Todays Guardian (Yes I do still read it 🙂 ) reports that the Police in the West Country are having to cope with high tech rave organisers who along with their MP3 powered sound systems are promoting their “illegal” gatherings by passing GPS co-ordinates via SMS to potential partygoers – expect another backlash against the technology from the usual quarters.
Expect a re-release of the Tony Christie classic “Show me the way to 35.185594,-101.824036” !
In the world of pin map mashups, it is hearting to see the avaibility of mapping api’s used in a more construcutive way that yet another real estate application. The Truth Laid Bear blog has produced a virtual earth mash-up which is tracking the latest middle east war and identifing the locations of blogs still operating despite the conflict.
Lets hope this a mashup will soon be no longer required, but things don’t look good on that front – shame on the UK and US governments for not supporting the UN call for an immediate ceasefire!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As I blogged a year ago I have been a supporter of the moves to simplify Geographic Markup Language (GML). There are good technical reasons, in particular making feature streaming practical, that require a simpler vocabulary than the full GML 3 specification.
But we must also realise that there is a major perception issue that GML is too verbose and just plain difficult. This is of course an over simplification of the facts and may have been driven by some vendors comments in the past, but perception has becomes reality.
In this context it is good to see the OGC in the form of Sam Bacharachs’ article in directionsmag evangelising on the potential of the simple features spec of GML.
I would argue that this is just what we need the OGC to be doing, it needs to get out and really explain why the use of open standards is important, and not be seen to be merely as a club for standards enthusiasts. After-all for a standard like simple GML there is always the alternative of KML !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.