Slashgeo

GIS Monitor reviews MetaCarta’s recently released Local Alerts service for the digital publishing industry which allows registered users to receive email alerts when news happens in their area of interest. From the article: “MetaCarta uses its core technology to geoparse and geotag the stories in real time and puts them in a database, which also stores the information on all of the registrants and the max-min lat-long of their area of interest. The company then maps out all the stories and alerts users to any stories that contain geographic references that fall within the range they have specified.”.

Several recent entries have discussed the newly available demo of WPServer, a web processing server which allow geoprocessing over an Internet connexion. Here's the must-read followup entry: "Want your shapefiles on a map? Use FeatureServer. Want to buffer each of the points in your FeatureServer-served data? Serialize them, and pass them up to WPServer, then display the data that comes back. Want to mix in KML data, to see the intersections? Add a KML layer to OpenLayers, and use WPServer to do the intersections. Crap. I think what OpenLayers can do now might actually be something people would refer to as GIS." Spatially Adjusted discuss this demo and is impressed. Random Nodes also shares his thoughts on this web-based GIS solution. import cartography even claim this open source approach may beat ArcGIS Server directly, this tells you how important the matter is. See also the two previous stories on WPS in the related stories below. Related, there's the release of PyWPS 2.0.

It seems Google's Ed Parsons does not read Slashgeo, otherwise he would have discovered about OpenAerialMap last August, here's his thoughts on the project. There's also an interesting recent entry on the O'Reilly Radar about OpenAerialMap: "Anyone can register as a datasource. You can then upload and geoposition your imagery using the site's tools. Though the project idea has been around for a while it was only recently put together by Chris Schmidt, an OpenLayers (Radar post) contributor and MetaCarta (Radar post) employee. Chris has made the site's code available."

The Technical Ramblings blog informs us TileCache 2.0 has been released. From the announcement: "* ArcXML Layer: The ArcXML layer adds support for speaking ArcXML style requests directly to a server. This layer type is experimental, and was designed and tested using the MassGIS ArcIMS server. * MGMaps Service: The MGMaps service accepts requests in the format used by the MGMaps client, a mobile map browsing client. * WMTS Service: The WMTS service is a (tile only) implementation of the current WMTS discussion paper release by OGC." Spatially Adjusted discuss TileCache's ArcIMS support. See also our introduction of TileCache 10 months ago.

The Earth Is Square and the official OpenLayers blog brings us news about the just released OpenLayers 2.6. A huge release in itself. It closes over 294 outstanding tickets and has a lot of new features. Please visit any of the following links above to get the full list of features.

In case you've been under a rock, here is a little background info on OpenLayers. "OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. MetaCarta developed the initial version of OpenLayers and gave it to the public to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD License."

TMN and FGT discuss two products by MetaCarta. The first one is Map Rectifier, an online raster data georeferencing and registration tool. The second one is GeoSearch News, from the press release: "GeoSearch News indexes an extensive collection of more than 1,400 national, international and local news sources every hour in addition to direct feeds from the Associated Press and Reuters. GeoSearch News provides users a single site on which they can learn what is happening now at any destination in the world." This is not the first similar tool, see related stories below. Update: 04/23 23:16 GMT by S : Corrected intro for accuracy, thanks to Chris Schmidt.

The Sand Pit blog brings the following announcement : "In July 2008, the ESRI Prototype Lab published an extension to ArcMap that added support for MetaCarta's GeoTagger OnDemand service.  This extension is now available as a custom task for ArcGIS Explorer.  The task is available as a free download (including source code) from ArcScripts. "

From the SharpGIS blog : "Blom just announced the release of their BlomURBEX (Urban Explorer) SDK. It includes access to high resolution ortho and SEAMLESS birds eye imagery of over 1000 european cities. These are the same images as Microsoft uses on the Virtual Earth platform, but the unique is that they have managed to seamlessly stich the birds eye imagery together seamlessly, making the navigation much more intuitive. "