Slashgeo

YannR writes "Hello, We are very proud to announce the release of Mapeed, the first plugin for Google Maps which boosts the display and the map rendering for several thousands of markers. What is the Mapeed plugin: - A new easy tool which enables the geo-search of localized data - A powerful and ergonomic interface, able to display up to 50.000 markers on a single map, thanks to the concept of dynamic clustering - An open system, with multiple feeding ways: webservices, API, admin console. Many use cases have been identified: geolocated classifieds (real estate, objects), online directories for companies, … As an example, we have launched the mashup CrunchVision.com = CrunchBase + Mapeed + Google Maps. An easy tool to check what are the tech companies in your area ! The Mapeed plugin is delivered as a SaaS service. Mapeed is online now as a public beta release. The team is located in Rennes, France. Contact: contact@mapeed.com http://www.mapeed.com/" We mentioned another similar clustering offer in the past.

All Points Blog references an article from Computer World which goes into more details about this. From the article : "The terrorists who attacked various locations in south Mumbai last week used digital maps from Google Earth to learn their way around, according to officials investigating the attacks.

Investigations by the Mumbai police, including the interrogation of one captured terrorist, suggest that the terrorists were highly trained and used technologies such as satellite phones, and global positioning systems (GPS), according to police."

From the Mapping News Blog : "The imagery was collected by a team of Googlers who travelled all over New Zealand to document every single public road in the country over the past year. The team drove Holden Astras, which had cameras mounted on a pole on the roof."

This is an important message to users who usually read Slashgeo via the daily newsletters. I just did the first Slashgeo account cleaning after over three years of existence. Out of now 1,800 registered users, of which half are subscribed to the daily newsletters, about 30 email addresses did not reaching destination for various reasons: some of these addresses are now invalid and some believed Slashgeo's newsletter is spam. If you are not receiving the newsletter anymore, simply go to your preferences to subscribe back and make sure the email address in your Slashgeo preferences is still valid. If you still do not receive the newsletter while subscribed, try another email address or help yourself and Slashgeo by making sure we're not blocked by looking at these instructions from Geospatial Solutions. I can say right away that several accounts from Yahoo! India, from the .mil and rediffmail.com domains do not reach destination. See also this previous tip on the daily headlines and newsletter.

I also took the time to do a minor update to our About page. More minor but useful updates in the coming weeks. We still plan to migrate to the AJAX code used on Slashdot, but I explained before, this issue is not entirely in our hands. Thanks.

The official Google Developers blog announced yesterday the update to the Google Maps API Terms of Service. Anyone interested should also read Ed Parsons and Spatially Adjusted entries. From the official blog: "What changed and why? A key goal for the November 12th revision was to eliminate a number of unpopular restrictions, including the prohibition on friend finder applications and non-"site" mashups. We also eliminated ambiguity about whether it's OK to use the API w/ password-protected free sites (it is). Additionally, we streamlined the format of the terms, eliminating the need for developers to reference multiple sets of incorporated terms of service, including the Google Terms of Service and the Google Maps Terms of Service to figure out what rights and obligations applied to their use of the Maps API."

The Between the Poles blog offers an informative entry on open geospatial data around the world. From the entry: "Another contributor to the increasing availability of geospatial data is the exponential growth in open geospatial data, the data equivalent of open source in the programming realm. There are key technologies that have enabled this to happen. GPSs have become so inexpensive that geospatial data acquisition is now accessible to virtually everyone. Secondly, the Web 2.0 phenomenon has enabled the widespread sharing of user content, in this case geospatial data collected by you and me. But equally important are open geospatial data licensing, which defines the legalities (intellectual properties rights or IPR) for sharing open geospatial data, and the open geospatial data pricing model that determines how much it is going to cost you and me. Open geospatial data derives from two sources, government and what I'll call non-government open geospatial data organizations, which tend to follow a Web 2.0 model, where the data is collected and contributed by users, typically equipped with a GPS. A motivation for geospatial software entrepreneurs to be interested in open geospatial data is open access. If you develop a web application that requires geospatial data and you use TIGER or OpenStreetMap data you can deploy your application to the web and be pretty confident that you are not infringing on anyone's copyright. If you want to do this with geospatial data from Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo, or MapQuest, you need to read the fine print and may have to work out an agreement with the vendor or the data provider." Follow the link for comments on several individual country initiatives. Some related stories copied below.

Geospatial Solutions offers a long and interesting article named "Mass-Market Geo Drives the Industry" by Sam Bacharach and Carl Reed. From the article's introduction: "The term "mass-market geo" represents the set of Web-based, geospatial-enabled applications that put geospatial technologies in the hands of anyone, anywhere, anytime — as long as they have Internet connectivity. Further, these are applications that can be used by people with no knowledge of GIS, remote sensing, geodata, or metadata. Examples of mass-market geo applications include the various Earth browsers, GeoRSS, location-enabled mobile applications, and volunteered geographic information (VGI)."

GeoConnections informs us of the availability of their new and improved Government Geographic Data Licensing Best Practices Guide. This is an extensive 184-pages guide. From the introduction: "The first version of the Guide to Best Practices was released in the Winter of 2005. Its principal objective was to serve as a continually maintained core document detailing progress in the development of an integrated framework for the licensing of government geographic data. It reflected the then current understanding of that framework, issues that needed to be resolved, and provided an assessment of those discussions from the perspectives of the licensing practitioner and data user. Continuous dialogue with government data licensing practioners, users and industry revealed some shortfalls with Version 1 of the Guide to Best Practices. The prevalency of new distribution models, the impact of technological advances on the dissemination of government geographic data and the evolutionary nature of government data dissemination policy, as well as other overarching government policy positions, precipitated the GeoConnections Secretariat to revive the Data Licensing Guide Working Group and to commence work, in the Winter of 2007, on Version 2 of the Guide to Best Practices. Version 2 of the Guide to Best Practices thus builds on its predecessor, augmenting it: 1) by refining the recommended integrated framework for the licensing of government geographic data, addressing distribution models that have emerged or increased in prevalence, and ; 2) through its treatment of issues that are now, in 2008, at the forefront of matters that are of vivid interest to government data licensing practioners."

This is "old geonews" from last August, but since CityGML was not mentioned for a while, I though pertinent of sharing this with our users: CityGML (City Geography Markup Language) has been officially adopted as an OGC standard. See the useful links from this Spatially Adjusted entry: "I’m still a CityGML newbie, but the more I look at the standard and learn about it, the more I’m excited about what we’ll be able to do in the future with BIM and GIS. Moving data back and forth between BIM and GIS is almost impossible today, but hopefully this is a huge step forward." GIS User shared a press release informing us that Safe Software spatial ETL tool already supports CityGML. See also related stories below.

In what I find to be kind of embarrassing for Microsoft, someone has written a javascript version of the DeepZoom functionality of Silverlight. Once again proving that introducing a new standard that only works on one platform doesn't quite make any sense when it can be done easier and efficiently with current technology. And best of all, works on all major platforms (even mobile). Here is part of their summary : "In a move that I wouldn’t have bet a dollar on, Live Labs released a purely JavaScript Deep Zoom client. You read that right, what was so far one of the nice features only found in Silverlight is now available in an open web, standards-based version."

I came across a pretty interesting use of the canvas tag found on newer browsers. Please visit the site (especially if you have FireFox) to see it live in action. Here is part of the summary : "After browsing through the code of Jacob Seidelin's Super Mario Kart demo, I was inspired to take the code and attempt to create a GPS-navigation system experience using publicly available roadmap tiles. The final result is a proof of concept that works pretty damn well in Firefox (and not quite that well in other browsers :)."

The official Google Lat Long blog informs us about the revamping of the Google Maps interface. From the entry: "For one thing, Pegman, our plucky mascot, is now close at hand wherever you go. He hangs out right on top of the zoom slider: [screenshot] To enter StreetView, drag Pegman to a street (or just keep zooming in all the way, and the lowest zoom level is now Street View imagery). Tip: if you hold Pegman over a location for a second, you'll see a preview of what it looks like."

Ahmed Farooq writes "Informal space dominates our every day conversation — neighborhoods, landmarks, pathways, etc — knowledge that is intuitive to a local, but not to anyone outside. iBegin Places lets everyone create, edit, and share informal space. It already includes a collection of Manhattan neighborhoods and NYC Subway (MTA) locations. All places created can be downloaded as raw points, JSON, Google Maps JS, GeoRSS, or KML." From their help page: "iBegin Places is an experiment in user-generated informal space. What we want to do is (with your help) map out places of reference. [...] Users can vote on unverified places. Depending on how the voting goes, they either become verified, or they get deleted. Because you are helping generate these spaces, we give it all back to you. Every single listing can be easily exported for use in your own applications. Our dream is to have the ultimate reference guide for neighborhoods, landmarks, parks, and pathways."

phyr writes "The first release of NEST (Next ESA SAR Toolbox) 1C is now available for free at www.array.ca/nest
NEST is a new ESA toolbox with an integrated viewer for reading, calibration, post-processing and analysis of ESA and 3rd party SAR data starting from Level 1. Distributed as fully open source, NEST allows users to easily develop new readers and post-processors for SAR data by means of a Java Application Programming Interface (API). NEST is developed by Array Systems Computing Inc. under contract to ESA. NEST 1C includes a Display and Analysis Tool (DAT) SAR data visualisation, analysis and processing, a Graph Processing Tool (GPT) for command line execution of batch processing chains and a rich collection of readers and writers with an abstracted internal representation to allow easy and efficient access to SAR data." From the website: "The Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) is used for reading, post-processing, analysing and visualising the large archive of data from ESA SAR missions including ERS-1 & 2, ENVISAT and in the future Sentinel-1. In addition, handling of products from third party missions like JERS-1, ALOS PALSAR, TerraSAR-X, Radarsat-1 & 2 and Cosmo-Skymed will be supported." Thanks for that interesting submission. We mentioned RAT and Optiks before and see also our Radar section.