The State of Minnesota tapped into FireWise, an organization funded by Wildland/Urban Interface Working Team (WUIWT) of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, aimed at involving communities in preventing fires, to map areas threatened by a blowdown of trees in 1999. The project is now up and running

Of note:

"The system utilizes Spatial Oracle, UMN MapServer and Java. Javascripting builds the front end html code for Web display."

Students do analytical work - mostly high schoolers, but also junior high students.

"The Minnesota Firewise program secured a modest grant from the National Fire Plan for the system to purchase software and hardware."

"...plans are in the works to allow the data to be displayed on a standardized client such as ArcGIS, Web Mapping Service (WMS), or Web Feature Service (WFS)."

- Government Technology

The PR is here. The details here and here.

Bottom line: $500 brings access to print (I guess they use those?) and electronic docs, no voting, no cost sharing, can work on Interoperability Initiatives, working groups and TC subcommittees.

Raj Singh noted this was coming at FOSS4G in Victoria.

The OGC yesterday announced (press release) it's time for regular folks to review and comment on its version of KML.

The release describes OGC KML as "a XML-based encoding schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future web-based online maps (2d) and Earth browsers (3d)." Comments are open until January 4, 2008.

If you need reassurance that open source geodata and services can work, read LinuxWorld's comprehensive interview with GeoNames "gazeteer plus" founder Marc Wick. He speaks to how the project got rolling, why he's chosen a creative commons licenses, how the number of data sources once about five now tops 100. The interviewer clearly did some homework: there's a question about implications for geonames of Autodesk taking Mentor's projection engine to open source.

Now, in English: The Open Geospatial Consortium has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Open Grid Forum, "a community of users, developers, and vendors leading the global standardization effort for grid computing."

The initial goals, per Grid Today:

- Integrate OGC's OpenGIS Web Processing Service (WPS) Specification with a range of "back-end" processing environments to enable large-scale processing. The WPS could also be used as a front-end to interface to multiple grid infrastructures, such as TeraGrid, NAREGI, EGEE and the United Kingdom's National Grid Service. This would be an application driver for both grid and data interoperability issues.
- Integration of WPS with workflow management tools. OGF’s SAGA draft standard is where multiple WPS calls could be managed.
- Integration of OGC federated catalogs/data repositories with grid data movement tools. OGF’s GridFTP is one possibility that supports secure, third-party transfers that are useful when moving data from a repository to a remote service.

Mash-ups and other Web 2.0 tools took center stage at many California media outlets this week as they tried to keep up with the latest information on the fires in that state and serve it to readers. The efforts were truly spectacular, and one My Maps implementation became a Web favorite (1.2 million views) as well as a resource for first responders. This week we look at those efforts and look ahead to what might be done better in the future. The podcast is 16 minutes long and was recorded on October 29, 2007.

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