Slashgeo

Franck Martin writes "Geospatial Content Management Systems (GeoCMS) are emerging. Take a CMS like tikiwiki and mix it with mapserver and you get a GeoCMS. The advantage of marrying the two technologies is to solve, simply, the metadata problem. Every map and every layer can be linked to a wiki page explaining what is all about in a free form. Every wiki page can contain a map to illustrate the contents. GeoCMS makes Metadata easy! You can even have a georeferenced image gallery, the location of your site subscribers and even more..." Read more below.

The Google Earth Blog discuss and provide links related to Wikipedia for Google Earth and WikiSearch tool. From the blog: "Apparently someone named Stefan Kuhn processed a database with about 34,000 wikipedia story locations and ranked them according to description file size. KASSPER then created a network link allowing you to view the locations as placemarks in Google Earth. [...] In the same GEC thread, KASSPER also posted a nifty web page tool for searching the Wikipedia database for locations." This topic is very dear to me. Numerous efforts are made towards Geo-enabled Wikis. Here's some links (including traditionnal wikis and geo-enabled wikis): giswiki.de traditionnal wiki and EOGeo FreeGISBook, Tikiwiki+Mapserver , WikiTravel, WorldKit GeoWiki. Keep in mind the OSGeo also has plans regarding this issue as previously discussed on their mailing list.

The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog discuss the scarcity of geo-enabled blogs. Andrew Turner shortly discuss Geospatial Content Management Systems. Meanwhile, there are related stories about geo-enabling Drupal, WordPress. And since I'm not good at keeping secrets, we're working on geo-enabling slash. From the GSWB: "Geotagged blogs will enable web search engines to effectively index blogs based on geographical information. This information will help to build more powerful search engines that support spatial queries (e.g., find all blogs on the topic “war” and written by people who are located in “Iraq”)."

Ed Parsons briefly discuss the Plazes LBS and social networking service which raised 2.7M euros. From the Plazes about page: "Plazes adds physical presence to the web. The Plazes website automatically detects your location and connects you to people and places nearby. See people in your area, discover other locations and follow the whereabouts of your friends. Locations within Plazes are not just global coordinates they carry significance to you and your friends. You can name locations like "Home" or "My Office". Represent your locations by how you relate to them and discover other significant locations. Relate to other locations by adding pictures, comments, and reviews. Plazes can also be told to remember the locations you visit so you can review your travels. Plazes is not only a web site, it is a service you can use to add location awareness to other applications you frequently use. Display your location in your favorite messenger or set your Skype mood message. Plazes location enables your digital life." The GEB blog has some additional information about Plazes.

The High Earth Orbit blog links to the GeoClue project which aims at providing a geographic information service for applications. This project in development will be presented at the GNOME conference in Birmingham, UK. From the website: "GeoClue is a project that provide all kinds of geography information to an application. This is through a very abstract DBus interface in which a variety of backends can be used to provide this implementation. Although we implement a few reference backends, creating your own is encouraged. There are many separate APIs that are planned including * Position * Map * Routing * Geocode * Track Logs" From the presentation's synopsis: "Emerging open-standards such as GeoRSS, KML, geo-uri, and Geo W3C all enable easy publishing and sharing of geographic information from many data sources. GeoClue aims to provide users with a application that can determine their position from a variety of location providers and find information that is local to them."

serosero writes "The GeoNames webservices are now avaialable for the thousands of Drupal (Open Source Content Management System) users with the GeoNames API for Drupal. All XML-based services are supported by the API, and the information is conveniently available through a standardized function."