Mapping Hacks

The code is here

It sometimes seems as if I’ve been reading the same Galileo article on the BBC News website for the last three years; only the delivery date changes each year. I missed this summer’s news of the collapse of the “consortium of consortiums” that was selected to build, launch and run the European-backed alternative to the […]

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 […]

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”? - […]

Yesterday, Tim O’Reilly emailed us to ask the following:
Any thoughts about the relative openness and hacker-friendliness of the Google Maps API vs. the Yahoo! or Microsoft APIs?
My response ran something like this:
Early on — i.e. last summer — there was a huge gap between Google Maps and the rest. In particular, Google offered a JavaScript […]

Our friend Mikel Maron has hacked up code to parse GeoRSS in Google Maps.
See his notes on an extension.
This can be quite useful for quickly building maps,
like Node.London,
and promotes an interoperable geospatial web based on a common data format.

With GeoRSS standardization [http://georss.org] in the works,
its important to get the big map players on […]

When Schuyler first created the Geocoder.us web site he embedded maps from the Tiger Map Server. This is a project of the US Census bureau that provides free maps and free map data. All in all it is very very cool. The maps are not as pretty as some of the commercial […]

I’m visiting the US for the first time since Google Maps came out, we’re staying in Brooklyn with a friend of Schuyler’s; one afternoon while he’s off visiting the The Open Planning Project, i decide to track down the local highly-recommended organic grocery. Where would i think to try first but Google’s spatial search? The […]

As part of the Healthy Arkansas effort, the state has compiled a list of trails in Arkansas.

This is part of Governor Mike Huckabee’s efforts, and like all politicians he’s
got his own axes to grind, but if it takes obesity to get geo data then hand me a french fry!

Seems like Mikel’s been hacking on Google’s Ridefinder service, and
discovered that it can be used to infer patterns of street
geography in New York City. Now, if only they’d start a service like this
in London, we could call the Open Street
Map project half done already!