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In an email out late last week John from the NZ Geospatial Office announced the following...

Hi All
The New Zealand Geospatial Office is pleased to announce that John Clegg from ProjectX has been awarded second prize for his Mashup - Crime 10K.

Check out Crime 10K @ http://blog.projectxtech.com/page/2/ or http://www.gis.org.nz/wiki/Geospatial_Mash-up_2008_Participants

Cheers
John

Congratulations to John, not only for winning a prize, but for also actually completing a working solution! :) Thanks also to the New Zealand Geospatial office, and the other central and local government organisations that rallied around the mashup.

After the strong turnout at the initial Mashup meeting at the start of May, it is disappointing, but perhaps not unexpected to have so few completed entries. I wonder if the short time frame - e.g. less than 2 months from discussions to submission resulted in too tight a timeline, especially as those that have the skills to mash something up in a short time are probably quite busy with work already? I hope that the Geospatial Office does not lose heart from the low number of submitted entries. I would have liked to have played with the data in Sahana, but I think Sahana needs another 6-12 months before it will be ready to support that, and I certainly wasn't in a position to currently build something from scratch!

Perhaps a competition needs more time to be run? Given that most participants would be doing it as a voluntary effort anyway it may need a 3-6 month timeframe to get more teams participating.

Alternatively, perhaps we look at moving away from a competitive, team-based, do-it-in-your-own-time approach, and try something like a soild 2 days to work through some geospatial issues or a particular theme to provide some focus - for example a mashup to bring a pile of different GIS systems together and work on interoperability around a certain issue. My favourite would be around a disaster scenario as that provides a very dynamic environment where lots of new data is being produced, and mashups are needed to aggregate data from many different organisations, and it is needed in a timely manner.

Who knows? Perhaps trying to get it all nailed in one weekend, or a combined Friday/Saturday (one day off work, one day of weekend) may be a lot easier for most. It also has the added benefit of throwing a pile of people in the same room(s) and setting them to a task, rather than providing an independent, work-at-your-own-pace challenge.

I'd be interested to hear some comments on this issue!

The New Zealand Geospatial Office is pleased to announce that John Clegg from ProjectX has been awarded second prize for his Mashup - Crime 10K.

Check out Crime 10K at Geospatial Mash-up 2008 Participants .

As part of the GOVIS Geospatial miniConference, a maps mashup is being held the day before with data sets being provided by LINZ and others. More information will be made available on the barcamp page (for more on what a barcamp is - click here).

A challenge to innovate! A challenge to find open data! Create and present your mash-up with a few data sets provided for the BarCamp! Cool Prizes! Sponsored by Statistics New Zealand, The New Zealand Geospatial Office and the Spatial Sciences Institute. Entry is open to everybody who is enthusiastic about using New Zealand's core geospatial data in presenting current issues and analysis challenges! MashUp 2008 is an event which brings together New Zealand's leading technical experts, as well as budding enthusiasts, in combining information sources with mapping boundaries and data in innovative ways. Rules of the competition will be downloadable here as soon as possible.

Over on Spatially Adjusted, James Gee has an article discussing what appears to be an increasing movement away from ArcIMS as the mapping server platform-of-choice. It appears that there have been few additional features or must-have functionality added to the commercial servers in recent years, and at the same time open source solutions have been growing in capability and reliability. The increasing trend towards interoperability has also speed up th

Just came across a project to develop an open source mapping application for PDA's. MapTools has the following objective.

Mobile GIS is an Open Source project aimed at providing various GIS solutions for a variety of mobile devices. Currently Mobile GIS is in the initial planning phase.

The South Korean Government is going to utilise an open souce mapping software package - IntraMap/Web (what appears to be a Korean company) - to manage and publish their nations mapping needs.

The unified digital map DB central center will be linking each data centers in providence, county, city levels to link Web servers, DB servers, administrator servers and GIS servers using Redhat#039s enterprises Linux 4.0 version.

The GIS engine #039IntraMap/Web#039 by KSIC was picked for its open source software. This shows the administration#039s intent to spread open source software and to apply it to other public access projects in the future. This kind of project can be an ideal showcase for the open source and foundation to overseas ventures for the domestic firms.

I think it is excellent to see these open source projects being picked up by Governments - hopefully we will see more of this occurring in New Zealand. Hint hint.

OpenLayers, an open source library that allows you to interface to many web mapping services has been released. We are looking at using this to add mapping capabilities to Sahana.

Mapstraction is a library to provide a common API for accessing some of the major public javascript mapping libraries, including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. May be useful for anyone looking at building a mashup with these services.

I came across an interesting article about people in the UK having to go out an map roads for themselves because the Crown Copyright does not allow them to use the Ordnance Survey data.

"Freeing certain scales of data would be good, but the best way to make it happen [is] to go and do it," replies Coast. "There's no reason for OS to [free the data] because it has a monopoly. There's no economic incentive - until we produce one."

If Ordnance Survey and other national agencies will not make their data freely available, then OpenStreetMap, developed over the past two years, will re-collect it from scratch. OS maps are covered by Crown copyright, which lasts 50 years from the end of the year of publication.

Luckily we're a bit better off here in New Zealand, although I'd love to see the innovation that would occur with spatial data if LINZ made all their data available via torrent - as TopoOnline presents too much of a barrier to obtaining significant amounts of topographic information.

The recently announced Open Source Geospatial Foundation has started a new project to develop resources about Public Geospatial Data. The proposed mission is focused around...

Promote the use of open geospatial formats - Providing best-practise guidelines and examples for use of open and free standards for data (GML, WMS, WFS-T) and metadata (Dublin Core, RDF).

Promote public access to state-collected geodata - Lead by example in demonstrating economic value and research activity generated by open access to public geographic information.

Run a repository of open geodata - A collection of geospatial datasets shall be hosted by the PGDP. Additionally, links to other open data repostories shall be collected.

Present and explain licenses for public geodata - The PGDP aims to collect licenses suitable for the publishing of public geodata. The license shall be presented along with a summary of its benefits and focus.