About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

The Carbon Project announced the release of their Secure Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) 1.0 extension for ArcGIS 9.2 desktop this week. The SDI 1.0 is a selected suite of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards endorsed by government agencies to promote interoperability. The extension will be the world’s most powerful geospatial security framework and is scheduled to be released this month as part of the CarbonArc PRO 1.6 update. According to the President and CEO of The Carbon Project, Jeff Harrison, “The combination of CarbonArc PRO and Secure SDI functionality answers one of the primary challenges in deploying real-world systems based on OGC standards – making sure critical geospatial information goes to the people who are supposed to have it.”

Google Maps has now added a new API from Map Channels, Feed Maps, which “lets users create Google Maps mash-ups from a number of different data sources.” Now, feeds from MyMaps or Google Spreadsheets ‘can be brought together on a single map.’

EarthGamz maps Olympic athletes using Google Earth. The new site, which connects sports fans to sports locations, has created an ode to the Olympics – a map of the athletes. Upon clicking on the home town of these athletes, users can see information about them, such as their bio and TV listings for their next competition. EarthGamz also has a Facebook application for the Olympics and their site describes plans to involve social networking with their sports viewing applications.

An interesting discussion about GIS possibly disappearing into the cloud was made by Vector1 last week. Insight about the idea came from Vector1’s editors Jeff Thurston and Matt Ball, while Kirk Kuykendall, founder of AmberGIS, also discussed his thoughts. According to Jeff, “GIS has been waiting for the cloud…the cloud has enormous potential to change shift spatial gears and accelerating the wider use of GIS functionality.” Matt states, “Predominantly geospatial capabilities are purchased by organizations, and by companies of such a size and complexity that they feel they must control these systems, particularly when they’re of a critical nature to operations and/or contain proprietary information that must be kept from competitors.” And although Kirk agrees with Jeff and Matt, he states that “disappear is too strong of a word” and “subsumption is more likely.”

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