Google's Address Geocoding patent

 

That's right.. details of the pattent are as follows... A geocoding component generates geographic coordinate information, such as latitude and longitude values, for postal addresses. A table includes a number of rows, each corresponding to one or more addresses. The geocoding component can quickly locate a particular row in the table based on a number of input address identifiers as the intersection of the sets rows that correspond to each of the address terms. The geocoding component may operate on addresses that are received by the geocoding component or extracted from documents. See http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=/netahtml/search-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=ptxt&S1=google$.ASNM.&OS=an/google$&RS=AN/google$ for complete details of the patent

Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data

A new petition is now online, the Topic - "Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data". The creators of the initiative state the following: "We are collecting signatures from spatial data users and GIS software developers worldwide to help demonstrate broad support for open access to geodata policies." So far they have collected more than 150 names. See http://okfn.org/geo/manifesto.php#signup

Protecting Our Homeland with Geospatial Intelligence

FYI, The July/August 2005 issue of the Pathfinder is now available on line. The theme of this issue is "Protecting Our Homeland with Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT)."  Pathfinder is the bi-monthly magazine produced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to promote public awareness and understanding of the discipline of geospatial intelligence. See http://www.nga.mil 

 

The Virtual Earth movie!

What is Virtual Earth? This amusing video from MSN features Steve Lombardi (from the Microsoft MapPoint crew) and answers the question... What is Virtual Earth? It's definitely amusing and effective... See http://www.virtualearthinfo.com/video.asp