In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Eddie sent me this information on a webinar for September 26th on Serving Public Health through Open Health Mapping Services.

The invitation: "In this, the fourth GovFuture webinar presented by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and Directions Media, we look at how improved sharing of geospatial information plays an important role in improving public health.

Our featured presenter is Eddie Oldfield, BA, Director, NB Climate Change Hub at the New Brunswick Lung Association. He will describe his work in coordinating implementation of geospatial interoperability standards to exchange, integrate, and visualize distributed health and environmental information. Applications he has studied have addressed chronic illness, public health resources, critical infrastructure, pollution, meteorological information, and pandemic surveillance and control.

Eddie Oldfield's current work involves helping to create a national portal [or web map services] to bring together climate and health resources for decision-makers in public health, municipal emergency management, and local climate adaptation. The portal would aid in expanding public health heat alert and response, community resilience / disaster risk reduction, and modeling of historical and forecast impacts from climate on public health. The portal could enable decision-makers to use diverse data sources through services that implement the OGC Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Processing Service (WPS) standards.

OGC and Directions Media invite you to join us in this webinar. GovFuture's quarterly webinars are designed to help people working in local and subnational (county, province, district etc.) governments worldwide make the best possible use of their ever-expanding location and geospatial information resources."

Many sources pointed to the excellent article from Brian Timoney named How the Public Actually Uses Local Government Web Maps: Metrics from Denver.

Here's the metrics, but head to the article to understand the context and get the informative details:

• "Single-Topic maps get 3 times the traffic of the traditional Map Portal
• 60% of map traffic comes directly from search engine requests
• Auto-complete drives clean user queries
• Map Usage is Spiky
• People Look Up Info on Maps, and Leave
• People Actually Interact with Balloon Content
• People Rarely Change Default Map Settings

[...] What’s clear to me is what local government maps need is less GIS and a lot more user-friendly auto-complete and SEO. Because in the end users want search and retrieval to work for maps the way it works for the rest of the web."

London - Zagreb, March 20 2012- GIS Cloud has announced they are re-shaping their service to better fit their users’ needs. GIS Cloud will be even easier to use, more cost efficient, provide more flexibility with a focus on solving particular users’ challenges. New solutions will be provided for organizations, governments, consultants and system integrators.

GIS Cloud says they are closely collaborating with their users to be able to better understand their needs and deliver better services. Having a modular and flexible service at their hand helps their users to:

• Cut unnecessary GIS software and IT costs
• Integrate GIS Cloud easily into existing work-flows and software setups
• Improve data exchange and management
• Reduce time to projects delivery

The new GIS Cloud offer is focused on reducing pain for many GIS professionals. This is mostly related to publishing data online, but also providing users with more cloud based geo applications and solutions.

The innovative HTML5 mapping engine released a few months ago has opened up new horizons and provided new ways of visualizing spatial data online. Publishing big data maps with several millions of features, rendered on the fly on a client, has opened up new possibilities.

For full information on the upcoming solutions take a look at GIS Cloud blog post.

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About GIS Cloud

GIS Cloud is a leading cloud platform delivering simple and easy to use geo applications and solutions. Company is focused on providing geo services for visualizing and publishing spatial data through its innovative HTML5 mapping technology.

The mission of GIS Cloud is not only to supplement desktop solutions, but to extend and enrich their capabilities through the potential cloud computing provides.

With a strong focus on using latest web and cloud technologies, company believes in moving traditional GIS industry into to the world of modern software.

Contact:

Dino Ravnic, co-founder and CEO
[email protected]
London - Zagreb

That's the title of a Direction Mag article, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, After All, It’s About Geospatial Jobs.

The summary: "The geospatial technology professional is at a turning point. The U.S. Department of Labor has identified the need for 330,000 qualified geospatial technologists to fill positions during the next 10 years. On top of that, geospatial technology is embedded in both mobile location apps and enterprise computing, increasing awareness of the technology and the need for those who understand GIS. So, where will we find qualified professionals to do the job? Editor in Chief Joe Francica looks at an important initiative that supports job training and education."

The article revolves around the GTCM: "[...] the completion of the Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM), a descriptive treatise that supports the development of geospatial technology curricula at the community college level [in the U.S.]."

Yesterday Slashdot discussed a story named Indian Government To Track Locations of All Cell Phone Users.

Their summary: "As per amendments made to operators' licences, beginning May 31, operators would have to provide the Department of Telecommunications real-time details of users' locations in latitudes and longitudes. Documents obtained by The Indian Express show that details shall initially be provided for mobile numbers specified by the government. Within three years, service providers will have to provide information on locations of all users. The information will have some margin of error at first. But by 2013, at least 60 per cent of the calls in urban areas would have to be accurately tracked when made 100 metres away from the nearest cell tower. By 2014, the government will seek to increase the proportion to 75 per cent in cities and 50 per cent in suburban and rural areas."

Kevin at the 'Centre for Spatial Law and Policy' came up with an interesting list of "fundamental elements of a legal and policy framework necessary for the development of a 'location-enabled' economy".

Here's his list:

1. Laws, regulations and policies with respect to the collection, use and transfer of geospatial data are clear and transparent;

2.  Any regulations that restrict the collection of geospatial data - of any type - are narrowly-tailored to address specific and articulable concerns, rather than broadly defined so as to address any potential risk;

3. Due to its unique qualities, geolocation information is protected for privacy purposes differently than information such as social security numbers, financial information or medical records;

4. Government agencies make government data (or Public Sector Information (PSI)) broadly available at minimal or no cost;

5. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in geospatial data are clear, widely understood and when appropriate, adequately protected;

6. Geospatial technology is treated the same as other types of technology;

7. There are no restrictions on the import and/or export of geospatial data;

8. There are no restrictions on the availability of information on the internet;

9. Individuals are adequately protected from government's using geospatial surveillance technology; and

10. Laws and policies encourage the use of industry standards that promote interoperability.

It´s a great pleasure to announce that the FOSSGIS Brasil Magazine #03 is launched. In this issue #03 we talk about the situation of free and opensource geotechnologies in Brazil, specially concerning the reasons to use, challenges of incorporating it to public institutions and tips to guarantee a smooth migration. Also, there is a brief report about Portugal and what has been done with FOSSGIS in this country.

Still about public policies and government, we talk about the "i3Geo" software applied to public management. "i3Geo" is a brazilian opensource software created inside the brazilian Environment Ministry by developer Edmar Moretti, which is also the interviewee of our 3rd edition, where he talks more about this great tool.

In addiction, you can know more about the ILWIS project, a former proprietary Desktop GIS, which is now a healthy opensource project; and about GISVM, a GIS virtual machine.

Besides others, be sure to read papers about GeoMajas and MapServer projects; the article about using the WPS standard together with OpenLayers; and the new section about "breaking taboos: FOSS Software can also do it"

You are able to download this issue accessing: http://fossgisbrasil.com.br/download/

We hope that you all like it and our team will be happy to receive your feedback about it. Your comments and suggestions are fundamental to us and our work.

Sincerely,

The FOSSGIS Brasil team
http://www.fossgisbrasil.com.br

This announcement may be interesting to the geonews community.  Earth Cube is a very ambitious initiative.  I did not see Open Source considerations explicitly mentioned.  Some experts should review the announcement and develop the story for presentation on slashgeo     ---Dale

From: National Science Foundation Update <[email protected]>
Date: Sep, Thu 29 2011 10:04 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Earth Cube Guidance for the Community

You are subscribed to National Science Foundation Update. This information has recently been updated, and is now available.

Earth Cube Guidance for the Community

Available Formats:
PDF: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11085/nsf11085.pdf?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click
 

[Editor's note: to provide a bit more context, here's a snippet of the pdf:
"EarthCube will be the transformative vehicle to address the scientific drivers in the GEO Vision document: 1) Understanding and forecasting the behavior of a complex and evolving Earth system; 2) Reducing vulnerability and sustaining life; and 3) Growing the geosciences workforce of the future.  EarthCube is inspired by the vision of a national cyberinfrastructure in CIF21."]

The first session I attended at the Where 2.0 Conference after the Thursday morning Keynote addresses was a talk entitled “Interacting With Local Governments: Best Practices”. The talk was given by Ben Berkowitz and Kam Lasater, the founder of SeeClickFix. SeeClickFix is a company that develops applications that allow citizens and customers to easily report issues and problems to local governments, utility companies, and other organizations.

It surprised me to learn that SeeClickFix deals with many of the same challenges I do as a land surveyor working on public infrastructure projects for cities and other government agencies. For example, the vendor for on City's IT wanted the company to sign a non-disclosure-agreement to use the API that had been developed for the City to report citizen problems. They also face opposition or hostility by individuals within government that don't want to allow open access to the data that citizens are reporting. The company also uses local government shapefile data when it is released under a reasonable data license, as I do in my own work. The company apparently contributed to the development of the Open 311 specification.

The Sunburned Surveyor

 Via internal mail I learned about the launch of the Government of Canada's Open Data pilot project.

There's also a link allowing you to directly browse their 'geospatial collection', which, if I'm still able to add numbers, offers a total of 166 geospatial datasets (unless some datasets are found in multiple categories?). The main page claims that there is 260,296 geospatial datasets already available. No matter what the actual numbers are, it's still a great day for open data in Canada.

From the data.gc.ca backgrounder page: "The GC Open Data Portal is a collaborative effort amongst Government of Canada departments and agencies to provide access to data managed by the government that can be leveraged by citizens, businesses, and communities for their own purposes. The government will work towards making public data that is not sensitive in nature (i.e. data which is NOT personal, secret, or confidential) broadly available in reusable formats."