Cell/IP logger, notebook of locations

Produce

The blog, Wiki, sites, databases that contain and generate geographic data

Communicate

A standardized mechanism for generating and transmitting the data

Aggregate

Tools for gathering, storing, filtering, and redistributing the original data

Consume

A viewer, map, or reader that a user uses to view the information; also can upload to GPS to use as direction waypoints or POIs

Figure 5. The GeoStack encompasses the entire life cycle of geospatial data, ...