geomantic

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.