Slashgeo

Remember the previous entry on REST and GIS? Could RESTful webmapping become OGC standards? The cfis and import cartography blogs discuss new REST interest at the Open Geospatial Consortium. Here's the second post and the third. From the third post: "Everything that's wrong the the WxS Suite (that's a fancy acronym for Web Map Server, Web Feature Server, Web Context Server, etc.) boils down to one thing - they are based on the fundamentaly flawed concept of service endpoints. A service endpoint is a program sitting on the network that defines its own API."

Geoblogs have been regularly covering REST technology and geospatial applications lately, see the related stories below. Directions Mag offers an informative article named Emerging Technology: Geospatial Web Services and REST which reduces the confusion with REST, SOAP, GET and POST. From the article's introduction: "However, when considering the evolution of geospatial Web services, it turns out that explaining REST and clarifying the discussion suggests the need for a proposal of how to apply REST to geospatial Web services. Such a proposal might help the open source and open standards communities establish better techniques to make geospatial Web services more open and accessible." Meanwhile, you have import cartography explaining how KML could be published in a RESTful manner, and the same blog also suggests serious (?) corrections to the DM article.

Anonymous Voxel writes "From rajsingh.org blog: REST has been a hot topic this year in the geo world. There’s a discussion group, a geographic data server, many blog posts, and email discussions. I’ve been mulling over what this means to OGC over the last couple months, reading RESTful Web Services, and discussing with the various advocates around the community. After all this, I think I know what’s going on, but I don’t think there’s any one clear explanation (despite some nice pieces of the puzzle here and here) available, and there has certainly been little effort to analyze the REST architecture in relation to geographic information systems theory, so that’s what I’ll try to do now." See related stories below.

The previous poll regarding who's doing geospatial work at your office gave these results, out of 54 votes: 42% of geospatial tasks are done by geospatial professionals, 25% are done by a diversified mix of professionals, 11% from computer scientists which learned geospatial stuff, other interesting results include only 3% from certified geospatial professionals and 5% by someone not qualified!

The new poll ask you about REST and GIS, a hot topic in the geospatial world this summer, and no, we're not talking about that kind of rest.

Dear readers, a small note to let you know Slashgeo geonews coverage should go back to full speed in the coming days/weeks. I was going to give a talk at a conference in San Diego this week, but a motorcycle accident last Friday modified the plans. I am very satisfied to find out many of the new Slashgeo editors, namely Colin, Lennox, Gene and Dan, took the opportunity to publish geonews in my absence. Thanks :-) That's how I hope Slashgeo will become, a site ran by the geospatial community for the geospatial community. I think we're in the right direction.

I won't provide much details on the accident itself because you're here to read about geonews, not my personal life. In short, I was extremely lucky, no permanent damage to my body (or my mind! ;-). Despite the title of this article, I was going slow (about 50km/h). After a few flips in the air, I ended up with four broken ribs, a fractured clavicle, a scapula in pieces and a lacerated spleen. Now back at home from the hospital, I expect it will require at least a few days before I resume contributing and feeding our readers with the regular geonews you've been used to. And I'm happy to confirm this recent dangerous experience has not reduced my will to spend precious time aggregating geonews for our community. It still makes me feel somehow useful. Cheers! Alex

The MetaCarta Labs demonstrate the world’s first Open Source Browser-Based AtomPub GIS Client. Try AtomPub in action via OpenLayers and FeatureServer right here, try it, it's surprising how easy it is to modify vector data. The CFIS blog adds more info on AtomPub and GIS interoperability, as well as this older entry from import cartography on AtomPub, KML and Google Earth. This is perfect timing considering RESTful knowledge amongst us. From the MetaCarta lab: " MetaCarta Labs is strongly in support of RESTful technology around GIS. FeatureServer is a REST-based geographic feature storage engine, which includes relatively complete Atom Publishing Protocol support. Using FeatureServer and OpenLayers, it is possible to create an AtomPub client, which uses input from the user to create geometries, and allows users to modify and save their changes, all via Atom + GeoRSS."

Last poll received little interest, out of the 38 responders, votes have been mostly evenly distributed, with this to note: only 7% said geospatial inroads on the web exceeded their expectations while 28% said the industry could have been much more innovative. The new poll asks what you think of the significant industry acquisitions this year, such as NAVTEQ/Nokia and TomTom/Tele Atlas, are such acquisitions a good thing or not?