GIS.org.nz

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.

The Intergovernmental Committee on Survey and Mapping have released a report covering these key tasks.

Task 1 - Conducting an audit of key agencies involved in emergency management and response to compile a nationally consistent Incident Management System (IMS) symbology resource catalogue.

Task 2 - Conducting an audit to define the major categories of symbols for all-hazards used or required by Emergency Managers and response personnel and develop documentation outlining which categories of symbols are relevant to different types of organisations and events, gaps in existing categories and priority areas for additional work.

The report is available from this page.

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

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.

The State Services Commission has released a new webpage that provides an overview of Geospatial Information Standards. Comments are being solicited on this introduction to GIS standards.

Dr. Marnie Leybourne - Director of the West Australian Land Information System (WALIS)
Come along and find out how WALIS has successfully brought 27 public and private organisations together in the areas of:

• Management of spatial information
• The building of industry networks
• Advancement of technology
• Accessibility
• Information sharing

The OGC has released for comment a standard specification designed to provide a directory service of available geospatial services entitled the Catalogue Services Specification. This has the potential to go a long way towards enabling a shared network of easily-searchable geospatial resources.

OASIS Open Standards 2006 is the fourth annual Asia
Pacific event where both management and technical professionals from the business and government sector can gather to share expertise and promote open discussion on the latest technologies, applications and services supporting the global e-Business community.

Presented in conjunction with OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), Open Standards is an event focused on encouraging the use of standards-based technology to improve efficiency and interoperability between business partners.