Open Source

Our editors step up to the plate to evaluate last year's predictions and offer new ones for the geospatial marketplace in 2013.

The long northern hemisphere summer is over and the geospatial industry is gearing up for fall. What should we expect? What would we like to see? Our editors get listeners ready for the next few months.

Two weeks ago the world learned about Zombie-based Learning, a geography teaching tool envisioned by a middle school teacher from Seattle. He used the crowdfunding site, Kickstarter, to ask the world to support his project. He had $5000 pledged in just four days. What other geography-related projects, educational and otherwise, are appearing on Kickstarter? What is getting funded? What isn't?

This week we mull over the announcements and news from the Where Conference held last week in San Francisco. It’s supposed to be about the business of location. So how’s business? What’s hot? What’s old news?

There are many proponents of data sharing, including the current U.S. president. But questions still linger about how best to deliver those data. Should organizations provide APIs and bulk data downloads? And, does what works for other kinds of data work as well for geodata?

There have been a handful of organizations that have switched from using the Google Maps API to using OpenStreetMap data in their Web applications over the past few months. This week, one of the biggest location-based services players in the world, Foursquare announced why and how it did so. Is this a huge coup for OpenStreetMap? For Foursquare? For open source?

This past week Spatial Energy and the IEEE became two of the latest organizations to announce competitions aimed at students and users of geospatial technology. Why do these keep popping up? Are they good for the geospatial industry?

Three items in the news in early January are teachable moments in geotechnology, for students and citizens and for the geospatial community. They include satellite imagery from the cruise ship Costa Concordia, Google tangling with OSM and World Bank, and an outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease explained by geography.

Several geospatial announcements and events made our editors respond,

Our editors step up to the plate to evaluate last year's predictions and offer new ones for the geospatial marketplace in 2012.