International Tidbits

China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping has been working on the construction of digital cities for two years. So far, they have been launched in 112 cities, about one-third of all cities in China, according to the Science and Technology Daily. The rest should be done by 2015.

- People’s Daily Online

The Australia New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) Metadata Profile (version 1.1) has replaced the New Zealand Geospatial Metadata Standard (NZGMS) as the recommended e-GIF geospatial metadata standard for use by New Zealand government agencies. The Profile is based on the international standards ISO 19115 2005 and ISO 19139 2007, and allows for the consistent collection of metadata (or information about data) across New Zealand and Australia.

- E-government in New Zealand

During an annual three-day conference on survey coordination held in Lagos, which ended last Friday, the surveyors resolved that a national mapping policy was necessary to achieve an adequately mapped Nigeria.

- Nigerian Best Forum

GCN: Future of GIS is “Crowd and Cloud”

You can attribute that clever alliteration to one of my former bosses, OGC President Mark Reichardt as quoted in GCN. The article goes on to give examples of these and 4D. (Well actually, I’m not sure what it covers since page 2 was not available when I tried to read the article.)

- GCN via @govwiki

WeePlaces Launches Geoprofiles

I wrote about WeePlaces.com back in August. If offered a way to track your check-ins and routes on OpenStreetMap. I hadn’t heard anymore about it. Eric Wu, the founder, let me know of the company’s (Movity) latest effort, Geoprofiles. 

So you have 150 checkins and 3 badges.  Now what?

Checking in for badges, points, or deals is fun and driving growth.  But checkins are a record of experiences and activities.  Weeplaces makes use of this data by creating geoprofiles, a personal page of these experiences.  Geoprofiles enable users to:

1.  Visualize their location history and discover trends.
2.  Group, annotate, and share checkins (coffee shops visited in the Mission, or weekend trip to NYC).
3.  Connect with friends and view the places they’ve been.

Geoprofiles are a new way to use and find value with checkins.  Our greater vision is that geoprofiles become a feed of your location life, serving as a storage and organizational tool for all geodata (checkins, pictures, descriptions, tweets, comments).

Last, we are launching integrations with Facebook Places and Gowalla, allowing users to create and view geoprofiles across platforms. 

Basically, it’s just the next iteration of Weeplaces. You can view Wu’s place profile as a sample. Fourquare’s CEO told VentureBeat: “We’ll do this eventually.”