The AP is reporting that New York's Governor Patterson has signed legislation that will give residents information about the cause and location of cancer. The new bill "requires health care providers and the state to collect more data on cancer patients than the federal Centers for Disease Control mandates. The data will be used by the state to create maps of cancer incidence for the public."

Today, MetaCarta announced some new ways to access the "secret sauce" of their search engine technology and launched their Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP). The bottom line here is that they have "disconnected" some of the primary tools from the basic platform. In other words, you can separately license their API's but still have access to their geo-referencing engine. So, if you only want to use their geotagging or query parsings applications in conjunction with the underlying geo-referencing engine software developers will now be able to license them as they need them. In the past, the six modules (geotagging, query parsing, geosearch, location finder, save-search-notification, and document density) that comprised the MetaCarta platform were highly inter-related and did not work independently. The objective for MetaCarta is to enable more developers and clients who may want to geo-enable lots of location-based, Web 2.0 applications. MetaCarta is also transforming itself from not just a product company but to offering software as a service (SaaS). MetaCarta says more details will be out on that later this fall. What will be challenging for MetaCarta is offering their applications through a SaaS transaction model based on CPM, which may be appropriate for some news organizations who may want to develop a map indexing view like the one they have on their home page.