Google Docs, ESRI Technology for Colorado Middle Schoolers

Deb Hooker who works for the Poudre School District in Colorado writes in the Coloradoan about the new computer curriculum the be launched next year.

Beginning with the 2009-10 school year, most sixth-graders will take a new nine-week Web 2.0 technology course that includes units on researching on the Web; Internet safety (appropriate use and ethics); data analysis; introduction to programming; Web site design; geographic information systems, or GIS; and Google Docs (collaborative Web-based office tools).

Seventh-graders may also choose to take an additional 18-week computer gaming and digital technology class that expands on the sixth-grade class, including units such as digital video production and video game programming.

The new courses involve using free, open-sourced software available on the Internet. Recently, representatives from Google and the Environmental Systems Research Institute, or ESRI, trained PSD middle school teachers and school technology coordinators on how to use tools such as Google Docs and GIS software.

I think may be some confusion about what “free, open-sourced software” is. Still, this sounds like a great start to preparing students for the Web 2.0 world.

MetaCarta’s Stimulus Map App

Recovery Map, part of MetaCarta Labs, is now live. Maps of stimulus related activity are created from the Main Street Economic Recovery, KML feeds, Flickr photos, and newswire feeds. You can view examples (Chicago, Wind power) or make your own, that can be saved and shared.

After visiting the samples, I confess that I really wanted to see the source of the dots on the map and could not really figure out how the Flickr pictures connection to stimulus. Point locations are color coded by votes at Stimuluswatch.org where visitors are asked to rate projects as critical or not.

Yahoo Placemaker: Location Parsing from Raw Text

The new service from Yahoo!, Placemaker will search through raw text (feeds, web pages, news, status updates ), pull out and disambiguate location references, counts them and provide WEOID (a Yahoo location ID). Then, one can programmatically “do something” with that information. Here’s the blog post introducing it.

So, I’m sure someone is thinking…“oh, like MetaCarta.” Yes and no. Yes, MetaCarta’s tools do parse geographic locations - but they do it with natural language processing - so “ten miles north of Paris” can be turned into a correct location based on the context in France or Texas. I don’t expect that from Yahoo’s offering.

via @timoreilly

On Google Maps Data API

Google officially announced the Google Maps Data API Wednesday. This was hinted at some months ago; I covered it here. In short, it’s an API to geodata that’s hosted by Google. The main “things you can do” with the data: add feature (point, line, poly) and attributes, delete them and read the data. Google and some of its partners already are using it; some examples are on the page noted above. The Google Geo Dev blog post (with much of the same info) is here.

Sean Gilles rounds up thoughts from geobloggers on the announcement here. If you read it, you may need to know what CRUD is. It’s “Create, read, update and delete (CRUD) are the four basic functions of persistent storage , a major part of nearly all computer software.” per Wikipedia.

Strangely, even as this announcement was going on in California, I was presenting at the New York State Geospatial Summit (look for a complete write up soon). One of my three “trends to watch”: data as a service. Nice to see my thoughts validated by Google. And, no I didn’t mention this API or use it as an example. In retrospect, I should have!

The use cases presented seem “small time” rather than enterprise scale (which doesn’t mean hey can’t be): travel data, best restaurants (“a collection” in Virtual Earth)...that sort of thing. Would Dr. Niman have used it to store H1N1 data? Would USGS put its earthquake data there? I’m thinking it might be used for the sort of data currently shared via network link (KML) or GeoRSS or the like. On the other hand, Google does say it scales. Could this be one option to look at in addition to storing/serving your geodata (ideally your authoritative data) via ArcGIS Online? That latter has/will have a solid set of geospatial tools to use. I suspect the former will in time, too, whether Google or others build them.