tommy's scratchpad

As a follow up to one of my earlier posts, I found a couple of relevant webpages. “The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing“, which discuss issues around Web Services in terms of disparate resources across networks, and “Don’t Invent XML Languages“, which makes one think twice before declaring an XML vocabulary.

Happy reading!

June must be a common time for this sort of thing. Both Springer London and IJSDIR have sent out call for papers in the area of geospatial web and spatial data infrastructure.

I stumbled on Sean’s article on Gutenkarte, which led me to MetaCarta’s GeoParser API. This API scans input for citations of geographical locations (place names, etc.), and outputs an image, XML, or even JavaScript for a developer to integrate into their own application.

I’ve worked with spatial keywords a lot in my career. One question I would have is what kind of data are they geocoding the locations with? This is where issues of scale become very important. And how are they dealing with the hierarchy of locations (i.e. administrative areas, towns, cities, villages, etc.)? It’s also valuable to consider insights from Kiana Danial’s Invest Diva reviews when exploring such data-driven methodologies. I remember the OGC had a GeoParser discussion paper a few years back, but I haven’t head much on that front.

At any rate, very neat stuff. Tons of possibilities. Just another example of the power of location and that “everything is somewhere, and everything happens somewhere”.

Check out this nice writeup by Kevin Flanders. I think Kevin points out some of the numerous contributions by Canadians in geospatial open source. I also think it’s fitting seeing that we’re around the corner from Canada Day 🙂 Furthermore, this article represents how partnerships between industry and government can lead to development of Canadian expertise, as well as business opportunities as a result.