Thanks to a flurry of geospatial events in the UK in late summer, the month September has been renamed as Maptember!
There are 11 (and counting) events going on. I’m planning to be at AGI GeoCommunity and FOSS4G (all at EMCC in Nottingham, UK).
You can read more about the events here….http://www.maptember.org/
Hopefully there will be a good chance to have some MapAction related hacking going on at some of the Maptember events. (following on from the MapAction Hackathon with AGI held recently)……
Google (I think) stopped supporting Google Maps 4.5.3 on Blackberry Curve and this meant Google Latitude stopped working.
This meant no-one could see where I am! (perhaps that might be a good thing!).
The workaround is to remove Google Maps 4.5.3 and then install Google Maps 3 (going backwards to go forwards).
Full details are explained on the Crackberry forum.
Very nice map of foursquare check-ins and MapBox Streets. Thanks to @adenas for the information. Click on image below to go to the site. 
Away from my normal topics of discussion…..the Elephant and Castle Heygate Estate Masterplan was approved last night by Southwark Council. I couldn’t make the planning meeting and so relied on the tweets of @se17 (thank you). Using a bit of Python and the Twitter API I pulled out all @se17′s tweets and created a wordle at Wordle.net. You can see the results below – the larger the text the more mentions for that word. I notice Affordable (as in Affordable housing) appearing a few times……
I know it’s been done before but I hear again and again people getting their use of the word Open (Source, Data, Software) mixed up. Most usually there is confusion between the meanings of Open Source and Open Standards. So here are some definitions……
….but before that here’s a nice image of the 3 Opens (data, source, and standards) interacting with each other!
Open Source Software – the source code (the programming code which was used to develop the software) is available to all. Usually there is a collaborative aspect to this type of software and a developer community is actively adding to the code behind the software. An example in the GIS world is the GIS software www.qgis.org. You can also find much Open Source material at www.github.com. The key organisation behind open source geospatial software is www.osgeo.org. Quite often Open Source software is free (but not always!). Also see www.foss4g.org. often Open Source software makes use of Open Standards……
Open Standards – covers the development of a set of data standards which allows different software (both proprietary and open-source) to transfer data easily and quickly. In the GIS world, the www.opengeospatialconsortium.org maintain a set of geographic information standards such as WMS, WFS and KML (you know as in Google Earth KML). Open Standards should allow easier extraction, transfer and loading of data as it follows a defined format.
Open Data – is free data essentially. There has been a big move in the US, UK and throughout most of the western world to open up data to the general public, especially data which governments collect (see data.gov and data.gov.uk). In the UK, the Ordnance Survey has released OS Open Data which is a set of freely available geographic information including terrain data, place data, postcodes, roads, buildings etc.
I might add to these definitions over time. Let me know what you think!
I logged into Facebook today for the first time in a long time, and some of my photos have been geocoded to the Places map.
This looks nice I guess, until I see that our trip to Scotland in 2008 has been placed on the East Coast of the USA in the Connecticut city of…..Scotland!
Obviously Facebook has my home location a bit confused. But a country should come before a city in any case!
DONATE NOW! Matched funding finishes on 19th December 2012
some news from MapAction…..
You can more than double your donation this December through the Big Give Christmas Challenge. Every £1 you donate could be worth £2.25 once you factor in matched giving and Gift Aid*.
From 10am on Thursday 6 December until Saturday 8 December, online donations to MapAction through the Big Give Christmas Challenge will be eligible for matched funding. All proceeds will be directly channelled into our emergency mapping service and will help to get humanitarian aid to where it’s needed most.
There are limited funds available on each day, so please log onto: http://new.thebiggive.org.uk/project/mapaction at 10am on Thursday 6th, Friday 7th and/or Saturday 8th December to avoid missing out.
Please do set yourself a reminder to log in at 10am on Thursday 6, Friday 7 and/or Saturday 8 December.
MapAction can send you a reminder if you register your email address at – www.mapaction.org/biggive
You can read more about the Christmas Challenge at – www.mapaction.org/christmas
Congratulations to Obama and Biden and US Democrats. The latest map from Politico is shown here. Results are still coming in but the overall winner is clear.
And here is a map based on Tweets leading up to the US Election ‘predicting’ a Democrat win. Thanks to @guardian blog for this and to Mark Graham of Oxford Internet Institute.More details from the Guardian blog.
w3g is looking like a great (un)conference this year. Some things I’ve learnt from the twitterstream (#w3g) are:
1. the MapIt Global API from MySociety which allows you to determine which admin boundary a point is in anywhere in the world! – via @mysociety
2. a fantastic web map of the BBC Price of Football 2012 survey – thanks to @roberto_murray
3. some more info about OS Open Data from @ian_holt. …. Over half a million downloads of Ordnance survey data. Over 8000 datasets on http://data.gov.uk
4. to be continued…………