Public geodata under threat in Europe

Via BoingBoing (of all places), recent moves by the European Commission to orchestrated sharing of government-collected geodata between member nations are become increasingly embroiled with licensing and copyright issues that may limit or completely illiminate public access to the data, data collected using public funds. Now I confess I know next to nothing about this situation (I don't even really know the difference between the EC and the EU), but I understand that public geodata is already a scarce commodity in Europe, so this is probably bad news for Europeans or anyone doing research in Europe.

MapRoom - a multi-user spatial data management tool

Hey all. So Brent and I have continued thinking about this whole spatial data management system we've all been discussing. Here are two mock-ups of what we think such a site might look lile. These are, of course, super rough right now, lacking some features and design considerations our first draft will have, but we'd love to get people's comments and thoughts from the get go. Main Page First page you see, with a simple search bar and a Google map to limit your search spatially. You'll be searching on tags and metadata we derive from the files initially, maybe other sources of metadata later. The Categories tab will be an alternate, categorical view of the data, based on hierarchical categories like data type, source, theme, etc.

Dataset View This is the view of a single piece of data, or file. Shows all the metadata, tags organized by popularity (or most searched on?), and big bright download button. Oh and imagine an "Add a tag" text box there beneath the tags. WMS/WFS/WCS functionality is sort of something we might like later on down the road, but not immediately.

The upload view will look very similar. Either you're remote user and you upload a file or you're an admin and you tell the application that you've put some data you'd like to add in a designated holding directory. The app will read the file, try to figure out as much of the metadata as possible, and then the uploader will have to fill in the required fields that the app can't figure out. It'll look a lot like the dataset view, except those fields will be editable.

NextMap is in the house

We've got the first quad of NextMap Radar imagery up in the GIIF. It is a new high resolution (1-4m) Radar product for Digital surface models and Digital Terrain Models. This will be most interesting to you all involved in Blodgett Forest; we could only get 2 quads to start, so we chose the quads covering the Blodgett Property. But it should be of interest to anyone wanting better res DEMs of California that are cheaper than LiDAR. Accuracy pending of course! See Eric and Abe's site.

Landsat Imagery Source

Another source for Landsat imagery (this one from U. of Maryland Global Land Cover Facility).

US Aerial Photography Program

See this link from GIS Weekly on the Digital Orthophoto Program. Includes information on nation-wide DOQQ availability.

Data and more data

Perhaps you already know about this site, but ... just in case: http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml . They have 13 Terabytes of available data, so it’s likely you can find something interesting. Landsat, Modis and Aster imagery and products, with different search methods.

That’s one big marble!

NASA released a new version of their "Blue Marble" whole Earth image. Blue Marble is their name for the stitched, cloud-free imagery they've gleaned from MODIS. They've done this before, but the new version (called Blue Earth: Next Generation -- original, I know) has better resolution (0.5 km vs 1 km) and more temporal data (12 months instead of 4 3-month intervals). The file sizes are huge, but they look great. Take a look!