Thursday, April 2. 2009

Maine Uses Open Source and Open Standards to Deliver Imagery

Government Technology reprinted an article by Mike Smith of the Maine Office of Information technology, describing how the Maine Office of GIS (MEGIS),with the Maine Library of Geographic Information (GeoLibrary), has put together a tool using mostly open source software to prepare and deliver imagery of the state via a WMS. Among the tools: GDAL, Python, and MapServer. The goal is make any publicly available imagery available in a standard way for use in the many software clients via a webpage.

With only two municipal datasets online, the site already gets 2000-3000 hits per day. And, teh cost saving?

Earlier attempts at providing web imagery services were costing the state $110,000 per year, prohibiting the inclusion of municipal data. Using WMS and open-source software, that cost is slashed to $6,000 per year.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source, Standards, Remote Sensing at 06:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

Thursday, March 26. 2009

Update: OneGeology-Deeper Dive into the Portal

Update: The project now has 100 countries participating. Number 100 was Burkina Faso.

- One Geology News, via Carbon Cloud

Posted by Joe Francica in Standards at 07:59 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, March 18. 2009

C|net Covers SXSWi Panel: "Using GPS and Location to Enhance Social Networking"

The big question was interoperability. Despite efforts of OGC and the recently launched OSLO, right now, "doesn't look good."

- C|net

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in LBS, GPS, Standards at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Friday, March 13. 2009

Delaware's DataMil Updated

The University of Delaware UDaily has an article detailing all the updates - but I'll note just two:

Another helpful item is a GeoRSS feed that notifies users of recent changes on the DataMIL site.

Lastly, the site makes use of a Google Map interface, which allows large datasets to be available for download. The DataMIL Tiled Data Distribution page is an easy way to click and get tiles of imagery and elevation raster data sets for the entire state.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Standards at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, March 4. 2009

Shapefile 2.0 Manifesto

Alex Willmer, a database administrator in the Birmingham, England, offers a blog post on his "Misspelled nemesis club" blog exploring the need for and candidates to be the successor to the shapefile as "the" de facto standard for geospatial data. He suggests three possible options (ESRI's File Geodatabase, Autodesk's Spatial Data Format (SDF), and Alessandro Furieri's Spatialite). In the end, he begs ESRI to open up the File Geodatabase. He chides ESRI for promising a library to read and write the format when the format launched and not delivering.

via @sgillies (on Twitter)

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in ESRI, Autodesk, Standards at 08:24 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, March 3. 2009

Podcast: Will Virtual Alabama Scale to Virtual USA?

Virtual Alabama is that state's tool to share data for public safety across jurisdictions. Built on Google Earth Enterprise, it's become a model of how to integrate local data for widespread use. Now, federal Homeland Security officials are floating the idea of a regional effort for southern states to share data to respond to natural hazards. Our editors take a look at the success of the state effort and ponder the challenges of scaling it up.

Subscribe to Podcast RSS

Listen Now (to download, right click on the link at left and choose "save target as")

Read the show notes

Missed any podcasts? Want to subscribe via iTunes, Yahoo, etc? Here's the index with all the info.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Standards, Directions on the News Podcast at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |