Friday, March 19. 2010

Podcast: A Hallway Conversation with the Team from DDTI on Everything Addressing

Did you ever wonder about the differences between addresses determined by geocoding using liner referencing and point addresses? How are acquired and when is one or the other the right tool for the job? Do you know what next generation 911 is and how GIS will it into it? Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg spoke with the team from Digital Data Technologies, Inc. to tackle those questions and more.


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Thursday, March 18. 2010

Kundra: Geospatial One-Stop One of Four Projects of Interest to OMB

Kundra says that while the E-Government fund is focused on four specific areas, OMB is trying to improve all the on-going projects.

But there are four projects that OMB and agencies are specifically paying close attention to, including Grants.gov, E-Travel, Geospatial One-Stop and the Integrated Acquisition Environment (IAE).

I have no idea what that means, but GOS has not been on my radar of late.

- Federal News Radio via @govcxo

Want to Name a New Geo Product and Get $200?

Crowdsourcing is in use for naming! You sign up (18+) and if the client selects the name you suggest you take home the reward.

There's a new geo app up for naming here.

(If you win and you are regular reader, let us know and we'll tout your great idea!)

via @namingforce

Quote of the Week

"There is no interface constraining what you can do with the raw, unfiltered data. You can plug it into a free mapping service, like Google Earth, that outperforms the bloated proprietary systems many cities and states use."

- Dan Knauss of Milwaukee writing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on government transparency, open data and in this case, the DC Data Catalogue

uLocate Changes Name to Where

Back when I visited uLocate some years ago outside Boston, the Where platform was yet to come. Now the company will drop the uLocate and now use Where. uLocate seems old not just because of the mixed caps in the title, but because it's not cool to have locate in your name, now that LBS is hot. Consider: MyTown, Gowalla, Foursquare...

- Xconomy

Microsoft Announced Spatial Support in Azure; WW Telescope in Bing Maps

Per Ed Katibah:

"Microsoft announced support for spatial in SQL Azure today at MIX in Las Vegas." There's nothing yet on the Web about the announcement that I found. (This article about whether spatial support is necessary for Azure is pretty interesting; it's from Feb of this year). For those still sorting out cloud offerings:

Microsoft's Windows Azure Platform is a cloud platform offering that "provides a wide range of Internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments or the Internet"[1] (though the platform itself is not made available for on-premises deployments[2]). It is significant in that it is Microsoft's first step into cloud computing following the launch of the Microsoft Online Services offering.

- Wikipedia
And:

SQL Azure (formerly SQL Server Data Services and later SQL Services) is a cloud-based service from Microsoft offering data storage capabilities similar to Amazon S3 and Amazon Relational Database Service as a part of the Azure Services Platform. Unlike similar cloud-based databases, SQL Azure allows relational queries to be made against stored data, which can either be structured or semi-structured, or even unstructured documents.[1] SQL Azure features querying data, search, data analysis and data synchronization.[1]
SQL Azure uses Microsoft SQL Server as a backend, but it exposes only a subset of the data types — including string, numeric, date and boolean.[AND I GUESS NOW SPATIAL] [2] It uses an XML-based format for data transfer.[1] Like Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Azure uses T-SQL as the query language and Tabular Data Stream (TDS) as the protocol to access the service over internet.[1][3] It does not provide a REST-based API to access the service over HTTP.[1] Microsoft recommends using ADO.NET Data Services for this purpose.[1]

- Wikipedia

In other Microsoft news, MS PR points folks to blog posts (Bing one, Chris Pendleton's one) about the release of he WorldWide Telescope mapping application for Bing Maps (the one demoed at TED). "
The application allows people to literally look up at the virtual sky in Bing Maps and see constellations and stars as they exist in real-life. Now people can see the sky as it appears at anytime – in real-time."

Part of why I suspect this isn't going to be as well-used as it might be:

To access the WorldWide Telescope application:
Go to: www.bing.com/maps/explore
Click on Map Apps (bottom of the left-hand rail, below the explore section)
Select the WorldWide Telescope App
(note: you need to have Silverlight installed)