In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Bloggage update: Hard to believe it's over a year since I left Kuwait - so just out of curiosity I looked for web maps of the area again. Google and OpenStreetMap left a little to be desired in the geography, but Leaddog's Syria GIS Map is very impressive indeed. Then I turn to my old employ's arcgis.com map of a Kuwait University project. It's a full Kuwait Municipality map, with GIS and geodesign of the new university, but also the whole city complete with directions including barriers, which I haven't seen on Google or Bing maps!

The E-Government project «geo.admin.ch» has achieved the 2nd place in the 2012 United Nations Public Service Award in the category of “Advancing Knowledge Management in Government”. A Swiss delegation accepted the «United Nations Public Service Award 2012», in New York under the attendance of the President of the General Assembly, the Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs and high-level government officials from around the world.

geo.admin.ch has won the 2nd place in the 2012 United Nations Public Service Award in the category of “Advancing Knowledge Management in Government”. With its outstanding services as a public platform for geographical information, data and services it is of great use for the citizen in daily life. Geo.admin.ch’s outstanding achievement has demonstrated excellence in serving the public interest and has made a significant contribution to the improvement of public administration in Switzerland. It serves as an inspiration and encouragement for others working for public service.

Most prestigious international recognition

The United Nations Public Service Awards is the most prestigious international recognition of excellence in public service. It rewards the creative achievements and contributions of public service institutions that lead to a more effective and responsive public administration in countries worldwide. The award was accepted in New York on the 25th of June 2012 under  attendance of highest international UN members by a Swiss delegation, consisting of members of swisstopo, the Federal Geoinformation-center and E-Government Switzerland.

Through an annual competition, the UN Public Service Awards promotes the role, professionalism and visibility of public service.

A priorized project of eGovernment Switzerland

geo.admin.ch is a high priority project of the Swiss eGovernment program. The goal of eGovernment is to enable both businesses and  citizens to carry out important transactions with the authorities electronically. The authorities in turn are called upon to modernize their business processes and communicate electronically with each other. The exchange of geodata is fostered by geo.admin.ch in a significant way.

Pictures under:

http://www.geo.admin.ch/internet/geoportal/en/home/current/
news20120626.html

geo.admin.ch in short (video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUbu8AzDD1Y

United Nations Public Service Awards:

http://goo.gl/mp6UR

My latest blog post addresses:

• some of the issues in direct read/write to spatial databases
• confusion that arises from competing user and vendor needs
• an attempt to clarify  from a standards & metadata perspective

Here's the weekly batch of geonews, finally on a regular Friday.

On the ESRI front:

• Recently, ESRI open sourced the ESRI Geoportal Server. Some twitter users were quick to mention that you still need ArcGIS Server software to use the Geoportal Server. [UPDATE: see comments below, it seems such a license is not a requirement after all.] To me, that's still a nice step. Their definition of a geoportal: "A geoportal is a gateway to Web-based geospatial resources, enabling users to discover, view and access geospatial information and services made available by their providing organizations. Likewise, data providers can use the geoportal to make their geospatial resources discoverable, viewable, and accessible to others."
• The popular blog SpatiallyAdjusted shares some elements that could be improved about the ArcGIS 10 user interface

On the open source front:

• O'Reilly discusses a new open source software called WEAVE (Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment), which obviously include a mapping component
• If you're into FDO, you'll be happy to learn of the new SequentialProcess for batch mode processing
• QGIS gets new label tools
• Remember Polymaps? The open source mapping framework Polymaps is now integrated into GeoCommons

In the miscellaneous category:

• REST and RESTful was widely discussed in the past few years in the geospatial community, including within ESRI, the open source and OGC rings. Thanks to this entry named Richardson Maturity Model: steps toward the glory of REST, I think I finally correctly understand what REST is about! ;-) (sorry I don't remember how I ended up on that article)
• TMR informs us MapQuest launched My Maps last June, with the same name of the similar feature provided on Google Maps, basically allowing you to save and share user-created maps
• SS shares a long perspective entry named What forces are at play in the evolution of geospatial industry sectors?
• NAVTEQ acquires the 3D modeling company named PixelActive
• APB informs us Yahoo has launched a new service called Local Offers: "that it said will give users information about local merchants along with coupons and information on deals at stores in their neighborhoods."
• Kurt shares interesting thoughts on GIS, followed by What is GIS? A workflow definition

In the maps category:

• Here's the evolution of active Facebook users by region
• A nice entry on The Human Development Index in Africa and Across the World
• SS shares an entry named Mapping Opportunity in America
• While I was aware of it, we mentioned mentioned it yet. The GEB discusses the USGS "Earth as Art" beautiful collection of Landsat imagery