Tuesday, September 29. 2009

ESRI/NAVTEQ Make Commitment as part of 2009 Clinton Global Initiative

Among the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative environmental commitments (press release) is this one using geospatial technology:

ESRI and NAVTEQ, in partnership with the City of San Francisco, commit to implement a pilot program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from specific municipal vehicle fleets, and mobile work force vehicles in the city and county of San Francisco. By using fleet route optimization software, city workers will locate routes that minimize fuel consumption.

Flickr Connects to OSM

The full announcement is on the Flickr Code blog, but in essence the new connection means that developers can tag photos with their nodes and ways (points and polygons) over on OpenStreetMap. For now, the sample is quite simple. If you visit this Flickr image you can view the single "machine tag" under View Machine Tags (1) or click on the linked text for St. George's house under additional information and visit the OSM page for that node. It'll be interesting to see how developers use this connection.

More importantly, it's another indication that OSM is becoming a "must have" option for those developing today's online and mobile map-related apps, not matter what API they are using.

Podcast: To Tweet or Not to Tweet-Advice for Your Business on Social Networks and New Media

Should you be using Twitter for your business? Do you have a duty to respond if someone says something negative about your company on social networks? How often are you maintaining your blog and do you have the resources to support it? What's the right social network and what corporate policy do you have in place today. Editor in Chief Joe Francica explores these questions and offers advice for marketing and communications professionals.
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Recovery.gov Relaunched with ESRI Tech

You've likely seen elsewhere that the updated Recovery.gov is up and running. That's the site the federal government produced to show citizens worldwide (and in the U.S.) how we are spending our stimulus monies. The new version is built on ESRI technology and requires a Flash player.

What I found when exploring this topic:

Computerworld blogger Robert L Mitchell reports:

"While individual states have been experimenting with the use of GIS for tracking and reporting stimulus spending, the level of detail and the use of GIS to visually present the data for a spending program of this size is unprecedented." Perhaps this is unprecedented for the stimulus (itself unprecedented!), but certainly WebGIS has been used to show this much data, no?

When you leave the homepage map to "drill down" the site provides a pop-up titled "ALL ABOUT THE DATA" which addresses data sources and update information. There other nice features including download to KML and the ability to see a "text view" of the data. There are quite a lot of options; I fear those comfortable with Google Maps may feel a bit overwhelmed. Also interesting: there is no information on the source of the background street and imagery datasets, nor did I find a "help" or "about the maps" option. That latter is where I'd hope to find the data message I saw initially. I'm not sure how I'd find it again.

The main "How to Use the Maps" (below) explains "heat maps" (aka choropleth maps), legends and geocoding (with no street address, or ZIP Code, projects are placed at the state capitol address). It's eight minutes long and doesn't include discussions of all the features.



You may also be interested in looking at Recovery.com, a site run by a private data firm, Onvia, which offers similar, but real time data (the Federal site is waiting for reporting in from recipients until October) and the ability to comment. It offers Flash-based maps using Fusion Maps.

- NPR