ESRI announces support of GeoRSS

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!

Geospatial Catalog Development Brewing

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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Yet Another Mapping API

Just read Jamespost on the ESRI JavaScript API, so I decided to take a look. Here’s what I think:
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PHP implosion

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 »

Canadian Water Portal in Lights

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!

Web Services and XML: Considerations

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!

Geospatial Call for Papers

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.

Location and GeoParsing

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”.

Canada and FOSS4G

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.

When to use XML

I remember, in 1998, an old boss of mine sending us a presentation on XML, and how it was going to become the next big thing in information exchange. Well, things have certainly moved along since then, and XML is all over the place. Read the rest of this entry »

Modified: 16 August 2006 12:11:14 EST