Slashgeo

The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog describes why GeoNames.org is his favorite geo-data provider. The short entry worth the read and underlines many great features of GeoNames: "It features about 2.2 million records of geographical information. [...] Many reasons why Geonames.org is interesting: First, it provides a unified representation of geographical data from different providers. [...] Second, it provides web service API for querying geographical information. [...] Third, Geonames web service supports both JSON and XML output." We introduced GeoNames a few months ago.

The GeoNames blog informs us the addition of 18,104 new GeoNames places for Antarctica. From the entry: "The CGA [Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica] is compiled by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) who have kindly given us the permission to use their data under the condition that we publish the disclaimer below. The CGA is itself an aggregator and includes data from 23 sources from 22 countries. 12′000 features are from US sources, Russia and the UK both contribute 4′800 places." Make sure you read this previous entry on data over Antarctica, more below.

The U.S. TIGER dataset has been rarely mentioned here before. The Free GIS D&I Geoblog linked to the announcement from the U.S. Census Bureau that the 2007 First Edition Public TIGER/Line will be available in the shapefiles format. What is TIGER? It stands for "Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing" and from the Wikipedia page: "[...] TIGER/Line is a format used by the United States Census Bureau to describe land attributes such as roads, buildings, rivers, and lakes, as well as areas such as census tracts. TIGER was developed to support and improve the Bureau's process of taking the Decennial Census. TIGER data can be used by GIS applications and is available without cost due to the requirement for U.S. Government publications to be released into the public domain." Some related stories below. Update: 01/25 04:42 GMT by S : Humm.. apologies, corrected the story, the data is not yet available, the site say "Starting in January 2008, the Census Bureau will begin releasing TIGER spatial data in shapefile format." but it seems it's not available yet...

Early last month the Bull's Ramble blog informs us South Africa now gets 10-m satellite imagery in NASA World Wind [several screenshots]. From the blog: "The data is from SPOT 5 provided by SpotImage and collected in 2005, it is currently only 10m resolution but looks gorgeous [...]" See also related stories below. Related to NWW, we also learn JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is using NWW to visualize data of their latest lunar explorer KAGUYA, making me wonder about the developments to their GLOBALBASE project. Update: 02/05 17:01 GMT by S : Here's a project called Africa@Home, which, similarly to SETI@Home, harness the crunching power of home computers: "The first application being developed for AFRICA@home is called MalariaControl.net. This application models the way malaria spreads in Africa and the potential impact that new anti-malarial drugs may have on the region." (via Kelly Lab blog)

The GeoNames Blog reports : "In the last days the newest GNS release (2008-01-28) has been integrated into GeoNames. The GNS dataset is maintained by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, a US department of defense support agency. During this load we have updated 73′000 and inserted 44′000 new toponyms. We have only updated records that have not been modified by GeoNames users or other sources."

To get a more detailed listing and links to the NGA site, please visit the GeoNames blog.