tommy's scratchpad

I took this week off, and decided to simply lay low and relax at home (relaxing in Toronto is a bit of an oxymoron, but I digress). So I’m enjoying my week by finishing up some small projects around the house, cooking, working out, and catching up in general.

So far, it’s been quite nice — I could get used to this! The only bummer comes in the form of my television, which konked out on me last night, sound and tube. Combine that with my stereo system (which is shot as well), and now I’m shopping for home entertainment — disaster!

At any rate, this is the last post you’ll see from me until after Canada’s Labour Day. In the meantime, check out Paul’s article about open source and users, as well as a response from Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Corporation. Also worth checking out is Sam Bacharach’s podcast on OGC 101.

Have a good week!

Phew! I’ve finally been approved to attend this FOSS4G2006. Thank goodness. It will be fun to see the open source geo gang for a week of catching up, discussions, and setting the path forward.

I’ll be presenting use of foss4g in ResEau, co-presenting “How good does open source talk OpenGIS?” with Bart van den Eijnden (Netherlands) and Yewondwossen Assefa (Canada), as well as giving the MapServer OGC Web Services Workshop, again with Assefa.

Check back here when the conference is on, as I’ll be blogging updates, thoughts, and maybe the odd story 🙂

As seen on the georss.org blog, ESRI has implemented GeoRSS within their ArcWeb Services JavaScript API. Wow, between this and their support of OpenLS, I think ESRI is starting to acknowledge both client requirements in this arena, as well as interoperability. Way to go!

Something’s gotta give.

There has been so much discussion on the idea of geospatial catalogs/registries/repositories/searching/[insert_buzzword_here] in the last little while that it’s impossible not to see the sore thumb that it has become within the community.

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Just read James‘ post on the ESRI JavaScript API, so I decided to take a look. Here’s what I think:
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I’ve toyed with many different programming languages, development environments, application approaches and the like, and thus far I can be categorized as a REST and Perl hack. Perl is very dear to me. I used Perl for the first major project in my career and in a slew of other applications, including owsview.

In the last couple of years, I’ve been moving to Java (servlets, JSP, etc.) for webapps, which has been successful for the most part, but haven’t budged from a scripting point of view from Perl when I needed something really lightweight and quick and dirty.
Until now. Enter PHP. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m glad to say that RésEau has been featured as the OGC Website of the Month, as well as featured as an article in Geospatial Solutions. I’m proud to have worked on this project with such talented people from many disciplines. It was also fun to get to do alot of tinkering into new and innovative approaches to the dissemination of geospatial info, such as GeoRSS and SensorWeb. Kudos to all involved!

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”.