7. Jumping ahead a little… XML, Ontology and Love.
I met Nicholas Maleve of Constant VZW at the Maison de Peuple in the Saint-Gilles district of Brussels last week. They had just held the latest in their series of Jonctions conferences and workshops and had had some time to think through some of the issues facing those who are currently concerned with mapping and of collecting and classifying location-based information.

I have known Nicholas for around three years I think, having been introduced at the CODE 'open source/free software' conference in Queen's College, Cambridge in the UK. We both have a track record in thinking and working through data-visualization, information systems, free software and its interface with art and activism in some form or another. This made a chat with Nicholas all the more important, as I wanted to know what someone else, in a similar situation to myself thinks about this (for me) relatively new phenomenon of Locative Media.

Nicholas is also a programmer, and has a good understanding of the applications of XML. This is particularly useful at the moment, as much of the location-based information systems use this mark-up language as a way of defining properties of objects in the world and references to them on the Web, for example.

Nicholas described for a while the idea of Ontology in this context. I'd seen this as a keyword in several documents around the DMZ event and had only an inkling what it was about. An Ontology in this sense is a file structure or namespace that provides the 'world view' for a particular document. In this case, Ontologies are important when thinking about the namespace of objects in the world. For example, in the spacenamespace project, Jo Walsh begins to describe some of the possible types of space that could be classified. An ontology is of course the product of a study which aims to define a system of classification, so this is going to be important is Locative Media is to build-up a file structure within which objects can be located.

Nicolas reckoned that the interesting part comes when two ontologies need to be merged – and this is where RDF comes on from what I can gather. In another conversation with Tom Dixon of Kode in Cardiff, he mentioned that there is a concerted effort to build meaning into the information systems that we use, so that imprecise definitions can be weighed-up and matched across ontologies.
This appears to be the basis for the Semantic Web project that Berners-Lee is promoting and draws on the idea that semantics are the attempt to resolve problem in finding similar meanings within different wordviews.

Nicolas mentioned that it was corporations that are interested in this idea as they are increasingly faced with having to deal with different 'worldviews' embedded within the databases of merged or partnered businesses. This attempt at 'understanding', so gentle and forgiving, seems so distant from the public perception of how businesses undertake mergers, take-overs or even internal downsizing ventures. (At another level, the idea that differing 'worldviews' are allowed to co-exist is hard to believe on the record of the governmental behaviours.)

All of this aside, it appears that the techno-determinist liberal-academic voice of the World Wide Web Consortium is persisting with the development of such systems. In an equally optimistic moment, I spent some time thinking about the idea of the interactions between Ontologies and where and how we experience this in other parts of our lives.

One example of this is when we feel whatever it is that we call Love. I figured that at that moment, when we let our guard down, we open our 'worldview' to change. It becomes open change through interaction – there is a chance that change will occur in our Lover's ontology too – and I guess that would be the proof that we would be looking for.

This process is apparent in Breathless – the film, featuring Richard Gere, as ti careens through Jerry Lee Lewis' breakneck, wayward lyrics and Goddard's Bout de Souffle towards that moment of vertigo, violence, confusion, obsession and wrecklessness.

I wonder whether there's room for that moment in the development of these file structures? Whether there will be a similar embodiment of the profound change that occurs when one worldview opens to another?
- posted by spope @ 9:41 pm

 
6. What is locative media?
Taking a look through the Locative.org website and mailing list archive, it becomes obvious that the terms Locative Media and Location-based Services are synonymous. While one appears, at first reading, to be defined from within new media art and activism, the latter feels quite at home within the corporate Geographic Information Services sector. Starting where many people do – chasing some keywords through Google, you can see equal weight given to the concern with location and information within both factions.
So it looks as if, as is often the case, to define Locative Media only in terms of technology is going to miss the point.
As evidence of this, it might be worth taking wireless local area network technology as an example. Used at once as a way of extending the reach of telecommunications companies, while also being taken up for free, open use by maverick groups of hackers, geeks and activists. The real and discernable difference between these factions is in the matter of ownership: some activists go as far as bringing the ownership back into the public realm through effecting policy – wireless network infrastructure as public service rather than private enterprise; others go even further and advocate radical cooperative models which take the responsibility and ownership beyond both state and corporation. At the extremes, these are fundamentally differing ways of understanding how communications networks could or should operate.

Drawing from this, I'd hope and expect to see similar fundamental differences in the approach to ownership and use of location-based services.
At one extreme I expect to find information systems that enable corporate retail interests to team with the largest mobile communications providers. Of course I lie here – I know that these are teamed-up already, and have working examples of such systems in place right now.

Following from this, I'd hope to see radical models of ownership and control being developed, outside of commercial application, but possibly within the reach of public policy.

I also expect to see the orthodoxies of psychogeography brought to bear somewhere along the line, providing as it does, interaction with both location and a mystical radical art-activism.

Let's see where to go from here…

- posted by spope @ 9:40 pm

 
5. Where to start?
Some objectives to be getting on with - to identify:

• What locative media is, or might be;
  
• Who is involved in its development;
  
• Why locative media is deemed important right now;
  
• What the context is - the network of standards, disciplines, organizations, people, discourses, funding;
  
• What method might be used to engage with it.
  

- posted by spope @ 3:26 pm