Between the Poles

Open Source Firm Red Hat on the S&P 500

Standard & Poor's has announced that open source software firm Red Hat will replace CIT Group Inc. on the S&P 500 Index.  Quite an achievement for a firm started with a completely new business model in 1995.  Red Hat Linux started when Marc Ewing created a distribution of Linux which he named Red Hat Linux and released in October 1994.  In 1995 Bob Young bought Marc Ewing's business, merged it with his own firm and renamed the new company Red Hat Software.  Red Hat Linux 2.0 was released the same year.  You can find out how Red Hat got its name here, right from the horse's mouth.

US House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Hearing on Federal Geospatial Data Management

From the Twittersphere. The US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources is holding an oversight hearing on Federal Geospatial Data Management July 23 10 am.  The hearing will be webast live.

Clean Energy Symposium

For those of you in the Bay area, Autodesk is hosting a Renewable Energy Symposium on Renewable Energy: Reducing Capital Intensity & Succeeding July 21, 5:30 PM PT to 8:30 PM PT at 

Autodesk

The Gallery at One Market

One Market Street, Suite 200

San Francisco, CA 94105

The focus of the symposium is on how renewable energy entrepreneurs, companies, and customers adapt to these times, reduce capital intensity, and still succeed.  The panel will discuss the regulatory, technology, investing, and utility aspects of renewable energy.

Digital Cities and BIM, CAD, Geospatial, and 3D Convergence

In the July/August 2009 edition of Geoconnexion International there is an article by Tracey Stone that outlines the impact that CAD, BIM, GIS, and 3D convergence is having on city planning and management.  She includes an overview of some of the results achieved in the Autodesk Digital Cities pilot at the City of Salzburg, Austria.

Canadian GeoBase Being Imported into OpenStreetMap

The GeoBase dataset which includes political boundaries, all roads, CanVec data, inland water network, and satellite imagery is in the process of being imported into the OpenStreeMap database.   The intention is to import all of the data except the elevation data.

• Political Boundaries                 Complete (Jan 2009)  
• Road Network
• CanVec data
• Web Mapping Service (WMS)
• Geodetic Network
• Geographical Names
• Hydro Network(inland Water)
• Satellite Imagery
• Elevation data                      Will not be imported

CanVec data is derived from the National Topographic Data Base (NTDB), GeoBase, and Landsat 7 imagery. CanVec contains more than 90 topographic entities organized into 11 themes including Administrative Boundaries, Buildings and Structures, Energy, Hydrography, Industrial and Commercial Areas, Places of Interest, Relief and Landforms, Toponymy, Transportation, Vegetation and Water Saturated Soils.

GeoBase is a federal, provincial and territorial government initiative of the Canadian Council on Geomatics (CCOG). It provides a common, up-to-date and maintained base of quality geospatial data for all of Canada which is available on a no fee basis and with unrestricted use.

A legal analysis of the  GeoBase and OSM licenses concluded that they were compatible. GeoBase and OSM agreed to include the GeoBase data in OSM because the goal of both GeoBase and OSM is to provide free geospatial data to as wide an audience as possible.

The Canadian Council on Geomatics (CCOG) is the major federal-provincial-territorial consultative body for geographic information management. CCOG advises on proposed legislation relevant to geomatics (especially land surveying), and to develop and promote national geomatics standards.

Modeling Buildings, Infrastructure and Geography

There's an interesting article by Neil Brooker about how different technologies including model-driven design, GIS, and 3D visualization developed in the gaming world in coalescing to create a more holistic view of the cities where more than 50% of the World's population now lives.   Neil's point is that althought the integration of building, infrastructure and geographic models won’t solve every global challenge we face today, "it could help create more appealing, practical and safer cities for the future. In short, the type of city we’d all like to live and work in rather than spend our time trying to escape from."

66.6 Million US Households Used Broadband in 2008

According to an Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) study The Substantial Consumer Benefits of Broadband Connectivity for U.S. Households, approximately 66.6 million households used broadband in 2008.  Dial-up users have decreased to 10.5 million households in 2008.   Households with no internet access decreased to 39.7 million.   

One of the conclusions of the study is that broadband has become a necessity.  As evidence the authors point to data that shows that when people lose their jobs today they may cut other things but not their broadband, which they are using to search for employment.

2008 ITIF rankings (composite of penetration, speed and price) indicate that the US is 15^th in the world.  According to the ITIF broadband penetration (subscribers per household) in the US is .57 compared to .93 for South Korea which is ranked number one.  Canada is ranked 11^th with a penetration of .65.

Internationally, last year's OECD report on broadband usage pointed out that 

• Fiber-based broadband (fibre to the doorstep) is now 8 percent of the total OECD installed base. Japan has 40 percent of its connections on fiber, Korea has 34 percent.
• The average speed of broadband connections increased from 2 Mbit/s in 2004 to almost 9 Mbit/s in 2007 with prices coming down 16 percent for cable and 19 percent for DSL in that time frame.

Google Maps My Location Uses W3C GeoLocation API

I blogged recently about the W3C Geolocation API which is progressing through the W3C standards process.  

Google Maps is using this API as of last week to identify your location.  When you bring up Google Maps, you'll see a button in the navigation widget.  The first time you click on it, you will have the option to enable the Google Maps My Location feature.  If you do enable it, then by simply clicking on the button, Google will centre the map on what it thinks your location is.  

As Adena Schutzberg points out in a blog, the API is not computing your location but using the preferred "location provider" set by the platform, which could be a GPS, wi-fi interpolation or some other method of estimating your location.  This is the location returned by the API to the calling application.  Apparently Firefox, Chrome and Gears use Google Location Services as the default geolocation provider.

So in my case, I am in the Autodesk office in Ottawa, Canada, but the Geolocation API appears to be returning the location of the Autodesk server in Manchester, NH.

GeoWeb 2009 in Vancouver July 27-31 Focus on Urban Environments

GeoWeb 2009 is taking place July 27-31, 2009 in downtown Vancouver, BC Canada at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and will focus on Urban Environments.  This year it includes an academic track on 3D Cityscapes.

Keynote and invited speakers include

• Michael T. Jones is Google’s Chief Technology Advocate and former CTO of Keyhole Corporation, the company that developed the technology used in Google Earth.
• Ken Greenberg is an architect and urban designer who has played a leading role in the rejuvenation of downtowns, waterfronts, neighborhoods, and campus master planning.

Some selected labs include

• GeoWeb 101 – An Overview of GeoWeb - the What, Why & Where of GeoWeb - Ron Lake, Carl Reed, & Michael Gerlek
• Digital Cities Modeling Workshop - Neal Niemiec, Autodesk
• Google Earth 5.0 KML Extensions -  Michael Ashbridge, Google
• 3D Geospatial: Project Implementation Methods and Best Practices - Tim Case, Parsons Brinkerhoff

Selected technical sessions include

• The gap between SDIs and the GeoWeb - Clemens Portele, Interactive Instruments
• Simple Relational Model for Temporally Diverse City Models - Paul Cote, Harvard University
• Address Management: The Secret Ingredient for Geospatial Success - Boris Gutkin, DMTI Spatial Inc.
• In My Backyard (IMBY): Renewable Energy for Everyone - Christopher Helm, NREL
• How good is your information architecture? - Carsten Roensdorf, Ordnance Survey
• Advances in Virtual City Data Management - Xavier Lopez, Oracle Corporation
• Building a new location-aware infrastructure for calendaring and scheduling - Peter Batty, Spatial Networking
• Integrating GIS, CAD, Raster, 3D and BIM Data - Dale Lutz, Safe Software Inc.
• Building a Virtual World: 3D Buildings in Google Earth - Mike Springer, Google
• Digital Cities Experts Panel - Doug Eberhard, Autodesk
• Open Access to Geospatial Data Using Open RESTful Web Services - Haris Kurtagic, SL-King
• Providing a Higher Level of Service through Web Architecture: City of Nanaimo and the MapGuide REST Extension - Jason Birch, City of Nanaimo
• Using Spatial ETL for Web Services-Based Data Sharing - Don Murray, Safe Software Inc.

Open Source Geocoder Announced at SOTM09

At SOTM09 in Amsterdam Andrew Turner announced that his company GeoCommons was open-sourcing their geocoder. You can get the LGPL-licensed code on GitHub and also see Andrew's lightning talk presentation announcement on Slideshare.