Slashgeo

Vector One offers an interesting reflexion on the debate between national mapping efforts and public-driven mapping such as OpenStreetMap. From the entry: "As can be seen, there is a wide difference between origins of national mapping agencies and their current operations. The word ‘mapping’ in their titles may confuse matters more than help, particularly to those who equate all spatial or a sense of ‘geospatial’ to the web map alone. These organisations are not solely map agencies. Their tasks and operations vary."

Vector One and Spatial Sustain blogs share their thoughts on the role and value of National mapping organizations. From Vector One: "It is the seed for developing land use developments, managerial strategies for environment, land use, population and other national policy initiatives. Without such data, a country is a collection of places with no real understanding, no basis for national decision making relative to land resources and has no consistent and useful means for protecting and understanding itself. How do you put a value on that? In recent times national mapping agencies have come under debate. More often than not this has originated from those who would like all their data to be free." From Spatial Sustain: "The advent of GIS, with map making tools for the masses, contributed significantly to the downfall of centralized map making. With the advent of GIS, federal agencies each undertook their own mapping initiatives that specifically met their individual objectives." See also related stories below.

Here's a wrap-up of last month's geonews regarding OpenStreetMap. First is a long discussion on the licence attributed to data contributed to the OpenStreetMap project, an exert: "Many of the problems arise because Creative Commons (the “CC” of our licence), as the name suggests, is largely concerned with “creative works” - music, literature, art, and so on. OpenStreetMap, on the other hand, produces data: a factual, uncontroversial recording of the world around us. [...] In the [Science Commons initiative] protocol, Creative Commons restates the problem that copyright simply does not apply universally to factual information." Then there's an update on Nestoria, the first commercial application now using exclusively OSM data. We also have Google's Ed Parsons discussing the differences between data in Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. Other OSM entries include a short discussion on the community surrounding OSM vs "old timers", a mention of OSM during the KDE 4 keynote, a visual comparison of Google data vs OSM + OpenAerialMap data over China, a short account of using JOSM, the advanced OpenStreetMap editor, and finally, the announcement of this year's State of the Map 2008 conference will be held in Ireland. See also the numerous related stories below (more if you search the Slashgeo archives). On a personal note, I used to say about OSM that data is particularly useful in Europe, but not in North America yet... after a quick peak today at the status of OSM completion in NA, I admit I'm impressed, data has been added very rapidly and this is obviously great news for public domain data.

The Digital Earth Blog posted an article with about this. From their summary : "According to TechCrunch, Microsoft is set to unveil a product called “Worldwide Telescope” on February 27. "

"Users will be able to pan around the nighttime sky and zoom as far in to any one area as the data will allow. Microsoft is said to be tapping the Hubble telescope as well as ten or so earth bound telescopes around the world for data. When you find an area you like, you can switch to a number of different views, such as infrared and non-visible light."

For a more detailed summary and a link to the original article, please visit the Digital Earth Blog.