Tuesday, September 30. 2008

Cancer Maps in NY

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."

Track Your Greenness Via Phone Courtesy Urban Sensing program at UCLA

The Nokia GPS-enabled phone app, PEIR, produces a Personal Environmental Impact Report. How? It tracks you (every 30 seconds) and when you upload the data it does its best to determine if you walked or drove (how would it know you were on a bus vs. your Hummer) and where you stopped (how would it know if it was Micky D's or the farmer's market if they were close by and the market was only running on Wednesdays?) The idea is simply to lower your score over time. The absolute values are not that meaningful says the lead. For now the app is in closed beta but is being shown off at NextFest, a Wired event. One planned feature? A tool to compare the greenness of different routes.

- Wired

TomTom Offers Quarterly Update

GPS Business News reports (exclusively, I find no confirmation from TomTom at this time on the Web) that TomTom will offer quarterly updates via its TomTom free desktop software for its sat nav devices. Prices begin at €39.80 for one year for one country for low end products (TomTom One, TomTom One XL) with higher prices for the higher end GO line, since those require more data (speed profiles). This is one way to start to monetize Tele Atlas. I wonder how users will determine if these upgrades are worth it over the free MapShare updates from fellow users.

Challenging Pictometry in New Jersey

Some in southern New Jersey are not comfortable with the use Pictometry's oblique imagery for assessment.

"It's Big Brother," said [State Senator Jeff] Van Drew, D-Cape May, Cumberland, Atlantic. "We're not supposed to be spying on people. When it gets to the point where we're doing aerial spying on people's lives, I've had enough," Van Drew said.

Van Drew is pondering a law to limit the uses of Pictometry.

Resident farmers in West Cape had their assessment challenged since the imagery didn't show as much acreage in pumpkins as claimed. Farmer Diane Rae explained "We don't grow pumpkins in March." The plan is to challenge the legality of the imagery's use.

- Press of Atlantic City

Monday, September 29. 2008

MetaCarta Unchained and Unbundled

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.

New Montana GIS Portal

The initial release of the GIS Portal is focused on the needs of GIS professionals. For the general public, the Portal contains an on-line map viewer that anyone may use to view basic maps and air photos of any location in Montana.

"The initial data catalog includes 400 databases and over 200 sample maps from the collections of the Montana Base Map Service Center, the Montana State Library, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks, and Flathead County," said [manager of the Montana State Library's GIS section Gerry] Daumiller. "During the next year, our staff will vigorously pursue other GIS data providers and help them add their data and maps to the Portal."

- Montana Business