In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Directions Mag shares an interesting article named What Douglas County Learned Moving its GIS to the Cloud, mostly using Esri GIS software and Amazon services.

From the article: "From a GIS administrator’s perspective, our number one benefit derived from using the cloud has been flexibility. The flexibility to deploy a new server instance or an image of an existing server and only pay for the time we use it is extremely valuable. We are better prepared to test new versions of software and custom applications. From an organizational point of view, the biggest benefits have been reliability and the reduced dependency on internal IT resources. The costs are predictable and Amazon provides many options for driving those costs down."

Via internal email I learned about the City of Toronto joining other canadian cities for opening their data, which includes a lot of geospatial data.

From the toronto.ca/open site: "The Cities of Toronto, Edmonton, Ottawa and Vancouver have joined forces to collaborate on an "Open Data Framework". The project aims to enhance current open data initiatives in the areas of data standards, terms of use agreements and open data website design." Before you ask, here's the licensing terms: "The City of Toronto (City) now grants you a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use, modify, and distribute the datasets in all current and future media and formats for any lawful purpose."

Toronto offers a variety of data in the Shapefile format, some raster in ESDAS, and WMS services too.

We mentioned last March the federal data.gc.ca initiative, and previously, we mentioned the open data initiative of Ottawa and Edmonton, that Montreal is also heading towards open data, and arguments on why Edmonton and Vancouver open data efforts did not succeeded as expected.