Old Poll, New Poll

Last month, we asked: What do you think of this blog’s “tidbits” articles that provide roundups of stories on a theme? We had 62 respondents.

47% - Always read the ones in my area(s) of interest.
21 % - Love them, read them all.
21% - Didn’t realize you did that!
12 % - I skip them.

Very helpful info! We’ll take that into account as we plan for the future. And, thanks to the Tweeters who asked for the Local GIS Tidbit RSS feed. We now offer that for this, the most popular “tidbits” category.

Next up: Will the iPad impact geotech? Vote on the left side of the blog homepage.

Mapping the Media

There have been many attempts to map local media environments. Now there’s an attempt to link them into a single map.

In order to get a better sense of community news across the country, The National Center for Media Engagement (NCME) embarked on an ambitious project to combine several media maps into one using Google Earth.

Funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the NCME generally works with public radio and TV stations to help them develop outreach strategies for local communities. This map emphasizes those stations, but also includes a variety of other “layers” that represent possible community allies for media makers, such as historically black colleges and universities. Also noted are rising efforts to wire communities for broadband access, and news projects underwritten by funders, including Knight, the Ford Foundation, MacArthur, and CPB.

One groups not yet on the map, ethnic media. But there’s work on mapping that group, too.
- MediaShift

Open Source Address Database

“www.openaddresses.org is an Open Source web portal for the management of Open worldwide geolocated postal addresses.”

What does that mean? If you visit the site you can click on a location and input the postal address there. Alternatively, if data are available (error removed; see below), you can programmatically get the postal address returned.

The site only stores the address, no attributes like who lives there, the name of a company, or points of interest. The site works with OpenStreetMap but is a separate database and set of services (geocoding, reverse geocoding).

http://www.openaddresses.org aims to collaborate nicely with http://www.openstreetmap.org “by exchanging data, but since localized addresses are a very specific topic, it is appropriate to have a plattform dedicated only to addresses.”

via GISUser
- press release

Local GIS Tidbits

In the state of Vermont (one of my personal favorites when it comes to New England states) you need a permit to burn yard waste. The town of Brattleboro allows residents to get one online and uses location information provided to prevent unneeded fire response.

You can either stop in to your local fire station or log onto http://www.brattleborofire.org.

Once there, click on the “Burn Permits” link where you will be asked to answer a couple of questions such as your name and address. You also have to agree to the terms listed on the Web site.

After the permit is awarded, the location is logged into the fire department’s GIS mapping system. If a smoke call is made to the department, it can check the map to determine if it’s a real fire or just someone burning their yard waste.

Brattleboro Reformer

David Zwarg (cool name!) is a developer with Azavea who is tackling a Mass Dept of Transportation challenge to use its sample XML real time bus feeds. The app BusMinder allows users to sign up for notification of when specific buses will reach your stop. For now there are only a few buses on the list (none of mine yet, but I’m being patient) but I like getting the apps out ahead of the rollout. I guarantee me and my running friends will be truly grateful to know when the 90 bus is going by after those cold evening winter runs. (Brrr!) Oh, and I’m fine if PA folks win our MA challenge.

- Technically Philly

A story in the Lawrence Journal World (Kansas) highlighted a mystery: where was that horse racing park? The story found its way to the Kansas Water Office who tracked down a colleague and some LiDAR data. That prompted a follow up story which shows an “anomaly” confirms the location of the former track.

Portlander Darrick Wong took some open-source data of bike parking provided by the city and developed a Google Map-based tool that shows the location of bike parking facilities throughout Portland. Next up: Phone app.

- Bike Portland

#Where 2.0 - Day 1 Wrap up

I attended several of the workshops and came away impressed with the willingness of instructors to take attendees through what was clearly a compressed time format.

I sat in on Mano Mark’s Google Maps API session and came away with a new appreciation of the simplicity of the API.

I attended Paul Ramsey’s OpenGeoStack workshop and diligently loaded PostgreSQL and PostGIS and hacked my way through a short application. Not that I knew what I was doing but it was clearly fun to try.

Next it was on to Aiden Chopra’s workshop on adding “3D to the Geoweb.” This was essentially a “Sketchup for Dummies” overview; I clearly fit the part. Now I’m a Sketchup neophyte. Adding textures to extruded building models is clearly fun but reminds of digitizing 3.0. I’d hate to have that job today.

I had a great conversation with Gary Gale, the director of geo technologies at Yahoo! Gale said that geo is on the right track now at Yahoo!; FireEagle clearly has a future; and upper management is taking strides to put more resources into defining geo as something for mobile location-based advertising at the company. I’ll provide the audio version of the interview shortly.


In the evening, Brady Forrest, the conference chair, hosted Ignite @ Where and this literally felt more like “open mic night at 2nd City.” Andrew Turner bolted on stage to wild applause. Given our enthusiasm for location technology and his experience with various efforts, he asked the very valid question of “How do you affect the single person on the ground.” I was not impressed by the other speakers. Most talks were five minutes of trying to sound funny with little substance. However, Paul Ramsey did have an entertaining way of explaining that mapping errors are compounded as more and more applications are built on top of base maps which they themselves may have been compiled from poor quality data.


See my post on the NAVTEQ LBS Challenge hosted by Jeff Mize and Marc Nadell. These apps that have not yet gone commercial were quite good. The eventual winner was, Cyprus Solutions with its VUE application for fleet asset tracking. The company will be successful when this app launches because of the implications for tracking goods coming in through ports for homeland security.

Patrick Meier of Ushahidi completed the day’s events with a nice overview of his efforts at Crisis Camps for Haitian earthquake relief efforts.