"Better metadata for GIS"

Just posted my two-page extract from the June issue of Digital Energy Journal:

We are going to see much more improved "metadata" system for geo-graphical data - which will help integrate it much more closely with bigger information management systems, writes Andrew Zolnai, sales and marketing director, Interactive Net Mapping Ltd.

What's in a name, Part II

A sure sign of succesful map, is when it blends into the application and serves an unobtrusive yet key role. I noted earlier in What's in a name? two such examples that make a mappliance (map + appliance). I found last week during 13 October English Day a fun project asking the same question - Location Lingo joined the English Project to the Ordnance Survey, and allows the man in the street to enter anecdotal names they know to share with the rest of the world - isn't this yet another form of crowdsourcing?

Trending London petroleum shows

Compiling petroleum shows I attended in London in the last five years, from small data management under 100 attendees to international geoscience over 2000, shows a few things:

Trending oilelefant.com, part V

Quarterly traffic figures to oilelefant.com show a pickup after the traditional summer lull. Of interest is the increase mostly due to visits outside my blog-twitter-web trio in slide 4 below. While next quarter may give us more details on this trend, it does suggest that readership is spreading across the web. Is this a new form of syndication that occurs naturally, like plants seeded in a garden without the garderner's intervention? If this is a form of crowdsourcing, then the twitter logo may be serendipitous... as birds are a main carrying agent of garden volunteers!

Of business and blogging

A few months ago I signed up for Area 51 Satck Exchange for GIS, and it has impressive statistics indeed. Soon after, however, short holidays then family emergencies and continuing oilelefant meant that I hardly participated at all. Nor have I blogged much this month, and that situation will continue... And I missed today's AGI w3g!

"The proof of the pudding is in the making"

The FOSS4G conference early this month in Barcelona raised a host of issues as usual. One picked up by James Fee and Jo Cook's blogs among others, is the role of SpatialLite in particular and exchange file formats in general? My main takeway is Jim's point, that while file exchange formats are important, efforts should be focused on internet exchange formats. We all agree that it's usage eventually that will dictate future formats, rather than vendors or standards bodies...

5 Ws for citizens-as-sensors

Des Kilfoil at the CBC in Calgary, Canada introduced me 20-odd years ago to the 5Ws, the basic tenets of any investigative reporting, from journalists to police, from Wikipedia:

• Who? Who was involved?
• What? What happened (what's the story)?
• Where? Where did it take place?
• When? When did it take place?
• Why? Why did it happen?
• How? How did it happen?

Anniversary blog

Even though I registered my blog in September 2005, I started blogging on 18 August 2009, no small thanks to my blog friend Hussein Nasser and the blogging geocommunity in London and elsewhere. I recently twittered these stats, and thank all for your help along the line:

azolnai: 1st anniversary blogging math: (72 blog posts + 797 tweets + RSS feed) * output = (100 Twitter+ 501 LinkedIn + 95 Facebook) * followers

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Time for reflection coming up to the anniversary of reconnecting with my current business partner David Lloyd to help oilelefant to market.

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?