NSGIC 05 - Ramona

I’ve heard about Ramona since I started attending NSGIC meetings in 2001. It’s a vision for a single online data inventory survey of GIS data. The idea is that with such a service, state coordinators would not need to repeated fill out surveys from different federal agencies and other interested parties regarding their data holdings. The app was very slick and a beta with about 10 states testing it is planned for the fall. I am also pleased to note that the programmer on the project (project funded by NOAA) is using MapServer for the maps.

NSGIC – Geospatial Bluebook

I’m a bit overwhelmed by the 800 page Geospatial Bluebook now available via GOS II (look under communities and “GIS for the Nation”). It’s a compendium of best practices, guidance, templates for building NSDI and perhaps GOS, The National Map and other things along with way. “The Geospatial Bluebook begins the process of identifying practices that have served other communities; the intended goal is to offer a set of national implementation templates for communities that choose to adopt those specifications.”

iPod Subway Maps Face Copyright Infringement Takedown

William Bright found that he could put maps on iPods. So, to be a good guy, he started offering maps of city subways on a website. That is, until New York City and more recently San Francisco’s authorities informed him he was infringing on their copyrights. He took the maps down and created his own, hoping to get around the legal issues. The good news? San Francisco, at least, is looking to offer its own iPod maps soon. (Via Wired)

CIO’s are finally waking up to location technology

An article published in CIO Today points to annoying realization. It’s only taken 20 years for CIO’s to wake up to the fact that location technology presents a unique competitive advantage. It’s about time, however, some of the people interviewed are a bit squeamish about sharing their "vision." The article highlighted a Fortune 100 oil company that asked not to be mentioned. The "secret" company is using GeoTagger from MetaCarta, which has targeted the oil industry because of its volumes of unstructured geospatial data stored as textual citations in exploration, production, and legal documents. However, ChevronTexaco is a major investor in MetaCarta so maybe this is the ‘not so secret’ aforementioned oil company.

Another curious quote in the article comes from Karla Dooley, a category analyst at Hensley and Company, a beer distributor who said that, "If we can provide better information to our customers to help them, that will keep us a step ahead…I don’t think anyone else is doing this kind of geographic stuff."

This is great. Eventually, this "geographic stuff" is really going to take off.

In brief, article cites that Staples Inc. is using an integrated BI/LI solution from SAS and Tactician, respectively and The Arizona Republic newspaper is using ESRI’s ArcGIS.

This is a nice review article but only two BI vendors, SAS and Salient, were mentioned and looks like only the Staples implementation of SAS and Tactician was the only true integration solution; the rest were single implemenations.

Google Earth Hack Takedown

It wasn’t Google that asked Andy Fowler to take down his layer that showed the nearest geocaches, it was GroundSpeak, the folks behind Geocaching.com. It’s not clear why they asked him to do so, though a similar service from GroundSpeak for paying members seems afoot, but he did. (Read especially the comments to Andy’s post; clearly expectations of websites are changing.) Stephan at OogleEarth suggests that user contributed content (like the contents of Geocaching.com) perhaps should be more freely shared.

I understand his logic, but even if the content was provided freely, geocaching.com still has overhead. So too will say Yahoo as it collects reviews of restaurants or Amazon as it shares user reviews of products and books. Should those be freely useable too? This is yet another issue that needs to be worked out as we progress toward Web 2.0.