Wednesday, May 14. 2008

Where 2.0 on Twitter

To my amazement there are very few folks following the where2008 thread on Twitter. Just 70. Perhaps folks are all all on the backchannel IRC? (IRC channel #where2008 on irc.freenode.net)

I guess this is reinforcing my sense of Twitter use in our community which is confirmed, thus far, by the current poll.

UK Starts to Map Every Plant & Flower in the National Trust

The BBC reports that the National Trust is mapping every plant in its gardens using a handheld device supplied by Magellan. Magellan tells us that gardeners of the National Trust are using their MobileMapper CX with DigiTerra Explorer software. Watch the video of how they will do it.

Dash Opens API

It'll be announced this morning at Where, but there's a blog post about first set of apps. Only a few are particularly spatial - WeatherBug weater, Caldwell Banker home search and speed traps from Trapster. As TechCrunch notes, it's odd that to get info on the API you must send e-mail rather than say read all the details then apply for a code or something. I guess Dash hasn't been watching how the rest of the tech community is doing APIs.

TomTom Acquisition of Tele Atlas a Go

The word came today from the EU. Basically the Commission said there was no reason fear unfair strategies:

"The Commission found that the merged company would be unlikely to pursue these strategies because its ability to restrict access to digital maps ... would be limited by the presence of an upstream competitor, Navteq," it said.

The new company "would have no incentive to restrict access to digital maps because the sales of digital maps lost by Tele Atlas would not be compensated by additional sales of personal navigation devices," it said.

- Bloomberg
- BusinessWeek

As we celebrate new options for finding geodata...Greenwich Stirs

Everyone remembers Greenwich, the town in Connecticut that went through a FOIA and several lawsuits only to lose its bid refuse sharing GIS data with a consultant. Now, even as we all ponder the goings on Google and ESRI and their vision to make geospatial data more findable and potentially useable over the Web, the court cases continue.

Fairfield County Weekly

Google/ESRI Announcement in Plain English

The announcements out of Where 2.0 from John Hanke of Google and Jack Dangermond regarding integrating neogeography with professional GIS (perhaps not the best terms, but I'm confident readers understand) are quite a lot to digest. (Video available here.) But that's ok, both companies are resetting their visions with regard to the other, to data and to services and it's certainly time for that.

Here's the substance of the relevant announcements teased out of coverage from Where 2.0, where the two geotechnologists shared the stage yesterday.

- ArcGIS Server 9.3 (available in about 4 weeks, per Dangermond) will make its metadata service "scrapable" into KML and thus findable via Google's geographic search (once known as KML search). Further, ArcGIS Server will be able to publish not only that data as streaming KML (and GeoRSS) but also related services. Dangermond showed finding data from a Portland, Oregon service, visualizing it and then performing analysis, all from Google Earth. Said another way, all data and services served by ArcGIS Server could potentially be findable and usable in any Google mashup. Further, the resultant KML can be used in app that supports the OGC standard.

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