geomantic

The extent to which Washington, DC has become a hub for emerging location aware technologies was underscored last weekend (10 – 11 June) with the occurrence of WhereCampDC.  The two-day event kicked off on Friday night with a series of lightning talks (20 slides in 5 minutes) that served to highlight both applications of geospatial [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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.

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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)

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Here.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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