Send me a postcard

Feeling nostalgic, apostcardaday.blogspot.com caught my eye. This week they've been showing postcards with some beautiful maps. I thought I should share the links with you all so you can enjoy them to. Just as a taster, here is one showing La Manche (via apostcardaday):

The Maldives
La Manche
Edinburgh
Thasos
Istanbul
Tainan
Washington State

I do hope they bring us some more to enjoy!

Data.gov.uk - Inspired

Of recent months I have been watching data.gov.uk develop and have been asking myself how we might utilise this great resource - this really is a fresh idea in the UK: making public data more easily accessible. This isn't like the one-stop shop of old where you still had to visit many shops, this is more like the hypermarket where everything is under one roof.

The concept is great: bring together all public data held by government, government agencies and alike and develop thoughts and ideas of how best to use this data.

With a slant towards anything with a geographical element in it, I set about searching for something that would catch my interest. The more I searched the more I realised how much this could really utilise a spatial data infrastructure like INSPIRE - It already has the some of the key elements like tags, so why not bring anything with a geographical element held in data.gov.uk in to line?

I would also really like to be able to search for data on data.gov.uk based on its geographical location rather than having to trawl through data simply based on tags. This could be based on a similar model to that marketed by WeoGeo. Like a kid in toy shop, I want to be able to add all the data I discover into a shopping basket and head for the checkout with a big grin on my face.

GeoApps emerges

I suppose it wasn't going to be long before someone coined GeoApps as a term referring to what I would call GIS. Still I can't knock the following linked blog article as it gives a succinct stand point of emerging GIS technologies in the cloud; where it has been used and some of those developing solutions in this area.

 Amongst others, it describes ArcGIS Server, eSpatial, WeoGeo, SimpleGeo and CloudMade using Amazon Web Services like Amazon EC2.

Amazon Web Services Blog