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Join the conversation--the Call for Participation has been extended until December 3, 2008

GIS has been around for decades, but is no longer only the realm of specialists. The Web is now flush with geographic data, being harnessed in a usable and searchable format. The right tools to easily create geo content have finally emerged and the outcome is the ability to represent and search the physical world online. Virtual representations of the physical world are becoming more realistic and important. As this happens, their geographic location becomes relevant and the scope becomes larger and problematic. Companies feel the need to have quality data across the globe—inside buildings and out—and are increasingly turning to their users to collect this data. In addition, the wide availability of geo-data has caused maps to become a required component of many online applications, creating a new market for companies like WeoGeo and GeoCommons to aggregate and generate revenue with geo-data and maps online.

GIS has been taken to heart by neogeographers, a new breed of developers with increasingly powerful tools built on the back of open standards and free APIs from the likes of Google and Microsoft, and application frameworks like Mapstraction and GeoDjango. Increasingly, the open source GIS stack is supporting the Web, adding a new arrow in the neogeographer's quiver. Geonames, an open-data service, is built from this data web-accessible data. Google has started exposing geo data in a separate index that is growing daily.

At the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, we expose the tools pushing the boundaries of the location frontier, track the emergence of new business models and services, and spend time examining new sources of data and the platforms for collecting them. New to Where 2.0 2008 will be a full day of in-depth tutorials on the best and the latest so that participants can return to their projects with new tools in hand.

Happening May 12-14, 2008 in Burlingame, California, Where 2.0 brings together the people, projects, and issues building the new technological foundations and creating value in the location industry. Join with other developers, technologists, CTOs, researchers, geographers, academics, business developers, and entrepreneurs to debate and discuss what's viable now, and what's lurking just below the radar. Learn more about Where 2.0.

O'Reilly Media is seeking proposals from people interested in leading the charge into the location frontier. Are you a GIS veteran on the verge of becoming a location entrepreneur? An open source developer hacking up a cool mapping tool? A neogeographer with a project that deserves a wider audience? A CIO using location information in an unexpected way? Submit a proposal to speak at Where 2.0. Proposals are due by December 3, 2007; registration opens in January 2008.