Friday, November 20. 2009

Computerworld on CloudMade

Actually, it was MacWorld (both IDG pubs) that caught up with Nick Black, CloudMade founder, to explore why the company and OSM can change the world.

- Computerworld

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source at 09:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, November 17. 2009

C|net Tackles PublicEarth and OSM

My personal favorite BOLer (that's Buzz Outloud, C|net's daily tech podcast) Rafe Needleman covers the user generated content site in an article title Crowdsourcing Cartography. PublicEarth launched Monday and is a Google Maps-based POI collection. Michael Rubin, an architect for Netflix is behind it; so the idea is to make a tool for places, akin to what Netflix is for movies. There's even a recommendations engine, just like Netflix. The business model?

The PublicEarth team wants to make this service the go-to database of unusual places, and to partner with standard booking sites like Hotels.com, OpenTable, and travel solutions like TripIt. Getting traffic from those sites will get people into the system, and then sending booking and ticket traffic out to venues will generate revenue.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source at 06:59 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, November 10. 2009

Boise Journo Maps City Council Election Returns Using QGIS, MapWindow and More

Nathaniel Hoffman who writes for the Boise (ID) Weekly details how he (and perhaps a team?) took the ESRI shapefile data from city and with some effort, created a Google Map from it. He had some trouble with projections, but did make a map. He also is a bit confused, suggesting that Google Maps is open source (it's not).

I applaud his (the team's?) efforts and hope he can get some help for a smoother methodology!

- Boise Weekly

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source at 06:59 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0) |

Friday, November 6. 2009

Podcast: A Hallway Conversation with Maarten Oldenhof

Adena Schutzberg interviewed Automotive Navigation Data (AND) CEO Maarten Odelhof about the state of commercial geodata, the licensing challenges and the role the community can play in keeping data up-to-date. This is the third in a series of interviews with geospatial insiders and outsiders.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source, Geospatial Business, Tele Atlas, NAVTEQ, Data, Hallway Conversations at 10:39 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Thursday, November 5. 2009

Tuscany's Open Source GIS Evolves

Officials of the Tuscany region (Italy) have published a new version of its GIS website built on SagaDB (Sistema di Accesso Georeferenziato alle Banche Dati).

The development effort began back in 2001and originally used GRASS. The latest version, released under GPL does't use it anymore. The solution supports "the creation of dynamic or pre-processed maps, where the graphic attributes can be processed by either the client or the server."

Why is app open source? "According to [dev team member Viviana] Cossi, the Tuscany regional administration decided to publish Sagabd as open source for two reasons. "Making it available as open source makes it easy to incorporate existing code into a project", she says. Secondly, the region as a matter of principle has a policy to select open source software wherever possible."

- eGov Monitor

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

Tuesday, November 3. 2009

Podcast: With Geodata, Developers, not Consumers Rule

If consumers think of geodata as a commodity, what does that say for its future? What are the key data relationships? And what, if anything, will differentiate one offering from another? Our editors ponder these questions in light of evidence that consumers know and care little about who makes, manages and updates basemaps.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Open Source, Directions on the News Podcast, Satellite Navigation, Navigation, Social Networking, Tele Atlas, NAVTEQ, TomTom at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |