geomantic

Last week, I blogged about Open Street Map over on my company’s blog, The Viewshed about Open Street Map and touched briefly on the subject of data quality. I cited the study by Muki Haklay that compares (favorably) the quality of data found in OSM with Ordnance Survey data. More on the subject of OSM [...]

[Read more →]

1. Ostensibly devoted to Flash Flex and other Rich Internet Applications (RIA) is the Flexmappers blog.
2. The Transport Politic focused on rail transport and other alternatives to automotive transport.
3. Related to Transport Politic is Streetsblog.net which aggregates some of the nation’s best bloggers on sustainable transport to carry out a discussion place and learning center.
4. [...]

[Read more →]

This is a good thing for both the standards setting community and the open source community:
OGC and OSGeo Sign Memorandum of Understanding | OGC®
With respect to goals and objectives, both communities have an obvious  natural affinity. I’m encouraged to see this finally happened.

[Read more →]

I accidentally bumped into this site whose purpose is “crowd-sourcing crisis information”. (Sorry; bad metaphor.) Initial deployments still in alpha, but should be interesting to follow in the coming months, especially in light of the value demonstrated by the Twitter platform during the recent siege in Mumbai.
Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS)

[Read more →]

Here.

[Read more →]

Business Week attributes an increased interest in Open Source software to the shrinking economy.
ReadWriteWeb cites a report conducted by Accenture that millenials (i.e. those born between ‘77 and ‘97) will ignore IT departments that don’t support their IT preferences and applications. That is to say, many emerging social apps like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and wikis, [...]

[Read more →]

On the eve of Thanksgiving, the folks at FortiusOne speculate whether Americans will be driving fewer miles on this most heavily traveled of holidays.
Fuzzy Tolerance released Geospatial Portal v2.0, with RESTful services for query and spatial analysis. It’s a good example of (local) government use of open source geospatial software. It’s released under the GNU [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]