Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling offers up a look at the MS/Yahoo potential pairing through the lens of local search. He compares the company's offerings in Yellow Pages, real estate, events and local search.

What strikes me from the analysis: Microsoft often has the edge in Tech, but Yahoo has the brand.

C|net provides details on the tribute (not memorial) planned for UC Berkeley on May 31st. The Microsoft researcher credited with many innovations in mapping/computer science was the first computer science PhD at the school. A worldwide search using Amazon and Google technology attempted to find Gray after his boat disappeared last January after setting sail from San Fransisco.

Update: (same day) Sean Gillies explains that it's not going to be shut down but rather redirected to a new site with the same data and a different look. Yes, that's true.

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Bloggers have noted that Adrian Holovaty's Chicagocrime.org will be shut down soon (read Holovaty's commentary here). If you've not heard, there's been quite a legacy of mashups that followed it and Housingmaps.com. Perhaps the best known in the crime space is CrimeReports.com which launched last year. Police departments pay a small fee (hundreds of dollars a month) and the service pulls out crime data from its system(s) and maps it. Apparently, it's the "pulling out" and "fusing" of the raw data that's the tough part. Putting it up on a Google Map (complete with e-mail alerts for those intersted in reports from specific areas) is not so difficult.

Crimes, by the way, are located based on a block, not a specific address to protect victims.

- AP

The Washington Post describes CNN's Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall, its "touch table" used to show graphics on the network. It was rolled out for the Iowa caucuses and it expected to be a star player tonight.

While "ooing and ahhing" over the technology, the article does highlight, subtly, that this is basically a big monitor and if you put too much complex information on it, viewers only see confusion. I'm curious too how watching the talking heads manipulate the Wall with their hands is that much more entertaining than if they (or someone behind the scenes) controlled a mouse or keyboard. Perhaps it's just the novelty at this point?

I'm also concerned that the Wall is perhaps getting credit for software others have created - say Google Earth. It was cool before the Wall and will be afterward. Still, the article reports that CNN's "fancy version of the Wall" comes with lots of extra software. It's unclear if its content, analysis or simply navigation tools.

I do want to raise the "touch screen" will solve all interface problems vision I seem to run into now and again. A user interface is not necessarily better with a touch screen than with any other input. Interface design is still difficult. At one time I felt many in the geocommunity felt that once GIS was in the browser, it would be"easy." In some cases, that's true, but one need only look at how complex browser apps and often their interfaces can become, to see the other side of the story.

A heads up on the model:

It's online at the FGDC website here.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), Geospatial Management Office (GMO) has developed this DHS Geospatial Data Model (DHS GDM) in support of urgent DHS mission requirements. This DHS GDM is a standards based, logical data model to be used for collection, discovery, storage, and sharing of homeland security geospatial data. The model will support development of the Department’s services-based geospatial architecture, and will serve as an extract, transform, and load (ETL) template for content aggregation.

DHS allies who have an interest in supporting this model are encouraged to review this DHS GDM and provide comments to the FGDC Homeland Security Working Group. This data model is being constructed in phases. As new versions of the model are delivered, associated documentation will be made available through this website.

Among the goodies: an HTML version of the data dictionary.

Comments and feedback are requested via the FGDC website.