Via All Points Blog: are all geo patents this dubious?

21. A storage medium for storing computer code to encode a computer system that plots a boundary on a map from a metes and bounds description and to generate latitude and longitude coordinates of corner points of said boundary by performing the following steps: generating bearing and distance information with respect to the location of a cursor on said map; displaying said bearing and distance information; using said bearing and distance information to generate said boundary from a metes and bounds description; generating UTM coordinates from said boundary; generating latitude and longitude coordinates from said UTM coordinates.

22. An electrical signal for encoding a computer system to plot a boundary on a map from a metes and bounds description and to generate latitude and longitude coordinates of corner points of said boundary by performing the following steps: generating bearing and distance information with respect to the location of a cursor on said map; displaying said bearing and distance information; using said bearing and distance information to generate said boundary from a metes and bounds description; generating UTM coordinates from said boundary; generating latitude and longitude coordinates from said UTM coordinates.

They invented a new storage medium and a new electrical signal? I'm a bit skeptical.

You know what the geo blogosphere really lacks? Gurus. Seasoned, opinionated, frankly critical, highly credible people writing about implementations. Experts in technology or methodology, writing with good style, clarity, and a sense of humor. Where are our Martin Fowlers, Tim Brays, Paul Grahams, Mark Pilgrims, and Joel Spolskys?

Geoff Zeiss has potential. His photo reminds me of the older fisherman I'd see back when I was a hack fly-caster. The kind of guy who could step up to a hole that I'd whipped fruitlessly to a fine froth, and tease out a trout on the first cast. But he's expressing the Autodesk viewpoint and not implementations in general.

Don't be fooled by his twenty-something looks (on display in his blog banner); Ed Parsons is a seasoned industry vet. He's written some provocative posts, but identifies more with CxO bloggers than we techies.

Charlie Savage and Matt M from Let's Push Things Forward bring a lot of the nitty gritty I crave. If they'd write more about data, and spice it up, I think they could be future gurus.

Crap, there goes the neighborhood. Please, unless you bring your own lifetime supply of water (and some to share), or are going to start an old-world bakery, or an affordably priced enoteca, don't move to Fort Collins. I'm begging you.

Since I have no academic background in GIS or Geography (was all Physics), I've been skeptical about GIS or map librarians (such as mapz). To me, this position seemed a bit mythical -- like the jackalope or sasquatch. But then recently I met Celia Pratt, maps librarian at http://www.lib.unc.edu. What's more, since I'm telecommuting to the AWMC's office on the 5th floor of the UNC library and working on the data model for a major reference work, I'm getting pretty close to map librarian territory myself. The intersection between Geography and the Humanities is a fine place to be.

The figure in the photo is not a map librarian.

If you're interested in a historian's take on Wikipedia and the impact of the Wikipedia process on scholarship, check out Roy Rosenzweig's excellent essay: Can History be Open Source? (via The Stoa Consortium). It was the talk of the History blogosphere around the middle of June after appearing in The Journal of American History, but I missed it due to my newness on the scene and preparation for our first Pleiades meeting. The essay is enormously relevant to the Pleiades project, and we'll be disseminating it to all our potential users.

After a brief history of Wikipedia and an analysis of its accuracy (pretty good) and prose (generally mushy), Rosenzweig considers what a Wikipedia-like peer production process might achieve with the participation of professional historians:

If the Internet and the notion of commons-based peer production provide intriguing opportunities for mobilizing volunteer historical enthusiasm to produce a massive digital archive, what about mobilizing and coordinating the work of professional historians in that fashion? That so much professional historical work already relies on volunteer labor -- the peer review of journal articles, the staffing of conference program committees -- suggests that professionals are willing to give up significant amounts of their time to advance the historical enterprise. But are they also willing to take the further step of abandoning individual credit and individual ownership of intellectual property as do Wikipedia authors?

The AWMC wants to preserve individual credit. Absolutely. But it's still going to be tricky. We'll need a lot of finesse to deal with perceptions about the big step.

Yesterday Hobu chastized successful MapServer users ZedX for apparently giving little back to the MapServer community. A soybean rust tracking web app developed by ZedX, using Linux and MapServer, recently made a splash in the All Points Blog. I think the fact that a company can put MapServer to use in a good sized contract without the need for paid consultation with core MapServer developers, or the need for feature enhancement, is a nice indicator of the maturity of the MapServer project. Touting their use of Linux and MapServer is also good for us all. Hobu knows as well as any of us how hard it can be to get an agency like the USDA to embrace open source. Hopefully ZedX will ice the cake and give their programmers a little time to share their new expertise with MapServer users through the mailing lists or IRC.

Near the end of his post, Hobu writes:

It is my hope that OSGeo will be able to provide a clearinghouse for contributions to its member projects and solves the issue of "great, I have some money/time/resources to contribute, who do I give it to?" Also, the ability to pool contributions together for larger efforts is something that is sorely needed. Those efforts are just getting off the ground though, and time will tell if that approach will be any more successful than individual-to-individual or individual-to-project contributions.

I'm in 100% disagreement with Hobu here. I don't think OSGeo is a good place for a company to invest modest amounts of money in open source projects. Look at the money being wasted now (yes, wasted) paying Collabnet for consulting on community building and open source development. Nothing against Collabnet, but the OSGeo projects already have communities and infrastructure. Direct contribution to individual projects remains the best way to make small to medium investments count.

In March 2005 Donnie Marino (then at DigitalGlobe) hosted a meeting of local MapServer users in Longmont. A follow-up has been a long time coming. After consulting with Donnie and Brian Timoney, I created a new Google Group to pick up where we left off last year: the Front Range Users of Geospatial Open Source, or FRUGOS.

We're looking to promote the use of open source software in geospatial applications here on the Front Range of Colorado and build a lively regional support network. Brian is particularly interested in getting open source into the GIS curricula -- or at least into student hands -- of our local universities (Colorado, Colorado State, Northern Colorado, Denver University), an effort that I'll back one hundred percent. Check out his first post for more details. I'm interested in helping organizations find local and regional commercial support for MapServer et al, something that is often noted as a limiting factor for enterprise uptake. In my opinion, FRUGOS should definitely be about increasing business opportunities for open source users.

Please check it out if you'd like to contribute to our regional open source geospatial community.

Update: FRUGOS is starting to take off.

I was asked this morning by a couple OSGeo members what the relationship between FRUGOS and OSGeo is or will be. That's yet to be determined. There's no explicit relationship at present. I am personally ambivalent -- perhaps even leaning -0 -- about OSGeo (longtime readers know all about it), but would prefer to see FRUGOS go with the flow. If it works, why not? If it doesn't work, why bother?

Lots happening this week. The top story is Google's hire of Plone co-founder Alexander Limi. Limi claims that the one day a week he'll be free to work on the Plone codebase is more than he now has. We'll have to wait and see. At any rate, a great opportunity for him.

The Open Planning Project is helping to organize the Big Apple Plone Sprint. Folksonomic tagging, annotations, and syndication are the topics that are the most immediately interesting to me. We'd like to put some of this to work in the Pleiades site.

I'll be attending the Plone Conference this year instead of FOSS4G. Josh Livni and Chris Calloway have suggested PrimaGIS as a topic for the post-conference sprint, and now there it is on the tentative list. Sweet! I think it would be even better to expand the topic to Plone and geospatial in general and aim to come away with more interoperability between the several Plone mapping products.