CENTER FOR GEOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS NEWSLETTER
August 2007
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HIGHLIGHTS (A bit light, but hey it’s summer.)
- GPS Demand Strong
- Historical Maps Conference
- Geospatial Semantics Conference
- Largest Pre-Industrial City Discovered
- Maps of Books
- The Earth is Also Flat
- Oracle and Google Maps Team Up
- Open Street Map Inspires Others
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CGA NEWS
GPS Demand Strong
Since starting to make GPS units available to the Harvard community two months ago, demand for the devices has been strong. Units are currently being used in Turkey, Peru, Belgium, as well as here in Massachusetts. CGA has set up a Google Calendar to schedule use of the units.
http://www.gis.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k235&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup7643
Historical Maps Conference
Director of CGA Peter Bol, is currently attending the Historical Maps and GIS Conference in Nagoya, Japan where he will deliver a paper entitled “The China Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS): Choices Faced, Lessons Learned”.
http://miryokui.seesaa.net/ (it’s in Japanese)
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CONFERENCES
Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial 2007
FOSS4G will be held in Victoria, British Columbia September 24-27. The conference “gathers developers and users of open source geo-spatial software from around the world to discuss new directions, exciting implementations, and growing business opportunities in the field of open source geo-spatial software.”
http://www.foss4g2007.org/
Second International Conference on Geospatial Semantics
The conference will be held November 29-30 at the Centro de Investigacion en Computacion in Mexico City. “Geospatial semantics play an important role for next-generation spatial databases and geographic information systems, as well as specialized geospatial web services.”
http://geosco.org/geos2007/index.html
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NEWS ON GIS RESEARCH AND SERVICES
Largest Pre-Industrial City Discovered Using Remote Sensing
“The new map uses data from high-resolution, ground-sensing radar and aerial photographs to augment extensive fieldwork. By detecting slight variations in vegetation and ground moisture due to underlying ruins, the radar reveals in unprecedented detail the location of temples - including 94 newly identified temple sites plus another 74 that have yet to be checked on the ground - ponds, roads and canals.”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12474-vast-ancient-settlement-found-at-angkor-wat.html
The Google Book Project Maps Books
This idea has been around for a while, and Google is not too good at it yet, but it is significant that they are trying. Here is an example - Google’s maps for War and Peace:
http://books.google.com/books?id=2goK4HJO2VkC
Why would one want to do this? If the extraction process can be automated, one might have a new way to search and explore large holdings of text-based materials. Further thoughts from Tom Elliott:
http://www.stoa.org/?p=567
The Earth is Also Flat
The new version of Google Earth Enterprise supports visualization of geo-data in 2D as well as the now boring 3D.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135126-c,google/article.html
Oracle will Provide the Google Map API in Its Enterprise Applications
According to Directions Magazine Editor Joe Francisca, “With the addition (to Oracle) of Google Maps, the result is a near perfect storm that could generate huge market awareness for spatially enabled applications at the enterprise level.”
http://www.directionsmag.com/editorials.php?article_id=2516
Open Street Map Inspire Google
Google is starting a project to directly assist local people in India in building detailed maps of their areas by providing them with GPS kits. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/google_uses_cro.html This project looks similar to Open Street Map, an effort to organize the local development of freely distributable map data.
http://openstreetmap.org/
Putting the “Space” Back in Spatial Data
Google Sky. Take a look.
http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html
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Editor of this issue: Ben Lewis
The CGA Newsletter is published monthly.
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