Feeds

Englisch Newspages

• Directions Magazine - Top Stories
• Directions Magazine - Press Releases
• geoinformatics.com
• GISCafe.com CorpNews
• GISCafe.com Weekly Reviews
• Geospatial Solutions
• Yahoo! News (mostly englisch)
• GISUser.com
• Mapping Hacks
• International Journal of Health Geographics - Latest articles
• OGC News Feed
• Slashgeo
• CADwire.net - GIS industry news
• Information Technology News at iCivilEngineer.com
• Topix.net
• ESRI News Feed
• esri Google Group
• [Technorati] "GIS" (mostly Englisch)
• [Technorati] "Mapping" (mostly Englisch)
• Geo: International UK News Articles
• GIS Lounge - Geographic Information Systems
• News

Deutsche Newsseiten

• gis-news
• gis-news.de (Blog)
• Yahoo! News (german)
• Geobranchen.de
• con terra - News (deutsche Version)
• [Technorati] "Mapping" (zumeist Deutsch)
• [Technorati] "GIS" (zumeist Deutsch)
• CeGi GEOcatalog - News (deutsche Version)
• Geobranchen.de EVENTS - RSS/RDF Feed
• AECWEB.de-News

Blogs

• Geography 2.0: Virtual Globes
• Ogle Earth
• Geo Coding
• GIS CAD Interoperability
• GIS Matters
• Richie's Space
• James Fee GIS Blog
• All Points Blog
• AnyGeo - Anything Geospatial
• Mapperz - The Mapping News Blog
• Sebastian Pache | Blog for Spatial Technology

Jobs

• All geographic information systems jobs | Indeed.com
• Directions Magazine GIS & Spatial Jobs Board
• Geographic information systems jobs | SimplyHired
• Gigajob: neue Stellenangebote: GIS
• GIS Jobs Worldwide Google Group
• GeoJobs Network Jobs Feed
• ICjobs.de Geoinformatik
• Careerjet
• Careerjet - keywords:GIS jobs in USA
• Careerjet - keywords:GIS jobs in Europe

Map-Services

• Yahoo! News Search Results for Google Maps
• Official Google Maps API Blog
• Google Maps API Google Group
• Google Maps Mania

Spanish Newspages

• Cartesia.org
• Google Earth Blog
• El mundo de los mapas
• geofumadas

14 items tagged "Data"

Related tags: Free [+], Collection [+], gis [+], and [+], World [+]

GIS Lounge - Geographic Information Systems

• 

  Mapping: the Next “Big Web Thing”

  Posted: June 11th, 2008, 6:23am CEST by Caitlin

  Tags:  Data Collection  

  The Financial Times published an analysis piece that looks at the investment by companies such as Nokia, Google, and Microsoft to amass huge amounts of data mapping out the world: “Our goal is to make a kind of mirror world, a replica world,” declares John Hanke, head of its Google Earth unit. Way to go? Mapping looks [...]
• 

  Five Steps to More “Interoperable” CADD Data

  Posted: June 4th, 2008, 4:56am CEST by Caitlin

  Tags:  Data  

  Paul Bartsch of the Spatial Tips site shares some tips on working with CADD data to make it more “GIS friendly”. The transition between CADD and GIS can be difficult but if you follow these five simple steps, it shouldn’t be very painful. Use Polylines instead of discontinuous lines. For example, when drawing a waterline, don’t break [...]
• 

  Making Navteq Maps

  Posted: June 3rd, 2008, 7:36pm CEST by Caitlin

  Tags:  Data Collection  

  PocketGPSWorld has an inside look at how Navteq’s survey teams update their street maps.  The article looks at how their cars are outfitted with GPS and camera equipment as they travel around the UK updating their geographic data.  Included is a video of the process. The making of Navteq Maps: Onboard with the survey team

AnyGeo - Anything Geospatial

• 

  Grab the 2007 TIGER/Line Shapefiles from the Census Bureau

  Posted: May 16th, 2008, 10:13pm CEST

  Tags:  Free Data  

  A tip if you like free stuff... I see that some of the "free" data websites are now flogging the free 2007 TIGER/Line files (SHP format) - I saw one site whoring out the data for $100+ bucks! OR.......
  
  [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

  

• 

  TerrasServer.com VS Microsoft TerrasServer USA

  Posted: May 9th, 2008, 3:44pm CEST

  Tags:  Free Data  

  I have to admit, I've wondered about this one for years. I recall stumbling onto the Microsoft resource and wondered "how do they get away with this"? What I mean is that commercial data provider...
  
  [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

  

GIS Lounge - Geographic Information Systems

• 

  USGS Releases New Shake Maps

  Posted: April 21st, 2008, 9:35pm CEST by Caitlin

  Tags:  Data  

  The United States Geological Survey has released updated National Seismic Hazard Maps for the United States. From the press release: Earthquakes remain a serious threat in 46 of the United States. For some areas such as western Oregon and Washington, the new maps contain higher estimates for how hard the ground will shake [...]
• 

  Antarctica GIS Resources

  Posted: April 21st, 2008, 2:58am CEST by Caitlin

  Tags:  World gis and Data  

  Find resources relating to GIS including case studies, articles and access to data relating to Antarctica. Articles and Case Studies Science and GIS in Antarctica Series of articles published in ESRI’s ArcNews Fall 2004 issue about the use of GIS and spatial technology in Antarctica.  Data Access Antarctica ArcIMS data viewer created by Gateway Antarctica, the Centre for Antarctic Studies and [...]

AnyGeo - Anything Geospatial

• 

  Tip - National Geographic DataDoors portal

  Posted: April 17th, 2008, 5:49pm CEST

  Tags:  Free Data  

  A data tip from NGS - Not exactly free, however, this is a fine resource for viewing data and imagery... National Geographic DataDoors portal (www.natgeodatadoors.com), customers can select the exact...
  
  [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

  

• 

  Canadian and US topos from Touratel

  Posted: April 17th, 2008, 4:39am CEST

  Tags:  Free Data  

  Fugawi Touratel (aimed at hikers and outdoor enthusiasts) allows users to view and print Canadian and US topographic maps from Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) and the United States Geological Survey...
  
  [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

  

Mapping Hacks

• 

  On food pricing

  Posted: April 12th, 2008, 8:45pm CEST by Jo

  Tags:  Data  

  Each time i read another sensationalising “food crisis” article, I grumble. What else is the blogosphere for, but to get things like this off one’s chest;

  So, prices of all kinds of food staples are rising globally, rapidly. Some - like rice - are specifically singled out, and specific warnings actually serve to worsen price inflation by sending those markets panic signals.

  The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) serves as a kind of global food pricing watchdog and they have been making worried sounds for the last couple of years at least. Last month, FAO published in association with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) a neat short paper on Fighting Food Inflation Through Sustainable Investment.

  So far so great and for me this shed some light on why food inflation is happening. Their lightning summary of causes:

  On the supply side:

  • Agricultural subsidies rendering more efficient production elsewhere, unprofitable
  • Lower stock levels due both to increasing cost and change in stock management practises
  • Rising fuel costs

  On the demand side:

  • Increasing demand for, and shipping cost of, grain as animal feed in “emerging markets”
  • Impact of biofuels/agrofuels on grain supplies for food consumption
  • Speculation, reflecting futures in current prices.

  Yet the main thrust of this document barely seems credible to me. It seems inarguable that government policy of tinkering with export quotas and price controls is worsening the macro problem. Certainly if other FAO assessments are to be read right, food inflation turns into a “crisis”-like situation at around the same time as policy measures start to drastically restrict exports in anticipation of a future “crisis” - a kind of society-level hoarding.
  One minute, the EBRD offers an acknowledgement that large offshore “agroholdings” businesses owned by private funds are moving in on marginal agricultural land which has become profitable again with increased prices - in places like the Ukraine and Poland. Next minute, there’s talk of “farmer access to credit”, as if the grass-chewing family farmer is still a figure who exists in reality. What the EBRD proposes are government measures designed to indirectly subsidise, rather than directly subsidise, massive agribusiness by (re)building transport infrastructure for long-distance shipping and large-scale storage. Credit facilities for farmland-based mortgages that will collect the equity in the land into ever fewer hands. The response is essentially “throw more hardware at the problem”, cross fingers, and rely on regulation to keep papering over the cracks.

  There are serious historical precedents for great infrastructural change simultaneously in both agricultural production, and transportation technology. These changes both corresponded to and helped cause large-scale social change. The late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, canalization and the railways came along with a change in land management, enclosure, irrigation practises - an Agricultural Revolution to complement the Industrial one.

  I suppose there was a corresponding set of changes after the Second World War, with containerisation, motorway transport, and mobile refrigeration alongside combine harvesters, effective pesticides, vast landholdings and the rest of industrial agricultural practise. This was also called a Green Revolution, a term that doesn’t work so well today.
  So it makes sense that we should be looking for this pattern of change to happen once more. Some radical change in agricultural practise seems to be the only way out of this series of interlocking causes of rapid and socially unsustainable global food price inflation. Look at the FAO/EBRD six causes again; one of those is rising fuel costs, and another three are directly caused by rising fuel costs.

  The nicest explanation of this I have seen was produced by Caroline Lucas MEP back in 2006, when food price inflation seems to have become really noticeable to the specialists. Her report, Fuelling a Food Crisis, works on the theme of Achieving food security in an era of peak oil is an urgent political priority. This will involve a more towards more low-energy and low-inpit farming, and the development of more localised markets.

  (Hooray for Caroline Lucas MEP! Years ago, when Mapping Hacks was still in production and before the INSPIRE Directive had its first reading, she was the only South-East MEP who wrote back to me with an opinion on INSPIRE. We sent a complimentary copy of the book to her office when it came out; I wonder whether she ever got to look at it.)

  Whether or not one buys into the discourse of “peak oil”, higher energy prices are both here to stay and are in broad side-effects socially desirable, if energy price dependence of food prices can be addressed. Reformation of agricultural and transportation technology, hand-in-hand, seem required to fix the underlying problems of food pricing. Further movement along the path we’re now on, hoping the faltering state apparatus will continue to be able to pick up the pieces, is building a road to nowhere.

  The only thing i knew about FAO up til now was that they support and develop the fine open source GIS project GeoNetwork, which began as a FAO project. It’s a java-based package for cataloguing and publishing collections of geographic data in a range of legally-mandated formats. Through the UN they promote GeoNetwork to organisations like CGIAR to publish increasing amounts of their fieldwork data in sustainable agriculture, nearer to real time.

  FAO also collects a lot of interesting historical and comparative pricing and trading data at FAOSTAT. What is published here only goes up to 2006, when the first signs of global inflation across all food types started to kick in. FAO’s more recent reports have statistics up to 2008, and while the FAOSTAT interface will generate nice tables and flash maps, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s rallying cry comes to mind: “We want the data, we want it raw, and we want it now!”

  Update… I’m told that the FAOSTAT core data is now undergoing substantial update and review, after which more recent data will appearing through their web service interface. There are substantial archives through which one can “drill down” to more report data going back to the early 60s’. I still suspect it to be the tip of the iceberg of what’s available in FAO archives, though.

GIS Lounge - Geographic Information Systems

• 

  CO2 Maps and Data

  Posted: April 9th, 2008, 1:06am CEST by Caitlin

  Tags:  Data  

  Purdue University has announced the availability of high resolution CO2 emission maps and data for the United States. The Vulcan Project details carbon dioxide emissions at a level of detail more than 100 times previously available datasets. Additionally, CO2 emissions were calculated in 10 kilometer grids based on a method developed to “extract the CO2 [...]
• 

  Digital Elevation Models

  Posted: April 6th, 2008, 6:35pm CEST by Caitlin

  Tags:  Data  

  Find web sites where you can download digital elevation model datasets for your area of interest. CGIAR SRTM 90m Digital Elevation Data from the Consortium for Spatial Information DEM Catalogue Listing of available DEM datasets compiled by Bruce Gittings. DEM File Finder 1-Degree DEM File Finder. Simply fill out the Latitude and Longitude of the site for which you need 1-degree [...]
• 

  Agriculture and GIS

  Posted: April 4th, 2008, 3:52am CEST by Caitlin

  Tags:  Data  

  Resources on the use of GIS in Agriculture. Find links to articles, case studies and user groups in agricultural GIS. Agriculture GIS User Group Ag-GIS, a users group dealing with GIS(Geographic Information Systems) as applied to Agricultural problems. GIS and Agribusiness ESRI’s web page on agriculture. Articles and support for utilizing GIS in this field. GIS in Agriculture Presentations Powerpoint [...]
• 

  African Data

  Posted: March 30th, 2008, 3:51am CEST by Caitlin

  Tags:  Data  

  Data sources, both commercial and free, in GIS format covering the continent of Africa. Find cadastral, environmental and cultural data. Africa Data Dissemination Service Land use and base GIS data. Africover Land cover and agricultural data for 10 nations in eastern Africa from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. ReliefWeb GIS Data ESRI Shapefile and MapInfo [...]