Tell a MrSid Story for its 20th Anniversary and other GIS Competitions

LizardTech is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the MrSID imagery format:

We'll be hosting events throughout the year to celebrate MrSID's 20th anniversary. In the meantime, we’re holding a contest, inviting people like you – in fact, you – to say a word or two about how MrSID has come to their rescue. Send us your recollection or tribute at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by July 10th, 2012. We’ll pick three contributors at random. Grand prize winner will receive an iPad and the two runner-ups will each receive a $50 gift card to amazon.com. We will announce the winners the winners via Twitter at Esri International User Conference in San Diego on July 24th.

- webpage via @gletham

Autodesk is running the Infrastructure Excellence competition with prizes including HP hardware, trips to Autodesk University and cash. Infrastructure projects that use specific Autodesk software are eligible. Last day to submit May 31.

- Infrastructure Excellence website via @engis

Four University of Wisconsin-Whitewater students who mapped all of the buildings, athletic fields and parking lots on their school's campus have tied with three other teams for third place in a Google Map Maker Competition.

University of Waterloo in Canada won the big prize. The folks, one of whom uses a wheel chair and mapped barriers to travel in the mode, got notebooks, stickers, etc. No word on if they are geo students or in some other area of study.

- Chicago Tribune

The Philippines Crowdsources Health Facilities and other Health GIS News

In support of Kalusugan Pangkalahatan, the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) launches the first of its ‘Crowdsourcing for Health’ initiatives using GoogleMaps.

Determined to maximize the benefits of the social networking platform, PhilHealth is encouraging the online crowd to help map all health facilities in the Philippines, according to  the statement from the agency website.

In fact, the public is invited to put points on Google Map Maker or OpenStreetMap. PhilHealth will be combining the data and hosting it on its website. I'm pretty sure you can do that with OSM data (with attribution); I'm not sure about the Google licensing.

- Philippine Information Agency

Middle Georgia got an EPA grant to do lead testing via Head Start programs among other things. The other things:

The goals of the grant are to increase testing in the district’s 10 rural counties from 9 percent to at least 25 percent within a year; to educate primary care providers about lead risks and testing requirements; and to evaluate a geographic information system risk model in Bibb County that will identify high-risk neighborhoods and the children who live in them.

- Macon.com

A recent report [pdf] on health inequities in the San Joaquin Valley gives new meaning to the real estate mantra: location, location, location.

The report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and Fresno State's Central Valley Health Policy Institute found that location plays a very real role in health -- so real in fact that life expectancy rates can vary by as much as 21 years in the valley, depending on the ZIP code.

- California HealthLine

Google Gives World Bank Map Maker Data Distribution Privileges

I saw some tweets about this last week and an odd op-ed in the Times (Directions Worth a Click), but now the offical word is out. Google announced the partnership on its Google Lat Lon Blog and the World Bank put out a press release. Sadly, there is already some really confused coverage of the topic (I'm looking at you ReadWriteWeb!) so let's get the facts. From the blog post:

Under this agreement, the World Bank will act as a conduit to make Google Map Maker source data more widely and easily available to government organizations in the event of major disasters, and also for improved planning, management, and monitoring of public services provision.

...

World Bank partner organizations, which include government and United Nations agencies, will be able to contact World Bank offices for possible access to the Google Map Maker data for their various projects. World Bank country offices in Kenya, South Sudan, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Moldova, Mozambique, Nepal, and Haiti plan to pilot the Map Maker agreement.

Now, let's address some possible confusion. The data is Google's. It's not open to the world under a free data license like OpenStreetMap is. Google makes its data tiles available via its APIs (with have their own restrictions and sometimes, fees). The Map Maker data is not open source (because that license is for software). Oh, and Google's mapping APIs are not open source either!

What i'm curious about it how the World Bank will decide if a requestor can have access to the data. Is it only during an emergency? Or when one is expected? Or is is for longterm planning for such emergencies? In either case, with a positive decision, I guess data would be delivered in KML. It's my recall that in the past there were times Google directly made that data available to certain responders during an emergency. I see this an an extension of that good deed.

The other thing I'm curous about is under what sort of terms (license) Google/The World Bank will hand over the data. WIll it be sharable to NGOs? To citizens? Can it be used on say Esri software?

Now, all those questions are moot if these countries choose to use OpenStreetMap, now in transition to an ODBL license, but with a very open one (Creative Commons) now. I'd prefer The World Bank go with a more open solution like OpenStreetMap so even more people can help in building these maps and using them for good. But, the Bank went another way. Maybe one day Google and/or The World Bank will chose an opener solution.