slashgeo.org

Slashdot runs a story named Program Uses GPS To Track Sex Offenders. Their summary: "43 sex offenders in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County are wearing GPS monitoring devices as part of a pilot program designed to keep track of their movements. If the offender moves into an "exclusion zone," police are called. “Exclusion zones for example [are] schools, daycares, playgrounds, facilities where children congregate for those sex offenders,” John Hudson, a security consultant, said. “We’ve identified in their red zones. If an offender with a device goes into one of the red zones, an exclusion zone, we’ll be notified immediately.”"

Slashdot just started a discussion on a story named Google Broke the Law, Say South Korean Police.

Their summary: "South Korean police say Google was in violation of Internet privacy laws when its Street View service archived private information in more than 30 countries, including email and text messages. The country's Cyber Terror Response Center broke the encryption on hard drives raided from Google last August and confirmed that private information had been gathered, violating South Korea's telecommunications laws. Police are seeking the original author of the program, though they say it is likely to be a US citizen. Google said it stopped collecting the information as soon as it realized what was happening. 40 states in the US are demanding access to the information gathered by the mapping service in order to determine what was archived, which Google refused to hand over. 'We have been cooperating with the Korean Communications Commission and the police, and will continue to do so,' said a Google Korea spokesperson."

We mentioned the project two times earlier this year, and now GeoNode 1.0 has just been released.

From their about page: "GeoNode is an open source platform that facilitates the creation, sharing, and collaborative use of geospatial data. The project aims to surpass existing spatial data infrastructure solutions by integrating robust social and cartographic tools.

At its core, the GeoNode is based on open source components GeoServer, GeoNetwork, Django, and GeoExt that provide a platform for sophisticated web browser spatial visualization and analysis. Atop this stack, the project has built a map composer and viewer, tools for analysis, and reporting tools.

To promote collaboration, the GeoNode is designed on Web 2.0 principles [...]"

Via internal email, I learned about the OGC announcement of the Georeferenced Table Joining Service (TJS) standard.

From the press release: "The OGC TJS standard defines an interface for services that provide the ability to join attribute data stored in one database on a network with corresponding geometry (points, lines, or polygons) stored in another network accessible database.

For example, a table on one server may indicate the population of various cities, while a second server may contain the geometry that describes the cities' locations and boundaries. The TJS standard describes a set of interfaces for both servers that allows the city name to be used as the "common geographic identifier" in order to join the population data to its geometry, thus enabling mapping and geospatial analysis of the tabular data. An earlier draft of this standard was titled the "Geographic Linkage Service"."

Via internal email, I learned that the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced the Web Coverage Service (WCS) 2.0 standard.

What's new for the WCS 2.0 version, from their press release: "The WCS 2.0 standard has several significant enhancements over previous versions. WCS 2.0 is harmonized with the Geography Markup Language (GML) coverage model, leading to increased interoperability across OGC standards. Further, WCS 2.0 supports all GML and ISO coverage types, therefore extending WCS from pure raster data to point clouds, curvilinear grids, general meshes, and more coverage types. Additionally, WCS 2.0 is highly modular and follows the OGC's new Modular Specification Policy, which describes a design pattern that makes standards easier to understand and implement."

Via the O'Reilly Radar, I learned about the Pew Internet Report on Location-based Services. Their key findings: "In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.

Key findings include:

• 7% of adults who go online with their mobile phone use a location-based service.
• 8% of online adults ages 18-29 use location-based services, significantly more than online adults in any other age group.
• 10% of online Hispanics use these services – significantly more than online whites (3%) or online blacks (5%).
• 6% of online men use a location-based service such as Foursquare or Gowalla, compared with 3% of online women."