OSCON: David Rumsey's Keynote

George Dyson's presentation about John von Neumann's role in the development of the ENIAC was the first presentation at OSCON to get a standing ovation -- and it was the least technical presentation of the entire conference. And this year O'Reilly's OSCON team managed to find another presentation that was light on the technical details, but heavy on how the open source philosophy can be applied to other areas of life.

In his presentation "Open Content: How Online Digital Libraries will Provide Access to Cultural Information in the 21st Century" David Rumsey talked about his vast collection of maps that he has collected over many years. When he broke his habit of collecting more maps, he decided to donate them to a university so that people could enjoy his vast collection. Upon reflecting on that decision, he changed his mind and decided to use the Internet to make the maps available to a much greater audience. And with that decision he embarked on a journey to digitize his entire collection of maps.

The result is for everyone to see at davidrumsey.com -- however the result is not just a collection of images slapped onto a web site. David and his crew worked hard to create a set of tools that allows the Internet community to access the maps in a meaningful manner. Visitors can choose to use a browser based viewer to browse the maps, or download various Java applications that enable a host of advanced features.

All of the images are scanned at a high resolution, which enables vistors to zoom into maps to get much more detail. The Java based viewer has a nifty feature that lets the user view the relative size of the maps and to view multiple maps at the same time. All of these tools have features that emulate what you might want to do with a collection of real maps in a library. You can tell that David and his team worked hard to make his collection of maps useful, going much further than simply providing scans of the maps.

David's presentation kicked into high gear when he started showing his GIS viewing application -- with this application multiple maps can be overlaid for better examination and comparison. David overlaid maps of San Francisco spanning 100 years and then showed how marshes were filled in over time and how the city grew. The application that he used to show these maps is simply stunning -- the controls allow the visitor to change the opacity of maps to view multiple maps simulteanously. A slider allows the user to overlap a portion of one map over another -- as if the user was manually overlaying one physical map on top of the other. The images were simply stunning and brimmed with information, ready for any Internet visitor to enjoy.

Finally, David showed an image that overlaid one map onto a GIS elevation map to give the old map a 3D defintion. That alone was amazing, but when David demonstrated a tool that allows the user to do a virtual fly-through an old map, the audience was stunned.

I like maps a lot -- studying geography and learning about little nuances of our planet is fun. I'm halfway scared of sitting down and taking a closer look at the site, because it's likely to go suck my available time for a few days. I didn't think that maps could be quite so cool or that a relatively non-technical presentation could get another standing ovation.

I'm really pleased that the O'Reilly Conferences team continually manages to find a wide diversity of speakers ranging from detailed technical discussions to high level philosophical keynotes. I'm also pleased to see that open source ideals are starting to permeate other layers of culture -- personally I am a big fan open source, but I think the philosophy and concepts pioneered in this space have a lot of applicability in other fields. Open data, open content, open geneogy -- we're just getting started exploring this space!

Go take a look at davidrumsey.com and let me know what you think!