Collaborative data, KML, and the future

December 8th, 2006by Chris Ingrassia

It's been a little while since my last post, and a lot has been going on since then. First things first, based on the results of our little GML vs. KML vs. ?? poll and some other feedback and homework we did on the topic, the decision was made to natively support KML for our data import/export features to be included in the upcoming release of our data warehouse.  We also came to the conclusion that we should also include ESRI shapefile import support due to the large volumes of data out in the wild that are already in this format.  This certainly doesn't preclude any other formats being supported down the road, but we feel that this combination will give us the most bang for our buck, so to speak. We've been getting quite a lot of feedback from various sources about the data warehouse and the general notion of community driven, collaborative data management.  Bob Zurek at IBM specifically pointed us out as an example of the direction that data and information management is going. I'd also like to tip my hat in the direction of Swivel, who lots of you have probably read about and seen by now.  It's great to see more and more people and companies going in this direction. Sean did a great job in his last post of outlining our basic thoughts and motivations behind our data warehouse project, and we're certainly not the only ones who face such challenges.  But I'd like to delve a little bit more into what I see as the next steps for such technologies to take, and the sorts of things that we might expect to see in the future, and that I hope FortiusOne can be a part of. Read on for my thoughts (warning: some buzzwords ahead)

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The Data Respository, Social Networks, and Geospatial Software as a Service

December 4th, 2006by Sean Gorman

It has been an interesting week with an article in the Washington Post and InformationWeek on the launch of GeoIQ and the upcoming data repository. Thought I‘d take some time to go into more detail with what we have in mind combing the two into the foundation of a geospatial software as a service. GeoIQ is the first step – allowing non technical users to analyze their data to make better location based decisions. In order to make better decisions you need good data, and this is where the data repository comes in.

Data is a problem that is not exclusive to us, but something that is critical to growth of web mapping in total. O’Reily, through Where 2.0, has given this topic considerable attention and we are hoping we can add our small bit to the solution. My frustration with geospatial data goes back almost a decade when we first started looking for open source data. Back then it was the beginning of the .com boom and we were looking for spatial data on fiber optic infrastructure to see if we could sort out if the Internet was going to be the end of geography. At the time the pundits were saying that the Internet would mean location was no longer important because you would be able to connect to the Internet and work from anywhere. So, we were mapping where the nuts and bolts of the Internet to see what locations could support the new business of the Internet and if the geography was actually changing.

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Filed in collective intelligence, geodata, geoiq, google, mapping, mashup, sharing, social networks, software as a service
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