geomantic

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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Via Slashdot, this article suggests that the public would be better served by exposing government data through a simple standards-compliant data infrastructure.
In his Computerworld post, Patrick Thibodeau cites the example of JDLand blog in how the public (bloggers, in this case) might make use of a standardized public data infrastructure. More here: Let’s turn 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 the [...]

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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 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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