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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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, [...]

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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.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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The good folks at Geonames blog report that two new countries have been added to their database. These are Saint Martin and Saint Barthélemy, which were formerly part of the French overseas department of Guadeloupe. The ISO newsletter leads me to believe that updates to ISO 3166 occur outside of the normal 5 year update [...]

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