Tuesday, January 16. 2007

National Academy: Not Enough Satellites for Earth Observation

Among the finding of the Research Council of the National Academies, by 2010, the number of operating Earth-observing instruments on NASA satellites is likely to drop by 40 percent. The report "Earth Science and Applications From Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond," proposes spending $7.5 billion on new sensors and satellites through 2020. That the group feels will meet scientists and the world's needs.

- New York Times

NAVTEQ Updates Error Reporting Tool

I'm not sure what it was called before, but now the website is called Map Reporter and is map-based. Per the press release, NAVTEQ has

updated its popular online feedback tool and renamed it NAVTEQ Map Reporter (TM). Now in its 11th year and having already handled tens of thousands of update requests, the updated system is now map-based, giving users who discover potential discrepancies an easier way to provide feedback by pinpointing the exact location of the concern for possible updating of the database.

The PR goes on:

Each submitted report is followed up individually and "map reporters" are able to monitor the resolution of their report and if a change is being made to the database.

This sounds very much like Tele Atlas' MapInsight, a limited released of which launched last year.

[Disclosure: I am a contractor for Tele Atlas.]

Farming out GIS Work Via Amazon

Brady at O'Reilly Radar posted a GIS use of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Mechnical Turk is a tool by which those who want humans to do work humans are good at but computers are lousy at to offer up those jobs to humans. In this case, Geospatial Vision is paying "turkers" to identify: "man-holes, drainage, pedestrian crossing, bollards, and yellow lines" in images using a Flash app.

I point this out because I can't seem to get the O'Reilly feed into "Other Points" and O'Reilly Radar is not in Planet Geospatial.

NAVTEQ: $600 offer for an Iowa County's Data

Discussions are ongoing in Johnson County Iowa about whether to sell, not sell or give away its GIS data. The discussion is being prompted by NAVTEQ's offer of $600 for the data.

Navteq has offered $600 for Johnson County's road-address information to incorporate into an online database used by global-positioning-system car maps.

There are privacy concerns noted, so I'm not sure at all about which data the article speaks. I first thought centerlines and address ranges, but then pondered address point data. I hope the county knows which data NAVTEQ wants!

- Daily Iowan

Podcast: Directions on the News - January 16, 2007

In our new weekly podcast covering the week's news Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg look at new products from ESRI and Ricoh, a significant GPS acquistion, an upcoming court date and explore the iPhone's lack of location awareness and new 3D modeling options with implication for GIS users. The podcast is 8 minutes (< 3 Mb) and was recorded January 15, 2007.

Here are the show notes. What are show notes? Links to all the things we mention in the audio.

Missed any podcasts? Here's the index.