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Experts from around the world gathered in Vienna this week for a five-day United Nations conference aimed at place name standardization. The UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), which was created in 1960 and is working toward a standard methodology to insure easy data sharing for events such as responding to natural disasters, economic development and tourism.
- UN via @jeffharrison
The Indiana University’s University Information Technology Services received the 2011 Excellence in Geographic Information Systems Award from the
Indiana Geographic Information Council for its Indiana Spatial Data Portal, which has made 20 terabytes of digital data readily available and
accessible. The data is available to those who don't have GIS software and the data are OGC compliant (not sure what that means, actually), per the student paper.
On Friday, a four-person unit will begin working to centralize the city’s GIS capabilities. They will develop an interactive map of the city that will eventually be available for public use....
On March 7, the Columbia City Council [MO] approved the transfer of the four employees to the city’s Public Works Department to form the new GIS office. The staffing of the office is considered budget-neutral; the $134,096 to pay the salaries, travel expenses and benefits plans for the four employees was transferred from other departments.
Murray County Board of Commissioners [MN] added a fee schedule for GIS related business. Requests for printing of maps range from $2.00 to $10.00 depending on size of the map. Some existing map products are available at no cost such as a county map. Fees for staff time, CDs or DVDs will also be charged. Available will be GIS data, address points, and parcels with annual updates.
I spoke with Global Product Manager for Location Intelligence, Jessica Krokowski to get at the gory details of the new Map Manager product:
- It evolved from interest in the public sector in Europe (there was discussion about it in Europe last year) and the U.S., as well as the telco space (with all its mergers and acquisitions and datasets). And, since PBBI is and always has been big in telcoms, the announcement at CTIA makes sense. (Oops! My bad - I think metadata is only for public agencies. Really, I think that.)
- It's designed to support worldwide geospatial metadata standards, ISO 19115/19139 which underlie both the INSPIRE and ANSI (US) requirements.
- It's a server based product that harvests metadata (into those mandated fields) from existing MapInfo data to create a catalog that supports OGC Catalog Services Web (CSW).
- It automates a lot of the data creation, but of course, much is always manual. Thus, there was a effort to make it very usable (the beta included 90 people form about a dozen countries). Users can set up templates to fill in fields that are the same across groups of datasets.
- There's a link in each record to the dataset itself. So, once you find the data of interest, you can directly use it.
- There's not really been a metadata solution (from MapInfo or Pitney Bowes or a third party).
- It's a Windows Server solution with pricing based on the number of seats of metadata creators/editors.
- It's designed to work with/have a similar look and feel to GeoSK.
More resources:
European MapInfo Manager Website
Data Sheet (Dated 2010)
Here's the key bit from the blog post:
So is there a strategy for GIS in Local Authorities that adopts Open Standards, offers the advantages of Open Source and above all delivers on the Open Government agenda that is emerging as a mantra of our politicians? Well yes, I believe there is and it’s a hybrid model.
The article is unsigned, but the head of marketing let us know of the post. She shared it was penned by CTO Eamonn Doyle.
Worth noting: Esri Ireland uses the free, hosted version of Wordpress, an open source blogging platform.
The French National Mapping Agency, IGN, has chosen Autodesk LandXplorer products to help distribute their data in CityGML format. As a national mapping agency with international reach, IGN relies on open data standards for information exchange and values the fact that LandXplorer products can be used to read and write CityGML.
That’s the first geospatial news from Autodesk in a very long time!
- At Lands End Blog
- press release (pdf, French only to date)
