geomantic

Returning from my summertime hiatus. Hints of changing seasons all around. I can see it in the angle of the sun, length of day, and moderating temperatures. It’s good to be back.

Welcome back. Sure, it’s been a while since I’ve had the time to post, so I thought I’d mark it with a few recent items of note.

The first item I want to call attention to is the GeoNetwork OpenSource project, which recently graduated from OSGeo incubation. I’ve felt for some time that GeoNetwork is an important addition to the stack on the strength of its metadata editing capabilities. As Sean Gorman pointed out a while ago, the existing specs for geospatial metadata are rather unwieldy for use on the geoweb. So, tools like GeoNetwork play an important part in lowering the resource cost for creating and maintaining metadata.

James Hansen also returned to Capitol Hill today, -exactly twenty years after first raising warnings about global climate change. You can read the Washington Post’s coverage here. In the long run, Dr. Hansen is going to emerge as a real hero for his ceaseless devotion to this issue as well as his bravery in standing up to ideologues who have ruined the careers of others who dared to contradict political orthodoxy.

Finally, two posts from early this month that touch on the intersection of neogeography and old-school GIS. The first is a great post by Andrew Turner on whether GoogleMaps constitutes GIS. Some of the same themes are touched on Sean Gorman’s interview of James Fee. Both articulate a role for GIS as an analytical tool, as well as acknowledge the role neogeography has played in making geospatial information available to a wider audience. My sense is that the neogeo-vs.-GIS dispute that emerged last year will quickly become irrelevant because, as both of these posts imply, is that the discussion will be re-focused on the nature of the emerging technical ecology.

For the last 18 months, more and more of my work is getting done on the Ubuntu platform. And as a self-described geospatial propeller head, I’m always quite interested in using the Ubuntu platform for GIS and other geospatial applications. Just in the nick of time, Matt Perry has updated his Ubuntu GIS how-to for the recent Hardy Heron release. He’s included some nice python libraries that I’d overlooked last week when I built my Ubuntu-based GIS workstation.

If you use Ubuntu, have a look at Matt’s post here.

Several recent posts I want to call attention to…

First, a very interesting discussion on the OSGeo-discuss list kicked off by Tyler Mitchell, who posted a request to the list for examples of how open source software has made employees more valuable in their jobs. The discussion was gently steered to whether one can conduct the same tasks with FOSS GIS software as with ESRI and other proprietary softwares. Paul Ramsey offered a response that fairly well sums how FOSS GIS compares with proprietary products:

“I’d buck up for a copy of ArcView (much cheaper than ArcGIS), and use
GRASS / PostGIS / etc tools for things like analysis. You can use
ArcView to generate the paper and do some quick low-end analytics and
the other tools for more involved stuff.

“My general synopsis: for server-side, for scriptability, for
automation, for web-based, open source wins for most use cases, given
a technically savvy user; for ad hoc, for cartographic production, for
a user who is used to a point-n-click experience end to end,
proprietary still wins.

“This equation hasn’t changed much in the 10 years I’ve been running
it. The goal posts have moved, open source is better at adhoc now than
before, but still not at the level of ESRI, and ESRI is better at the
server stuff now, but still not at the level of open source.

I would add that FOSS GIS still has a long way to go before it incorporates the essential elements of workflow that proprietary products already have in spades. The industry leaders in GIS software, -specifically ESRI, Intergraph, and MapInfo, have invested Big Bucks in numerous vertical markets in an attempt to offer support for the tasks common to those industries. Will it be up to consultants to take incorporate similar functionality in FOSS GIS packages? Or, will vendors and developers undertake the task?

Link here.

Another lively discussion is going on over on the Geowanking list with regard to the status of KML now that it is officially an OGC specification. There is some confusion over the licensing and copyright of OGC specifications. Alan Doyle has posted an interesting study of the terms governing OGC documents, which is well worth a look. The problem of copyright is a bit thorny because of OGC’s inter-relationship with ISO/TC211 and the overlapping standards and specifications. (There was a lively discussion last year sometime on how ISO could freely encourage the adoption of ISO standards on the one hand, while requiring end users to purchase the standard.) My take is that the copyright/licensing issue is part of the necessary institutional wrestling we incur as we migrate from a paper-based processes to Internet and web-based processes.

Link to Alan Doyle’s study here.

Coincidentally, Fuzzy Tolerance has an interesting and somewhat related post on the licensing terms of FOSS with a link to the Software Freedom Center’s primer on FOSS. Careful when you click, ‘Next’ on those software EULAs!

Link here.

I tend to think that one of the more important distinguishing features of Web2.0 applications is the collaborative nature of the technology, which has opened up previously arcane vocational amd professional specialties to amateurs. This is what Clay Shirky refers to as “mass amateurization”. The really interesting thing about mass amateurization is that it has made it possible for amateurs to collect the data that have been traditionally undervalued, or too expensive for public and private enterprises to collect, or in the case of Open Street Map, where no public domain data exist. Thus the term “crowd sourced” data. (I’m not fond of the term as, in my mind, it has connotations of unruly mobs.)

So who would have thought that seismology would become a field where crowd sourced data are collected? Well, if you own a certain model of laptop, you can use the hard drive shock detector as a sort of seismograph and post your results. Yes, I know there will be concerns about the data quality, but that misses the real point, which is the sudden ability to increase the density of observations at a very low cost, at least where the laptops are located.

Link to the Quake-Catcher Network Home Page here.

So what does tea have to do with placemaking in the 21st century? A lot, if you realize that tea is essentially a product of its environment right down to the local climate -including rainfall regime, altitude, total annual insolation, etc., as well as the soil type and underlying geology, the age of the tree, and cultural methods. I had my first drink of pu’er (???) in 1986 from a street vendor in Hong Kong. It was decidely earthy, moldy, and well…strange, due to processing, which involves aging (e.g. molding and fermenting) in caves for several years. And that first taste was what we might politely refer to as an ‘acquired taste’. Just like compost, or say, dirt is an acquired taste.

I’ve grown to love pu’er, especially when times are tough and I’m under a lot of stress. Over the last ten years or so, several tea merchants have made a small speciality of selling pu’er teas sourced from remote farms in the mountainous southwest province of Yunan in China. During that time, the world has discovered pu’er, fueling an economic boom among Yunan tea farmers. A sign of pu’er tea’s rise in popularity is found in today’s New York Times, where there is an interesting article about how pu’er tea is a serving as a viable economic alternative to smokestack-based industrialization. (The NYT scores extra points for the small map indicating the location of pu’er tea country in southwest Yunan province.)

What I know about pu’er…well, I’ve exhausted the subject in this post. But you can find out more than you ever wanted to know about pu’er (and other teas) at the Cha Dao blog where a small group of serious tea devotees write smart and incisive commentaries about tea.

There are several very specialized sources of pu’er, and other Yunan teas but one of my favorite sources is Silk Road Teas in Lagunitas, CA. (Make sure you check out their excellent selection of green teas, too.)

A couple recent articles in the Washington Post having to do with things geospatial. Rob Pegoraro describes his experience using the neighborhood boundaries in Yahoo! Maps live. Just goes to show that not only are those boundaries are loosely defined, but when those who approximate the location of those boundaries have no local knowledge, there is bound to be disagreement. Do we each need our own private gazetteer made up of our mental maps?

Link here.

The second article features a clever mashup from the Center for Neighborhood Technologies that compares the trade-off between housing/commuting costs. Sure, the data are a little out of date, but it doesn’t really detract from the overall utility of the concept. Quibble with the currency of the data and the assumptions behind the cartography, if you like. Still, you look and you ‘get it’, don’t you? Where should I live if I want to lower my carbon footprint AND not be a slave to the steering wheel? Incredibly useful, I think, and all the more so, if the issues of data currency are addressed.

Link here.

Yep, that’s right. It was Announced today. KML is now an OGC specification, and no longer a proprietary Google spec. Good news all around.

Here’s the link.

I want to draw attention to a post by Sean Gorman on the GeoCommons blog outlining a proposal for a lightweight metadata schema for geospatial data. I have long felt that the FGDC and ISO standards sacrificed a lot in the way of flexibility and agility in exchange for completeness. The emphasis on data quality is well placed, but as Sean points out, the specs are way too unwieldy for web use.

Read Sean’s original post here

The source code for the latest release candidate of GRASS is now available at the OSGEO site. I’ve always thought the analytical capabilities of GRASS were quite robust, but could never quite get used to the old interface written in TCL/TK and so I never had the patience to ascend the learning curve. This new release touts a new interface base on WxPython and the looks are vastly improved. Here’s a screenshot of the startup screen.

Much better front page for the world’s leading open source GIS, no? Being a first release, the GUI is limited to providing some tools focused almost exclusively on geo-data creation and management, which is a good start. Now it’s time for the developers, consultants, and other contributors to the GRASS project to extend the user interface to incorporate a broader range of business processes such as analysis, reporting, and resource management.

Here’s the link to the press release