While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics. Read More…
Erik Hersman presents the remarkable story of Ushahidi, a Google Maps mashup that allowed Kenyans to report and track violence via cell phone texts following the 2008 elections, and has evolved to continue saving lives in other countries. Read More…
Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. Read More…
Furthering its commitment to providing the geospatial open source community with faster innovation and support for standards worldwide, Autodesk announced the availability of new providers developed on Feature Data Object (FDO) open data access technology. FDO technology, originally created by Autodesk and now a fully endorsed project in the open source community through the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), allows users to store, retrieve, update, and analyze geospatial data.
The new providers include two new Autodesk FDO Providers: Autodesk FDO Provider for GE Smallworld and Autodesk FDO Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008, which are now available through the Autodesk subscription program for AutoCAD Map 3D and Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise. The FDO Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 will also become available on OSGeo through the FDO open source project.
In addition, new FDO Providers for IBM Informix, KML, and PostGIS have been developed by the open source community. The latest FDO Providers allow customers to take advantage of the native support for additional spatial data formats—and let users more easily access, view, edit and analyze data—within Autodesk geospatial software.
The announcement was made today at the annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Cape Town, South Africa, where geospatial open source developers and users join to learn, present and network. “As a development partner, we appreciate the impact that open source technology has had for increased community collaboration and rapid innovation,” said Haris Kurtagic, CEO, SL-King. “By providing the open source community the ability to work seamlessly on a variety of spatial and non-spatial databases and file formats natively, without the need for translation or risk of data loss, we further the success of the geospatial community as a whole.”
“Today’s announcement underscores our commitment to our geospatial customers and the open source community,” said Lisa Campbell, vice president, Autodesk Geospatial. “Autodesk continues to partner and work closely with the community to help these technologies gain adoption—and evolve and improve over time. Ultimately, users benefit from faster innovation and support for standards allowing them to lower the cost of ownership by easily integrating multiple data types and database systems.”
KidsGIS is a cool project from a group of professionals and educators out in Oregon (USA), who have been using MapGuide Open Source tools to create an open source geospatial portal as a tool for educating kids about environmental issues and about using open source software and open data standards. The project has an impressive group of sponsors, including the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, Autodesk, the San Diego Visualization and Supercomputer Centers, URISA, local governments and schools, and private companies such as Spatial Integrators and SPATIALinfo.
The project has been in operation since 2005, and now have a protoype up and running, using data from a project where students collected their own data from a study area along the Willamette River and its tributaries. The plans are to improve and expand the functionality of the prototype GIS applications as they move into the next phases of the project.
