Transition and cleanup

Slideshare is a great venue to post presentations - it cross-posts to my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles as part of my next-gen social network - the lion's share of my recent Slideshare posts relate however to oilelefant.com I just left: I have thus moved all relevant presentations to a new Slidehsare account, henceforth managed by David Lloyd:

Another look at SAGE

Syndication, AGgregation and Entitlement were discussed here earlier. Now look at my internet presence here:

SAGE: Syndication, AGgregation & Entitlement

For-free vs. for-fee is an issue that won't go away any time soon. I discussed this here before, and it came up recently with the adoption of OpenStreetMap on Bing Maps and arcgis.com. In a macro sense it's about data, systems and traffic control, as evidenced by the lock-down of Google search and Blackberry access in China and parts of the Middle East, respectively. At a micro scale it came up in a discussion group on LinkedIn: who owns map symbology derived from public sources?

No such thing as a free lunch

To great press and technocrati fanfare, the UK Ordnance Survey freed up its data... somewhat! This was promptly announced on mapperz and Ernest Maples blogs. And commented on as far away as the US west coast by Ed Parsons and Geoff Zeiss currently in America - does location matter?

"Who you gonna call?"

"Geo busters!" (apologies Ghost Busters).

Geodata access and availability is the real story behind the flurry of news around UK government freeing up some data, vs. Google collecting it and returning it for free, and many others. And this happens against a backdrop of various SDI (spatial data infrastrucutre) intiatives. I joined a UK government data developers mailing list, to educate myself on the ins-and-outs of data provision at the coal face, so to speak. And RDFa emerges as the way to resolve this - the more metadata one provides within any given dataset, the easier it is to classify and maintain internally, and to discover and distribute externally.