Slashgeo

It's Friday! I give myself the right to serve you recent geonews in batch mode :-) On the Google front, there's a new November imagery update and SketchUp 7.1 that fixes bugs and adds lifelike facades. Microsoft did not stay still, they expanded Bing Maps in China. On the geospatial open source front, you can now do GeoNames searches with GeoExt ux. There's new GeoTools tutorials available and a GeoDjango tutorial too. On the ESRI front, ESRI launched a GIS wiki which has been removed since. There's also a few updates: ESRI Parts For Microsoft SharePoint 1.1 Now Available, ESRI MapIt 1.1 Now Available and ArcGIS API For Microsoft Silverlight/WPF 1.1 Now Available . The ESA November 2009 bulletin is freely available, celebrating 30 years of Europe adventures in space. Here's an article named " Mapping Human Behavior and Our Collective Unconscious". APB mentions a private beta of SimpleGeo, a new infrastructure for location-based services. TMR links to geotaggings apps for the iPhone. Here's a map of corrupt nations, with the U.S. not faring very well. Why not a County-by-County U.S. Unemployment Map while we're at it. Here's an article named Satellite Imagery Helps Combate Illegal Trafficking at Sea. APB has an entry on safely crossing the Mexican-U.S. border with location-based services and another one on Autodesk down 31% over Q3 a year ago. Finally, some interesting discussion on Spatial is Special (part 2), Spatial Isn't Special and in the same vein, GIS is Dead – Long Live GIS and Reports of the Death of GIS are Greatly Exagerated.

From cnet news : "Twitter has now launched the geotagging API, or application programming interface, that it announced in August. Users now have the option to opt-in to geolocation by clicking a box in their settings menu, according to Twitter. For now, the company said, the impact of geotagging will be in third-party apps. Users won't see a difference to Twitter.com just yet."

MoonChildCY writes "After a GIS event day that saw participation from industry, government and freelance authors, I wrote up the essential skills a GIS Professional should have today to be able to get a job. Of course this is not a definitive list, and not exhaustive, but a good start for most people. Feel free to chime in, either here or on the blog article itself."

Here's recent book reviews found on the geoblogs. V1 offers a review of "Rethink­ing Maps" by Mar­tin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins: "The book 'Rethinking Maps - New frontiers in cartographic theory' is not only about mapping today, it describes where mapping might be in the future and provides insightful considerations for thinking about the many changes happening in the pursuit of cartography." The Map Room offers information on Frank Jacobs' Strange Maps book, including a link to an interview of the Author: "An intriguing collection of more than one hundred out-of-the-ordinary maps, blending art, history, and pop culture for a unique atlas of humanity" TMR also links to a review of "The Fourth Part of the World" by Toby Lester: "This is a very impressive book: always user-friendly but never dumbed-down and covering an extraordinary range of subject matters. The best popular book on cartography, in fact, since Nicholas Crane’s Mercator; and that is high praise indeed." Finally, not really a book, but the journal "Cartographic Perspectives" has made available its issue 64.

Some recent Google-related geonews. First, Google Earth 5.1 is now out of Beta, you can download it now: "The 5.1 release focused on one of our most important features: performance." There are a new round of new cities and new features added to Google Building Maker. Also, Google Earth 2.0 for the iPhone has been released: "We've added some exciting new features, including the ability to view maps that you create on your desktop computer right from your iPhone, explore the app in new languages, and improved icon selection and performance."

Via email I got this Guardian article named Ordnance Survey maps to go free online. From the article: "The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April, in a victory for the Guardian's three-year Free Our Data campaign. The move will bring the UK into line with the free publication of maps that exists in the US. [...] The government is moving to open up data after the Tory party first made clear that a key shift in how it would govern would involve passing on information to the public." Mapperz offers more links if you want to read more about this. You get Ed Parsons' reaction, now at Google, he comes from the Ordnance Survey. Somewhat related, Off the Map shares an entry named "The Contradiction of Free Data and Business Models". We mentioned several times in the past the Ordnance Survey.

John Clegg writes "ProjectX and Google have just released an opensource javascript library to extend Google Streetview called Mapsicle. The library has been released by Google as a part of the Maps Util library — http://gmaps-utility-library.googlecode.com/svn/tr unk/ . Using Mapsicle you can...

• Annotate locations – Need to annotate a building or a place. eg. ProjectX demo – Streettag.net
• Advanced Store locators – Create store locators showing you exactly how to get to your store from their current location.
• Interactive tours – Combine Street View with content to show people interactive tours of the streets of the world
• Interactive touch screen kiosk – What about Street View as a touch screen information kiosk.
• Digital signage – Create interactive advertising on Street View using video and images
• Games – Build a treasure hunt application.
• Mashups – How about adding Street View to your mashup ?

Mapsicle is at version 1.0. Its early days and we'd love help to develop Mapsicle and unleash the next generation of maps mashups."

fotoguzzi writes "Ryan Jonasson has put together a simple side-by-side yoked comparison between Bing and Google Maps. It is possible to get the two views out of sync, but used as intended, it is a great way to see who is providing the most relevant images."

ThinkGeo writes "ThinkGeo is reporting on their blog that they have revised their Map Suite GIS software line for .NET today. The revision concludes the public beta on three of their products — Map Suite Desktop, Silverlight and Routing — each of which are now available in final release trim. There's also a new release candidate of Map Suite Geocoder, which includes more sample applications and API documentation. All of the Map Suite products got a variety of bug fixes and stability improvements to round out the release. ThinkGeo has made the full change logs and details available on their blog as well. 60-day evaluation copies of all the updated Map Suite components are now being offered up for download on ThinkGeo's website, so check that out if you're interested in GIS for .NET applications."

fotoguzzi writes "The Register reports that NASA and Microsoft have teamed up on a web application aimed at getting children to match features from old Mars imagery with the same feature from more modern imagery. El Reg speculates on why NASA and Microsoft would want kids to do such a thing, but none of their NASA sources seem forthcoming. I signed up in the over-13-years-old category. Apparently, Mars looks like a big grey rectangle with a large Install Silverlight button near the top. I guess I will never know what it's like to be on Mars."

Found on engadget : "The MIT Technology Review has unearthed a new laser-based 3D mapping robot that can produce results similar to those obtained from $100,000 systems at about a fifth of the cost. Funded by the US Army, researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology have now demonstrated the Remotely Operated and Autonomous Mapping System (ROAMS, for short), which employs a mirror-based LIDAR system that bounces a laser off a rapidly rotating mirror and gleans environmental information from how long it takes for each pulse to bounce back. An array of video cameras and IR proximity sensors add to this recon bot's sentience, though you'll still need to be within a mile's range to operate it. So not quite yet ready for solo missions to Mars, but plenty useful for gathering data on our own planet. You'll find video and imagery of the results this machine kicks out after the break."

Megan Peterson writes "After more than a year of development, The PublicEarth Project is proud to announce the launch of a new website – http://www.publicearth.com/ PublicEarth is “the Wiki for Places,” and is dedicated to delivering interesting, unique and up-to-date place information in a personalized way. PublicEarth offers an ever-expanding database of nearly 5 million places, and spans an ever-expanding list of categories: from scenic views and public art to beaches and haunted locations. Content includes commercial and non-commercial sites, and is contributed by both individuals and organizations. Tools are provided to make the adding of locations easy, and the use of information flexible, including print outs, sharing on social websites, generating widgets, RSS feeds, and interaction with GPS-enabled devices and mobile phones. The more you use PublicEarth the better it gets."

Geoweb Guru shares his technical review of Yahoo's Placemaker service. From the review: " Yahoo's Placemaker service is a geo-parsing web service that attempts to identify locations in unstructured and atomic content (eg. news articles and feeds). As such it promises to be a powerful and useful method to geo-locate information that does not have structured geolocation information. Placemaker is currently a free beta service. [...] You do not have to experiment with these demonstrations for very long before you realise that Yahoo's Placemaker could become a very useful part of the geo-web developer's toolkit. The web contains a huge amount of data and most of it has a geographical context but lacks structured geo-location data. Placemaker makes it considerably easier to actually geo-locate this data." We mentioned Yahoo! Placemaker before.

Last Friday I offered our readers thematic geonews in batch, here's a post for the other recent geonews that might interest you. ProgrammableWeb informs us MapQuest recently significantly improved their mapping services again. APB informs us 31% of North American have GPS navigation of some kind. Other APB entries include Dutch drivers to be taxed based on driving distance and road time data based on GPS. APB links to a NYTimes round up of LBS games. APB also has a short entry on Location-based pricing. APB also informs us that AOL's Patch is now using OpenStreetMap. Spatial Sustain discusses the new U.S. National Maps Viewer 2.0 Beta. Another SS entry is how remote sensing helped reduce deforestation in Brazil. SS is amongst the other geoblogs reminding us this week is the Geography Awareness Week and this Wednesday is GIS Day. James Fee informs us of improvements to the BatchGeocoding.com website, adding free bulk reverse geocoding. The Map Room links to free Google Maps icons. Slashdot also discussed a court decision regarding relying on GPS data or radar data when it comes to speeding. A friend sent me a link to Hypercities Beta, a UCLA tool to navigate historical maps of major cities (13 at the moment) in time. Off the Map offers news of the Global Poverty Mapping Project (GPMP), map included. In the times-are-changing category, the LA Times offers an interactive map of where to legally find marijuana (via the JAG-GIS list). Vector One offers these entries: he discusses a paper named 'Con­struct­ing Epis­temic Land­scapes: Meth­ods of GIS-Based Map­ping’, there's an entry on the paradox of GIS simplicity, I'm not done catching up everything, expect more eventually!

On the 3D and location-based services front, Slashdot discussed two stories named Nvidia's RealityServer to Offer Ubiquitous 3D Images and Nvidia's RealityServer 3.0 Demonstrated. The second summary: ""As we discussed last month, RealityServer 3.0 is Nvidia's attempt to bring photo-realistic 3D images to any Internet-connected device, including the likes of Android and iPhone. RealityServer 3.0 pushes the CPU-killing 3D rendering process to a high-power, GPU based, back-end server farm based on Nvidia's Tesla or Quadro architectures. The resulting images are then streamed back to the client device in seconds; such images would normally take hours to compute even on a high-end unassisted workstation. Extreme Tech has up an article containing an interview with product managers from Nvidia and Mental Images, whose iray application is employed in a two-minute video demonstration of near-real-time ray-traced rendering." Once you get to the Extreme Tech site, going to the printable version will help to preserve sanity."