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.

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

Thursday, February 26. 2009

Virtual Alabama May Grow into Virtual USA

FCW reports on the effort, currently being discussed by several southern states. The idea is to allow states to share their own data across jurisdictions no matter their platform. As discussion get going David Boyd, director of DHS Science and Technology’s Command, Control and Interoperability Division reports technology is not the issue, it's getting the players on the same page.

The whole article sounds like every OGC conversation I ever heard. I guess it's good to see progress, but the term standards is not part of the current reporting. That said, I suspect it's in the mix.

Virtual Alabama is built on Google Earth Enterprise; the technology for the pilot of gulf coast states was not detailed.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Standards at 06:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |