schiller labs to teach a workshop on Google Maps and mashups for UW-Milwaukee's GIS Day, 15 November 2006. I believe this workshop will be free and I know it's open to the public, but registration will be required.

The tentative title and workshop blurb:

INTERNET GIS: GOOGLE MAPS + MASHUPS
After a brief introduction to mashups [web applications that combine content from more than one source], learn how to create our own Google Maps mashup. You’ll be amazed at how fast and easy it is!

collective machinery is a website dedicated to exploring and facilitating collaborative multimedia, internet-based, and locative production. Toward that end, our site is an open "forum" (wiki-powered). Anyone can add pages, edit existing content, and ask questions.

Conceptually, collective machinery is divided into two areas:

1. General topics—Discussion area for people to share information and tips on topics such as phonography, photography, APIs.
2. Specific projects—Actual collaborative projects that want to use collective machinery to organize/promote their collaboration.

→ collective machinery
→ how to play
→ all recent changes

While doing a printable map for Conflux, we received a request to number the points and create a key. While this isn't a difficult task, it does require a set of numbered icons and we were in a bit of hurry, so didn't want to create our own. Enter Brennan's Blog.

Brennan has created several icons in red, green, and blue, which are numbered 1 to 25 each. He's also included an empty one as well as the Photoshop master. Visit his post to download the .zip. Thanks, Brennan!

After batch-geocoding the tour stops for Orphan Productions and plugging it into Google Earth, Stephanie turned to the labs for help. Her request: a Google Maps mashup and an explanation of how we did it. The map should display all of the band tour stops and a continous line should connect all of the points.

As you wish:

• → the map
• → the explanation

The DIME file (street centerlines) and parcel outlines are now available for free download from the City of Milwaukee's website at city.milwaukee.gov/display/router.asp?docid=3497! This is pretty huge and it's been a long time coming… I wonder why they finally realized it?

→ links to Milwaukee map data

Wayland, Mass., July 20, 2006—The membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) has approved and released the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) White Paper as an official public OGC White Paper (OGC Document 06-046r2 [http://www.opengeospatial.org/pt/06-046r2]).

A sensor network is a computer accessible network of many spatially distributed devices using sensors to monitor conditions at different locations, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants. A Sensor Web refers to Web accessible sensor networks and archived sensor data that can be discovered and accessed using standard protocols and interfaces.

In the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) activity, members of the OGC are defining, testing, and documenting a consistent framework of open standards for exploiting Web-connected sensors and sensor systems of any type. Sensor Web Enablement presents many opportunities for adding a real-time sensor dimension to the Internet and the Web. This has extraordinary significance for science, environmental monitoring, transportation management, public safety, facility security, disaster management, utilities' SCADA operations, industrial controls, facilities management and many other domains of activity. The OGC voluntary consensus standards setting process coupled with strong international industry and government support in domains that depend on sensors is expected to result in SWE specifications that will become established in all application areas where such standards are of use.

The OGC^® is an international industry consortium of more than 300 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS^® Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. Visit the OGC website at opengeospatial.org.

At the June meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC^®) in Edinburgh, Scotland, Simon Cox received OGC's eighth annual Kenneth D. Gardels Award. The Gardels Award, a gold medallion, is awarded to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to advance OGC's vision of geospatial information fully integrated into the world’s information systems.

Simon Cox is a Research Scientist, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Exploration and Mining, Perth, Australia. He has been for many years a highly respected and enormously important contributor in the OGC Technical Committee, where he has made significant contributions to the OpenGIS Geography Markup Language (GML) and Web Feature Service (WFS) Implementation Specifications as well as the Sensor Web Enablement effort. His work in ISO has been of great value in helping OGC standards receive ISO standing, and he has been a strong advocate of OGC in Australia for a decade. Simon is well known in industry outside of OGC. He developed an application profile of GML for the mining industry, he is an active participant in Australian geology and standards organizations and he is the author of scores of journal articles, conference papers, reports and abstracts. In 1994 he launched one of the earliest and most successful geoscience websites including web-mapping.

Mark Reichardt, president of OGC, said, "Simon has provided extraordinary service to the OGC in our Technical Committee, in ISO, and in Australia. Few have done more than Simon to help fulfill the OpenGIS dream. We all owe him our greatest thanks."

The award is given annually in memory of Kenneth Gardels, one of the founding directors of OGC and OGC's former director of academic programs. Mr. Gardels coined the term "Open GIS," and devoted his life to the humane and democratic uses of geographic information systems. He died in 1999.

The OGC^® is an international industry consortium of more than 300 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS^® Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications.

I forget why it seemed necessary (because there are plenty of alternatives out there), but creating a JavaScript latitude/longitude converter was still a fun little exercise. Our utility can convert between decimal degrees; degrees, minutes, and seconds; and radians.

I was thinking about creating a GeoRSS plugin for Wordpress, something that would allow one to tag posts with coordinates and then add the coordinates to the RSS feed in the proper format. Before I started, though, I realized somebody probably built it already. So I did a few Google searches and here's what I found:

The Geonames RSS to GeoRSS converter: A webservice that reads the entries of an RSS feed and searches the Geonames Database to find a location for the entry text. If a relevant location is found, its latitude and longitude are added to the RSS feed using the GeoRSS encoding.

[[ This seems like fun, but it's not what I'm looking for at the moment. ]]

Geo Plugin: Allows one to attach geographic coordinate information to posts. It also permits the specification of a default geographic location for the entire WordPress blog.

[[ Ok, this sounds like it will do at least half the job. … And it works great! Geo not only allows me to add ad hoc coordinates to a post, but it can also store locations! Perfect.]]

[[ … ]]

It appears that I'll have to hack wp-rss.php or wp-rss2.php to produce a GeoRSS feed. The Geo plugin provides some instructions on how to do this, but I'd prefer not touching these files (since my changes will get overwritten when I update).

GeoPress is pretty cool as well and promises a GeoRSS feed, but, again, I'll have to touch wp-rss.php or wp-rss2.php. Plus GeoPress seems a bit more robust than I want.

[[ … ]]

schiller labs is now GeoRSS compatible, using the GeoRSS GML encoding (the feed even validates). To make this happen, I had to tweak Geo a bit. So, if you want the GML encoding, you'll have to download the zip here. Decompress and install as usual.

Then add the following namespace declarations to the <rss> tag in wp-rss2.php:

• xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss"
• xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml"

Finally add the following code inside the <item> tag:

<?php get_the_rss_geotags(); ?>

For our latest webmapping jaunt, we started working with the MapQuest OpenAPI for the Riverview Antique Market site redesign project and, I have to say, it sucks. You can view our map and routing experiment here, but the display is currently completely janked in Firefox and the controls are improperly placed in IE 6.0.

…

Ok, maybe the above analysis was a bit hasty. The culprit in our display problems: the DOCTYPE directive! Remove it if you want your map to display at all in Firefox and correctly in IE.

Whack this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">