Mapping Hacks

NASA just did a study to determine the value of geospatial data standards. They compared two projects, one
that used standards and one that was proprietary, using a big long methodology that determined that
standards are a good thing.

“One way to express this result is by saying that for every $100 million spent on projects based […]

Where do neighborhoods start, and stop? Where is Tribecca, SoHo, SOMA? The
Neighborhood Project “is creating a map of city neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet users.”

They collect addresses and claimed neighborhood from Craigslist posts, and people filling out a form, and then
do clever things.

“This is an experiment in collective knowledge” so […]

Friends and supporters of openstreetmap, the grassroots collaborative GPS mapmaking effort in Europe and worldwide, may be interested to read this excellent email that Steve Coast sent to the discussion list earlier today.
The geospatial web boom is driving a lot of idle-handed free software enthusiasts like Rich, Schuyler and I to need sources of free, […]

This morning i got a rare piece of snail-mail: production prints from this year’s Society of Cartographers Bulletin, of the essay that i was honoured to contribute on the subject of Open Geodata, Free Software, and Civic Information. It talks about why we wrote “Mapping Hacks”, and why UK based geo***kers are finding it hard […]

I dropped by the launch event for the GPL 3.0 discussion draft today, hoping to catch sight of Nagarjuna, which i completely failed to do. I hung about to listen to a discussion on Digital Rights Management policy - one materially new area that the GPL 3.0 covers is DRM, a new kind of attack […]

The eagle-eyed crschmidt and drumm spotted, while looking at NYC maps both via mfrumin’s flash overlay tool for plotting vectors over GMaps and via the main Google Maps site… the base maps look quite different. Specifically, there are many features and enhancements missing in the maps that come out of the API.
They reasoned out that […]

A couple of readers pointed out that i seemed to have upset Ed Parsons, the CTO of the Ordnance Survey, not a little bit with my reference to the display in his presentation of viably unnecessary, easily outsourceable techno-toys, at the recent Society of Cartographers conference session on Public Access to Maps/Data
Ed’s slides showed a […]

At the recent World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures i organised a series of Open Geodata activities. We held some small workshops on practical implementations and standards. I’d hoped to do something on a bigger scale with more EU attendees, but i was very happy with what we ended up with. There was also a […]

Heather Brooke of Your Right To Know wrote an excellent article for the Times Law section recently, on Why we must cut the costly Crown copyright, a growing campaign on both left and right to repeal the obsolete laws of Crown Copyright that cover most state-produced information in the UK and in many ex-Commonwealth countries […]

A couple of weeks ago i greatly enjoyed attending and presenting at the Public Access to Maps/Data session of the Society of Cartographers‘ summer school.
Richard Fairhurst gave a particularly moving talk about how Waterscape had moved from a 2million pound, proprietary GIS package to a free, Flash-based one written in his free time, which actually […]