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

James Fee writes that The ESRI JavaScript API is better than WebADF. “The simplicity of the JavaScript API and the way it works, makes the classic WebADF and HTML viewers obsolete for most users…”

Jeff Thurston at VectorOne discusses map intelligence and data workflows. While most workflows using a GIS follow a step-by-step procedure, Jeff states that, “no matter how proficient you are with a GIS, or the data in question, it is near impossible to know what else surrounds the question you are working on.” This leads to questions of map intelligence and the procedures and workflows that are related to making a map. To be intelligent, GIS becomes more than just following the process, but processing the information in a meaningful way.

Applications using Yahoo Fire Eagle are highlighted on Google Maps Mania. These applications include Spot, Wikinear, Rummble, Metrosphere, Map My Tracks, and ekit. Each has a different goal in mind, from building a travel journal on Google Maps to list geotagged events happening near you.

We did a lot of work mapping Hurricane Ike this year, providing maps important information such as storm surge and wind speed, wave heights, and the impact on energy infrastructure. GISuser shares that 3-D pre- and post-storm lidar topography data will be made available to local, state, and federal agencies to aid post-storm disaster recovery and future erosion mitigation.

It appears that there is a spatial data exchange in Ireland with multiple agencies contributing data. Directions’ All Points Blog reports that metadata searching is available via text search or accompanied by spatial extent and date, but there is no “map viewer” to examine found live data at this time.

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