In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Here's the recent Microsoft-related geonews.

• Bing Maps and Hotmail come together: "When you select “Maps and Places” [in an Hotmail message] a task pane opens that allows you to add new locations or interact with a set of previously defined locations."
• Part of the Bing Spatial Data API, Microsoft introduced batch geocoding and batch reverse-geocoding with Bing Maps.
• In addition to the Windows Phone, the Blackberry and iPhone, now there's Bing Maps on your Verizon Android device.
• For the developers amongst us, MS introduced PHP and VB .NET SDKs for Bing Maps Platform. There's also an entry on Bing Maps and MS Visual Studio LightSwitch.
• The official blog also mentioned Geo Fact Finder, "the application includes over fifteen distinct data themes that includes several dozen specific variables" for the U.S.

Still catching up recent geonews, last week the FGT blog mentioned the open source imagery analysis project named OpenDragon. While the project has been around for over 5 years, we never mentioned it in the past.

From the official website: "OpenDragon provides a robust suite of image processing operations, via an intuitive, responsive, multi-window graphical user interface. Software functionality includes full-color display, annotation, enhancement, measurement, supervised and unsupervised classification, georeferencing, on-screen vector capture, and a broad range of other capabilities to support image processing education and research. OpenDragon can access image and data files created by earlier releases of commercial Dragon, can run scripts created for other versions, and is backward compatible in its organization and navigation. OpenDragon uses an innovative client-server architecture and is based on platform-independent industry standards including Java, XML and HTML. The OpenDragon architecture supports new levels of user extensibility and will eventually allow the software to execute on Windows, Linux, Mac OS/X, and Solaris and other Unix variants. "

We previously mentioned a few other similar software, Opticks is one example.

ikiMap (www.ikimap.com) is a free web service which allows its users to create and share their maps.

The objective is to combine the concept of a social network together with the use of cartography and maps.

Users can create their own maps (by uploading files in KML, GPX…formats or directly by drawing on the map), vote for other users maps, add comments, create groups of friends, theme channels and more! Users can actually label the map as private and grant access to it only to certain people.

ikiMap is a free service, and it's based on freeware:

* OpenLayers (http://openlayers.com/)
* MapServer (http://mapserver.org/
* PostGIS (http://postgis.refractions.net/)

There are more info about ikiMap on:

• Blog: http://ikimap.blogspot.com/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/ikimap
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ikiMap/200361580929
• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/ikimap

Here's a first round up of Google-related geonews for the last week.

• Google Earth for Android was updated to v1.1, and now includes the oceans
• StreetView imagery is now available in Google Building Maker, in addition to 6 new Building Maker-enabled cities
• Once again, there's new imagery available in Google Earth and Maps
• Google Lat Long shares an entry for the 5 years of Hurricane Katrina
• If you're a golfer, the Golf Courses layer came back to Google Earth
• Here's a surprising example of location-based html5 music video made by band Arcade Fire and Google, making use of Google Maps and StreetView for your own childhood neighborhood.

This morning, Slashdot discusses a story named Building Prisons Without Walls Using GPS Devices.

Their summary: "Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic that increasingly GPS devices are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. 'By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace,' writes Wood. But new devices such as ExacuTrack suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might do away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. 'The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers,' adds Wood. 'The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.'"

Amazon Watch and International Rivers, two non-profit environmental groups, have been advocating against the construction of the Belo Monte hydro-electric dam in the Brazilian Amazon, what would be the third-largest in the world. To make its threats palpable, the two organizations used Google Earth to map how the dam would flood cities and make stagnant pools out of the Xingu River, a vital tributary of the Amazon and the lifeblood of the riverine and indigenous peoples who live there.

To view the animation, go to http://amazonwatch.org/tour-belo-monte.php.

Still having quite a lot of geonews catching up to do, here's the geospatial-related stories discussed over Slashdot during the past week.

• GPS Tracking Without a Warrant Declared Legal in the U.S.
• Can an Open Source Map Project Make Money?, discussing the relation between Bing Maps, MapQuest and OpenStreetMap
• Garmin Recalls 1.25M 'Fire Risk' Satnavs
• Brazil Using Smartphones For Planning the Future, their summary: "Brazil has bought 150,000 LG smartphones and has embarked on the world's first fully digital national census. Can they succeed when the US recently failed to go digital? The Brazilians say that the digital census has several advantages over paper and pen methods. They say that the data is more accurate since GPS data will pinpoint the exact location of a household. The GPS data is cross-referenced with satellite images to ensure that responses are correctly geo-tagged. The recently begun census will underpin future publicy-making decisions."

Here's last week's announcement regarding the availability of the final FOSS4G 2010 conference program.

From the announcement: "More than 700 people have already subscribed and the number is growing every day. If you have not subscribed yet, do it now. Some workshops are already sold out so don't loose the chance to choose your favourite workshop."

As announced earlier this summer, Slashgeo will have a representative attending the conference.

In our last poll on the old Slashgeo website (results inaccessible at the moment), we asked you how ArcGIS Online will fare. Out of 212 answers, 13% thought it will be a success and chimes a new era in GIS. 35% stated that it might work if they do it right. 23% anticipate it will never become main stream or is doomed to failure. 7% are simply not interested anyway and 20% admit they don't know what ArcGIS Online is.

On the new Slashgeo, the poll section is still on the right-hand side column. This time, we ask you what are your initial feelings on Slashgeo's new website.