Is it time for a global licensing framework for geospatial data? The GSDI Legal and Economic Working group thinks so and offered a presentation and a way forward at the GSDI 13 conference held in Quebec City in May. The effort aims to harmonize existing licensing without changing fundamental access policies and funding models and be compatible with the diferences in national legal systems. That's a tall order, but an important one as the world moves toward geodata sharing. Geoff Zeiss reports.

You are journalist. There’s breaking news across town. How do you tap in to citizen journalists already on the ground in the area? Geofeedia. The feed offers location-based content from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa based on an address or a polygon drawn on a Bing map. The for-fee service was launched last week after quite a bit of testing. 

Unlike your father’s vintage Chevrolet, the half century old polygon based trade area does not appreciate with age. Sure, there is something that can be said about a “time-tested” model, but retail above all other industries should value an organization’s ability to adopt new technologies and embrace change. Authors David Doering, Shaofei Chen and Jay Ward of Tango Management Consulting take us "beyond block groups and census tracts."

Non-government organization (NGO) activity in developing countries is difficult to track due to limited infrastructure. URISA’s GISCorps, which coordinates short-term, volunteer-based GIS services to underprivileged communities, was asked to assist the Craig Bellamy Foundation in creating an interactive map showing the locations of international and national NGO offices and their programs in Sierra Leon, a developing country in Western Africa. Michael Knapp, a GIS specialist from Anchorage, Alaska, describes how a combination of Esri and Google technology accomplished the task.

Bike Score is the biking equivalent to Walk Score; it’s a measure of the bikeability of cities. 

Mapping of potential retail outlets is one of the first steps in putting a distribution channel in place while launching a telecommunications brand. This is the second article in a two-part series on utilizing location intelligence to organize and understand information through a geographical perspective, enabling informed decisions about retail marketing. Author Abhishek Bhardwaj, associate consultant for Infosys, uses Bangalore, India as the setting for his analysis.

Users of maps and other visualizations of data want it all. They want both detail and context as they explore small scale (large area) graphics. Technologies to address this challenge have come and gone. The latest one is from researchers at Purdue. Their tool, dubbed PolyZoom, organizes simultaneous, magnified views from a single document, while maintaining their relationship to the whole.

Unlike the board game, the Map of Life lives online and as its name suggests, maps out life on earth. To be more specific, it provides location information for a selection of living things on earth.

What should the satellite companies DigitalGlobe and GeoEye do now that ongoing talks of mergers and acquisitions are a well-publicized fact? It’s a pretty fair bet that something has to happen soon since it looks increasingly like the government will cut spending for commercial remote sensing satellites. Editor in Chief Joe Francica writes an open letter to the CEOs of both companies with some "free" advice.

This market report was written and reviewed by members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to provide a simple guide to the EU INSPIRE Directive and Implementing Rules from an open standards perspective. Additionally, this report provides an overview of the role that OGC, CEN and ISO standards play in helping public sector bodies across Europe meet their obligations to implement the INSPIRE Directive and Implementing Rules.