SHODAN LIVES
Notes and links from @colemanm.

I wrote a blog entry for the spatial networks blog with my thoughts on the current state of GIS and geospatial technology in education. There’s been some great feedback to the post so far, from both students and educators alike.

As one who went through a university program for geography not too many years back, I know the kinds of things I was exposed to during that time — and even with the massive growth of the geo industry since then, there’s been little perceptual shift in focus for many of these programs.

My latest post on the @spatialnetworks blog — on the challenges of mapping socio-cultural fabrics.

A Reuters op-ed piece critical of NGA.

It’s ridiculous to claim that Google creates the same product as NGA for a fraction of the cost and then “gives it away for free”… A flagrant misunderstanding of geospatial data and how it’s produced.

I only call attention to this article for these insane stats on NGA:

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has 16,000 employees — nearly as many as Google — and a “black” budget thought to be at least $5 billion per year. The NGA is building a new headquarters complex with the stunning price of $1.8 billion, nearly the cost of the Freedom Tower rising in Manhattan. That new headquarters, near Fort Belvoir, Virginia, will be the third-largest structure in the Washington area, nearly rivaling the Pentagon in size.

I so want to try out MapBox’s offerings. They provide geospatial datasets as Amazon EBS volumes that you can mount on EC2, an awesome way to source free data for access in your applications. They currently have snapshots of the OpenStreetMap Planet database, US Census TIGER/line data, and NASA’s CGIAR Worldwide DEM.

Even though mapping toolkits like Mapnik, Tilecache, and OpenLayers are getting extremely good, tools like what MapBox provides make it easier to jump into providing your own custom maps and data for mapping apps, instead of relying on Google or Yahoo to handle everything for you. Nothing’s wrong with using those commercial APIs for basemaps, but for certain applications, it makes lots of sense to have more control over your cartographic style.

The Maps team is on a roll lately. They just opened up Google Maps Labs today, unlocking new features I’ve been wondering about for a long time (drag ‘n zoom!).

There are a couple new “power user” features that’ll be useful to me, like the lat/long display tooltip, aerial oblique imagery, and the lat/long marker drop feature.

Google has released a fancy new online drawing tool for digitizing in 3D buildings for Google Earth.

You pick from a preset group of locations and it loads in oblique aerial photos (so you can see the shapes of the buildings and pull their 2D footprints into three dimensions.

(Demo video)

Cartagen is a framework for adding rich styles to map data, to produce better cartographics.

You utilize the GSS (geographic style sheet) spec to style map elements from OpenStreetMap data.

Brady Forrest on the iPhone’s new features for GIS developers.

“North Korea Uncovered” is a project by a Ph.D. student from George Mason University named Curtis Melvin. The objective is to map as many “unknown” points of interest in the super-secretive DPRK as possible, from data gathered on his trips to the country as well as information from other “local spies.” All sorts of infrastructure and military data is mapped, including mines, dams, missile facilities, military bases, prisons, and burial mounds. It’s a huge and fascinating dataset.

Download the Google Earth point data layer here.

(gadling)