Mapping Seinfeld via Google Maps - a fun Mashup

Like many of you, I'm a Seinfeld fan... not just a fan, but I'm a huge fan... likely able to ramble off the plot, quotes etc... from virtually every episode... anyway, of interest to all you other Seinfeld-a-holics out there, check out this innovative Google Mashup (from stolasgeospatial) that maps locations in New York City that actually played a part in Seinfeld episodes. Each icon offers up a place description as well as a detailed description of the episode of interest and the role that the physical location played in the script. To date there's only a couple of dozen locations posted and I look forward to many more being added. See http://www.stolasgeospatial.com/seinfeld.htm

WEB-based Geoinformation Data Warehouse Prototype

Dimitri Goldman has introduced me to The WEB-based Geoinformation Data Warehouse Prototype (GIS DW Prototype) - a WEB-GIS decision support system, based on using of: reliable and productive ORDBMS Oracle 10g; universal and effective J2EE platform; simple and flexible XML-based technologies.  GIS DW Prototype includes more than 40 thematic layers of SAND - the information about USA Counties, obtained from: USDA Forest Service; National Weather Service; U.S. Geological Survey; USDOT/BTS; Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) and other. A lengthy description of the project is offered in the About section. Check it out at http://dgoldman.narod.ru/index.html

Suggested GIS and Geospatial Technology Events, 2006

This week I spent a bit of time going over some conference literature in an effort to try and decide which events to hit, which ones sound cool, and what new events might be of interest to GIS users, mashers, and other geospatial technology enthusiasts. I compiled the results into a list of what I bill my Top 15 GIS/Technology events of the coming year. Most are no surprise to you, however, there are a few interesting new events that you might wish to follow or even attend if you happen to have the travel budget. Descriptions of each event are provided along with the requisite contact info and a few notes. To spice it up a bit I've also added a few images from some recent events I've attended and also list off some pointers to smaller regional events and GIS training and a few fun travel tips that you might find useful. See the article"GISuser Suggested Geospatial Technology Events, 2006" HERE - http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/8240/ - Did I miss anything that you would list on your TOP list?

Geospatial Podcasts - GIS & Location Technology podcast from Farallon

From Farallon, Episode 1 - In this Episode, a team from Farallon looks at the GIS Industry trends for 2006. Topics include:
Autodesk GIS Web mapping server goes open source - what this means and what is their motivation.
GIS vs Spatial Information Management (SIM) - how are they different.
Google Earth - why is it cool and how is it transforming GIS from the realm of specialists to mainstream IT.

Check it out at http://www.fargeo.com/podcasts/

MidAmerica GIS Consortium (MAGIC) conference

This comes to us via a NODAK reminder... the upcoming MidAmerica GIS Consortium (MAGIC) conference will be held April 23-27 in Kansas City.  You can see http://magicweb.kgs.ku.edu/ for more information. OF interest,  there is a limited number of grants available to local and tribal government organizations who are within the MAGIC states (ie. North Dakota etc...)

 

National Green Check GPS Certification training programs

This comes from the people at guidepostservices, Every 3rd Saturday, starting March 2006 National Green Check GPS Certification training programs are now being offered by Guidepost Services, a recreational GPS, map, compass training centre in Toronto, Ontario Canada For details visit www.guidepostservices.ca

Notes from Mashup Camp and kudos to podbop

Stephen O'Grady http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/001317.html has generously posted some thoughts from MAshupCamp, a developer event recently held on the West Coast. Steve shares his perspective as well as some useful links to other attendees that blogged their comments from the cozy event (ie. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2616). Of interest, the podbop application was selected as the best mashup and received the best mashup award - more about this can be found from the podbop developer's website at http://gtmcknight.com/ - so what's PodBop? Simple.. type a city, locate MP3s, deiscover bands in your area.. way cool  See http://podbop.org/

Google Earth KMZ file for Olympic Venues

In today's update from the Google Friends newsletter details of how the company has  updated Google Earth and Google Local with high resolution imagery of the area surrounding Torino, Italy, home of the 2006 Winter Games. Here's the skinny... With Google Earth installed, click on the KMZ file for Olympic Venues, which will load placemarks for all the major sites at the Games. To really appreciate the scenery, be sure to enable the Terrain layer and take advantage of the tilt view control in Google Earth: We've also generated street maps for Torino, which are available in the Google Maps API for those of you interested in creating Winter Games mashups. http://earth.google.com http://local.google.com (search on 'Turin' or 'Torino') - Finally, for more Games-related news see : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/gamesmanship.html

Access scholarly literature via Google Scholar

A reminder... obviously you use Google, however, did you know that Google also has a tool known as Google Scholar (Beta)? In a nutshell, Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research. Definitely a useful resource for those seeking research material and references. Simply jump to http://scholar.google.com/

Now You Can Vote for features in the next release of Virtual Earth

Over at the MSN blogs the crew is asking developers for their input as to what they would like to see in the next release of Virtual Earth. Some of the requests already cited include:

3 - Birds Eye Coverage in more cities

4 - Allow more than 10 items on the Scratchpad

2 - Improve coverage of WiFi AutoLocate (this makes my list every release! work is never done here.)

1 - Nautical Maps

You can share your comments and cast a vote simply by visiting MSN Spaces Virtual Earth at http://spaces.msn.com/virtualearth/Blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!564.entry

The GOLDGEOS Project - WEB-based Geoinformation Data Warehouse Prototype

Dimitri Golman has released the GOLDGEOS Project - some details - it's a WEB-based Geoinformation Data Warehouse Prototype (GIS DW Prototype) is a WEB-GIS (or GIS Internet) decision , based on using of: reliable and productive ORDBMS Oracle 10g; universal and effective J2EE platform; simple and flexible XML-based technologies - See http://dgoldman.narod.ru/index.html

Updated GRASS GIS 6.0.2 released today

The developers have announced yet another update to the popular GRASS The new features of GRASS 6 cover a new topological 2D/3D vector engine and support for vector network analysis. Attributes are now managed in an SQL-based DBMS. A new display manager has been implemented. The NVIZ visualization tool was enhanced to display 3D vector data and voxel volumes. Messages are partially translated (i18N) with support for FreeType fonts, including multibyte Asian characters. New LOCATIONs can be auto-generated by EPSG code number. GRASS is integrated with GDAL/OGR libraries to support an extensive range of raster and vector formats, including OGC-conformal Simple Features. FYI, GRASS is supported by the following systems: GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris (SPARC/Intel), Silicon Graphics Irix, Mac OS X/Darwin, Microsoft Windows with Cygwin, HP-UX, DEC-Alpha, AIX, BSD, iPAQ/Linux and other UNIX compliant platforms (32/64bit). Fro more about the latest release check out http://grass.itc.it/announces/announce_grass602.html

Geospatial Sensors

As many have probably witnessed in recent years, there is explosive growth and demand for integration of sensor-based location intelligence within tiered geospatial applications. Whether applications are mapping RFID tags, digesting objects detected through video analytics, correlating events from within Mesh network clouds, tracking movement from GPS-enabled Smart phones, distributed, ad hoc networks are supporting an increasing number of sensor systems gathering location intelligence.
Historically, when dealing with satellite-based and areal-based remote sensing platforms, GIS and remote sensing analysts have discussed techniques for sensor fusion. Now, sensor fusion encompasses a larger universe where a multiplicty of sensors may be deployed, each gathering data that has a geospatial value associated with the data being collected. Real-world challenges involve moving these data through complex networks and maintaining connectivity with the associate metadata - metadata often describing not only the nature of the objects being sensed, but the information about the sensor location. This is especially true if this sensor is moving through space and time, harvesting information in voluminous amounts. Video is a good example and real challenge.
The significance of this evolution is that geospatial IT professionals are faced with understanding how to communicate, connect, and harvest the spatial components of the messaging coming from the increasingly complex sensor web deployed across global grids. Communication protocols and architectures for global sensor networks have been and will continue to be developed, and finding a way to integrate the spatial component into distributed geospatial analytical frameworks across a range of devices represents both opportunity and sophisticated system integration challenges. Geospatial architectures must now account for managing millions of messages a second, applying sophisticated algorithms for logic functions, visualizing these data in coherent and intelligeble user interfaces, and finding ways to push only relevant messages to the end user in a near realtime capacity. Dynamic spatial data with complex spatio-temporal components is rather new to the vast majority of the geospatial community.
While the Defense-INTEL community continues to support the most advanced GeoCOPs (geospatial common operational pictures), commercial applications are increasingly desired, and sophisticated Homeland Security applications demand a sensor-rich environment for monitoring a variety of complex dynamic objects in multi-scaled geospatial frameworks. As is the case in many geographical problems, learning to harvest the location intelligence from a distributed sensor network requires next-generation interdisciplinary teams to support interoperability and a solutions-based approach. It is one thing to know the where of sensor-based solution; it is another to develop the geospatial analytical tools to rapidly place the sensor data into a meaningful context for downstream decision-support. As millions of cell phones deploy across the planet, imagine the data gathering potential as well as the data management challenge to effectively communicate the spatial information in a coherent manner. One emerging approach is to embed geospatial functions at the firmware level in order to parse and analyze the sensor message volume at both the data collection point as well as the sensor node. GIS functions are seemingly becoming componetized into the very fabric of the sensor devices. -- Posted by Alex Philp, GCS Research

Krugle Prepares to launch Search Engine for Coders - could it be a Google for Coders?

Officially announced a couple of weeks ago at the DEMO conference, Krugle Inc. is preparing to launch a new search engine for coders... think of Google for Programmers. The Krugle search solution promises to deliver easy access to code and other highly relevant technical information in a single, convenient, easy-to-use interface. From the company... "Krugle also improves communication between programmers by allowing them to add their commentary in a layer that floats above the source code. In addition, Krugle allows programmers to permanently tag code, and sets of search results, and easily share them with their colleagues." The company's vision - Krugle answers the need for a single place to find relevant code and critical technical information. - See http://www.krugle.com for more

SWFWMD Photos needed for Lagoon photos contest

Shutter-bugs in SW Florida may be interested in this opportunity... enter and you could get your photos published in the 2007 Calendar. Photos must have been taken within the Indian River Lagoon watershed, which extends from Ponce De Leon Inlet in Volusia County to Jupiter Inlet in Palm Beach County. Judges are looking for creativity. Popular subjects include wildlife, plants and habitats indigenous to the lagoon; however past winners focused their lenses on recreational and commercial activities, children's activities, scenic vistas, underwater photos and lagoon landmarks. Entrants may submit up to three photographs for consideration. Images must be in landscape format only. Submission must be in the form of 5-by-7-inch or 8-by-10-inch quality prints. Many images will be selected for inclusion in the calendar to be available in the fall of 2006. In addition, the top three winners will receive $300, $200 and $100 for first, second and third place respectively. The remaining nine will each receive $25. Prize money will be sponsored by Environmental Consulting and Technology Inc. All entries must be postmarked by July 31, 2006, and accompanied by a signed application, which details entry requirements and limitations. Check out http://irl.sjrwmd.com for more details