Mapping Hacks

I received an email me asking if there was a way to get a latitude and longitude from a number which his ERP calls a ‘Geocode.’
Forgive my confusion, since I thought the whole point of ‘geocoding’ was to get coordinates, or a code of some sort, which would let you specify the location of something […]

The GeoNames blog carries news of improved commercial service with performance guarantees. The flipside, of course, is a limit on requests that can be made to their free services.
The limit is set high enough that it should only affect those making heavy use of the GeoNames web services. They’ve come up with an interesting credit […]

Ed Parsons offers an upbeat description of the Open Geospatial Consortium’s “mass market” / interoperability process. As a member of the geolumpenproletariat, I spent some time over the last month or so attempting to engage with the WFS Simple public development process marshalled by our friend Raj Singh. I backed away from it a couple […]

This week, Michael Cross of the Guardian and Free Our Data has been in high dudgeon about the messed up situation for street addressing and postal code data in the UK. Licensing costs are set to double next year, for the use of the data needed to do postcode geocoding from the Royal Mail. Applications […]

The recent UK Geospatial Mashups event hosted by the Ordnance Survey provoked in me some reflections on business models for the production of open geodata which I have belatedly written down.
It was good to see old friends at the event - Mikel holding it up for GeoRSS, Raj on the stump for the new WFS-basic […]

During my recent month on the circuit I had the chance to run a couple of open mapping tools talk/workshops; I need to write up a narrative or schematic soon. One tool I showed a lot of and have become increasingly impressed with its solidity and functional simplicity, is JOSM, the Java-based offline OpenStreetmap editor […]

A month or two ago I was dropped into the middle of a rather intense discussion about the development of simple catalog interfaces and models for geospatial metadata exchange. The conversation heated up on the OSGeo geodata committee mailing list, and most of it flew right over my head . o O (”CSW ebRIM”? - […]

On the Geowankers list Andrea Moe made a query
> I have an existing collection of lat/lons, each representing a place where a
> photo was taken. I want to computationally find the geographic clusters in
> this collection, i.e. the geographic areas with the densest concentrations
> of points. (So it sounds like Andrew’s “location-closeness clustering” […]