ASI Buys Into Oil Well

Analytical Surveys, Inc. (ASI) recently stated it woud diversify into the energy area. I thought that meant more GIS for that arena. Apparently not, the Houston Chronicle reports the company bought a 20% stake in a relavtively new oil well in Oklahoma.

Analytical Surveys, Inc. ...today announced it has acquired a 20 percent working interest in a producing Oklahoma oil and natural gas well. The Company acquired the interest for $300,000 cash from TD Energy LLC, the operator of the well and owner of the remaining 80 percent working interest. 

Microsoft Gives out $300,000 Virtual Earth Grants

Eight academic recipients of Virtual Earth grants will receive a total of $300,000. Microsoft issued an RFP last year for projects that explore Virtual Earth and Trustworthy Computing. 23 grants were announced today with 8 focussing on moving VE forward. C|net provides details and here’s the release.

The RFP asked for

university research in areas relevant to digital geography including spatio-temporal databases, routing, computer vision, ontologies, map user interfaces and visualization. Virtual Earth is Microsoft’s mapping and local search technology. The eight winners of the Virtual Earth RFP will conduct basic research in digital geographics that is expected to advance the state of the art.

Virtual Earth recipients include these folks. (The only I know is David Mark.):

• Maneesh Agrawala, University of California, Berkeley (United States)
• Frank Dellaert, Georgia Institute of Technology (United States)
• Dieter Fox, University of Washington (United States)
• David Mark, University of Buffalo (United States)
• P.J. Narayanan, Indian Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad (India)
• Hanan Samet, University of Maryland (United States)
• Shashi Shekhar, University of Minnesota (United States)
• Cyrus Shahabi, University of Southern California (United States)

Geospatial One-Stop Wins “Information Sharing” Award

Public CIO reports that GOS was one of five winners of “the Industry Advisory Council’s (IAC) Collaboration and Transformation Shared Interest Group (SIG) ...Excellence.Gov awards.” These are given out, this year for the sixth time, to programs “selected for demonstrating best practices in information sharing for federally-led IT program implementations.” There were twenty finalists and five winners.

Why Europe Needs to Provide its Own Public Geodata

It’s not on the main page of Directions, so I want to highlight this guest editorial by Jo Walsh on the logic behind efforts to open up geodata in Europe.