Major map search engines support GeoRSS

Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have all announced that they now support the GeoRSS standard. This standard allows RSS feeds to provide a location that corresponds with the story in the feed.

Google Earth, meet World Wind

NASA has their own (open-source) competitor to Google Earth called World Wind. Right now it's only available for Windows, but NASA will be releasing Mac OS X and Linux compatible versions starting with version 1.5 (they're now at 1.3.5). Expect 1.5 to drop around the end of September.

Virtual Earth Plugin for NASA World Wind

click thumbnail to see larger screen capture. There is now a plugin for NASA World Wind that allows you to connect to Microsoft's Windows Live Local. More details can be found on the Nasa World Wind Wiki and the developer's personal blog. download plugin here

A knight for open geodata

Recently, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the Internet by beating up Al Gore and taking it, along with lunch money) spoke out about opening up geodata from the British Ordinance Survey (analagous to the USGS?) for free public use. Seems Europeans are really starting to push for open geodata.

MapWindow GIS

Does anyone have any experience with MapWindow GIS? It seems like another open source GIS solution, with potentially more of a focus on functionality thatn just viewing data, but it's Windows only. I might give it a whirl tomorrow. This screenshot is pretty.

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.

Soliciting new names for MapRoom!

Apparently there are bunch of other entities called MapRoom out there, some of them closely related to our own project, so we need your help to think of a new name! Here are some ideas: MapDrawer, MapHouse, MapHaüs, Mapository, The Giifer, MapBase...

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.

Open Source Geospatial Foundation

Remember a little while ago when Mapserver and AutoDesk's MapGuide congealed into the Mapserver Foundation? Well now there's an even bigger umbrella group called the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, including not only Mapserver and MapGuide, but GRASS, GDAL, and OSSIM. Other big open source projects like PostGIS and QGIS don't seem to have joined yet, but maybe later. Hopefully this will bring about better consistency and interoperability across the world of open source GIS software. You can read about this at Directions Magazine

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Mapserver Foundation

Mapserver is an open source web mapping software package that I use for the VTM site and that Brent uses for the Fire Information Engine. Recently, several core Mapserver developers announced the formation of a Mapserver Foundation, an organization intended to unite Mapserver with several related open source projects under a single banner for the purpose of standardized development and release procedures, and to provide a single body to mediate funding requests and donations, among other things. Most likely modelled after the Apache Software Foundations, this is certainly a Good Thing, as all these kinds of management and governance issues were previously handled in an ad hoc manner by the developers and a handful of contributing organizations like the University of Minnesota and DM Solutions, which has lead to a lot of inconsistency and occasional gaps in documentation.

However, in addition to Mapserver, the new Mapserver Foundation will also host the newly open sourced AutoDesk MapGuide, a web mapping package from the company that makes AutoCAD. Confusingly, MapGuide will now be known as Mapserver Enterprise, and the old Mapserver will be called Mapserver Cheetah (although the naming is apparently still up in the air). Several people in the Mapserver user and developer communities are peeved because the Foundation was planned without community input. Many are also displeased by this alliance with AutoDesk, a company not generally known for its commitment to open source. Some argue that this new naming scheme will confuse potential users and dilute the Mapserver brand, eventually resulting in less use and development for the traditional Mapserver we all know and love. While I think the new naming scheme is stupid and possibly detremental, I think the Foundation will ultimately be a force for good. Anything that provides greater stability and more documentation can't hurt, right? Links for the interested: Mapserver Mapserver Foundation AutoDesk MapGuide Official announcment of the Mapserver Foundation Comments by Ed McNierney (founder of topozone.com) Comments by Gary Lang (a lead MapGuide developer) Discussion on mapserver-users (a search for 'Foundation' should bring up most of the relevant threads, assuming there aren't any Asimov nerds getting way OT)