Finding Your Way in the Open Geospatial World

It is clear that geospatial capabilities are going to be big, and this means the open source community needs to expand its work in this field. That's just been made easier by Autodesk, which:

recently announced plans to donate its coordinate system (CS) and map projection technology to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). The software, acquired from Mentor Software will help users to more easily support geographic coordinate conversions and allow accurate and precise geospatial analysis. This planned donation joins other previous Open Source donations by the company, including the web mapping MapGuide and the geospatial data access technology (FDO) software, both donated last year.

The rest of the interview offers some useful background to the kind of stuff that will be coming through, and how open source fits in.

Of Open and Closed Geography

Talking of the price we pay for idiotically closed geographical data:

The United States has benefitted in many ways from having public data sets that are freely used by scholars, commercial firms, consultants, and the public. An example of this is the TIGER system (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/) Many countries do not, and one British geospatial expert estimated that the closed nature of their system has cost them one billion pounds in lost business.

(Via Open Access News.)

Where in the World is GeoRSS?

A Slashdot post reveals the precise geographical location of my ignorance about GeoRSS:

Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds

This site describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.

To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.

This is apparently a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium, although, alas, its openness is limited in extent:

Q: Does OGC promote free software and free data?

A: No. OGC promotes the development and use of consensus-derived publicly available and open specifications that enable different geospatial systems (commercial or public domain or open source) to interoperate. For example, OpenGIS Specifications can be used to geospatially enable interoperable Web based applications and portals. These applications or portals can provide either free or available-for-fee services and data that are widely available to Web users.

Inspired or Not?

This sounds good news:

The European Parliament and Council reached agreement last night on the contents of the proposed INSPIRE Directive, which aims to harmonise spatial information across Europe.

Key points resolved during the final stages of the discussions between the institutions included the principles according to which citizens should be allowed to examine the official maps and other spatial data covered by the directive, and rules for granting authorities access to data held by other authorities.

...

Data search services designed for the public will generally be free of charge, although the directive allows fees to be charged for access to data that has to be updated frequently, such as weather reports.

However, the cynic in me suggests that the devil is in the details. Anybody know?

Update: Michael Cross of the Guardian does: the answer is "not inspired". We've been stitched up by the Ordnance Survey, invoking that perennial favourite, "reasons of national security" for withholding information - just like that nice Mr Bush does. Ever heard of Google Earth or Google Maps, which already give all this information?