Slashgeo

Ogle Earth is reporting about this development. From their page, here is snippet of the summary : "And while Géoportail is indeed the first portal made by Europeans for 3D mapping (albeit by licensing American technology), it is not the first portal to show Europe in 3D. In fact, it still doesn’t. (Google Earth, NASA World Wind and Microsoft Virtual Earth came before and do all of Europe. Géoportail shows nothing beyond France’s borders.)

Géoportail certainly is much more impressive that the UK Ordnance Survey’s “outreach” effort, but both are just as closed in a time when everything online is moving towards open, interoperable, mashable standards. KML is now an OGC standard, most recently embraced by Microsoft. Where is the support By IGN and OS? Why can’t I export anything to mash up? Where are the APIs? The USGS, on the other hand, gets it." Head on over there to get full details an links to the real story. See also previous stories about GeoPortail below.

The Earth is Square let us know NASA World Wind 0.4.1 has been released. A few days ago he also detailed the Moon and Mars layers for NWWJava. From the 0.4.1 announcement: "The World Wind Java SDK alpha 4 - version 0.4.1 is available. Download WWJ SDK 0.4 (Zip 6.5M) or try the java web start demo 0.4 from the NASA World Wind site. [...] WorldWind Java SDK home pages at NASA Learning Technologies and WorldWind Central." As usual, I copied related stories below.

The Digital Earth Weblog discuss the new OGC membership availability for individuals: "* Non-voting participation in the Technical Committee (TC) * Non-voting participation in working groups of the TC. * Can be a Participant in OGC Interoperability Initiatives on an in-kind resource basis, without monetary compensation. If I’m reading that correctly it means you can offer your time and expertise for free, but you cannot influence the outcome when it comes to a vote." And not unimportant, the OGC is requesting comments over its version of KML, you have until January 4th. Related, the Free Geography Tools details a free KML to GPX converter and the S-M-GIS blog shortly discuss the integration of KML in Virtual Earth. A few previous related stories copied below.

It's my pleasure to announce that NAVTEQ Network for Developers(TM) (NN4D), introduced a year ago, is an active supporter of Slashgeo.org. This is great news for our thousands of geospatial professional readers. It opens the door to the sharing of additional pertinent content from NAVTEQ and will increase Slashgeo's visibility. We are also planning a few new related features which may interest several of our readers. No money is involved in the deal and rest reassured that Slashgeo will stay neutral and continue aggregating and discussing geonews from the geospatial community as a whole.