David Smith, who has generally been a proponent of SOA and Web Services on his blog, considers REST:

Certainly the geospatial community will need to sit up and take note of where this leads... Having written my own WFS and WMS services and clients from scratch, though I am still no Web Services guru, I still had to wonder about the wisdom of the approaches being used in the whole paradigm.

See my web category for more about REST and geospatial.

I finally read Adena's interview with Michael Jones, who in fact does invite us to start spatially marking up our data and services in the way I proposed. I'd better start reading Directions more often.

I'm excited about going forward catalog-free, but I'd be even more gung-ho if we were using Web standards (and maybe GML) instead of a repurposed proprietary XML language designed by a geo-visualization company.

I'm off on vacation for a few days after finishing the latest Pleiades site migration and release. Our master KML file is now at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/nwlink. That's 304 places in ancient Lycia and Pisidia (southwest coast of modern Turkey) from map 65 of the Barrington Atlas. There are 102 map pages to go, and we'll eventually have about 50,000 ancient places (with extensive bibliography) online next spring. In case you have a Barrington Atlas handy, the map 65 grid is available at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/BA065grid.kml.

It will take a while for Google's index to catch up with our changes, but thanks to mod rewrite and a little scripting, anything you find through a Google Earth search is properly redirected to our new URLs.

PleiadesGeocoder provides a portal geocoding tool and methods for producing KML and GeoRSS representations of Plone content. I've made a 0.6.2 release [plone.org, icon.stoa.org] on the way to the next Pleiades milestone site release.

What's Plone? The Python CMS, which, as Stefan Geens reminded me the other day, is still completely unknown to PHP fans.

Substitution of 'W*S' for 'WS-*' in Nick Gall's position paper yields a bunch of good lessons for the GIS standards bodies. For example:

Unfortunately, Web Services, at least the W*S style, are "Web" in name only. While W*S enables tunneling over HTTP (used merely as an XML message transport), in almost every important aspect, W*S violates (or at best ignores) the architectural principles of the Web as described in the W3C's Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One and in Tim Berners-Lee's personal design notes.

Via Pete Lacey.

Google Earth with KML search may not be an SDI, but it sure as hell looks like a data or service catalog killer. If every W*S published a KML document like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.1">
  <Document>
    <Feature>
      <LatLonAltBox>
        <north>50.0</north>
        <south>30.0</south>
        <east>-100.0</east>
        <west>-120.0</west>
      </LatLonAltBox>
      <description>
        <![CDATA[
        <h3>Example Web Map Service</h3>
        <p>
          This is a KML feature that points to the web map service
          at example.com.
        </p>
        <p>
          <a
            href="http://example.com/wms/"
            rel="alternate"
            >
            W*S Service Online Resource URL
          </a>
        </p>
        <p>Keywords
          <ul>
            <li>physiography</li>
            <li>hydrography</li>
          </ul>
        </p>
        ]]>
      </description>
      ...
    </Feature>
  </Document>
</kml>

we would be able to discover services using Google Earth, or by searching the index of a yet-to-be-developed, open KML crawler.

Issues with Vista will be popping up in our projects soon.

I recently upgraded to Windows Vista / IIS7, and found very little help on the internet regarding installing PostgreSQL / PostGIS, most 'help' consists of useless trolls and flame wars. Seems the open source community would rather fight each other than try to play nice with the new Microsoft OS platform.

Useless help? You mean like this -- why in the world would you want to run your RDBMS, Plone instance, or any other server application on Microsoft's defective-by-design multimedia appliance?

I'm finding a fair amount of other placemarks in the neighborhood of some interesting ancient places from Pleiades. Check out the ancient settlement of Caunus [direct network link], and the host of interesting photos in the Panoramio layer. If you search for "roman" in this spatial context you get a number of Pleiades placemarks, but there are a few from other sources, notably the "theatre of Caunos", and the co-located Panoramio mark. There are also nice shots of remarkable rock tombs near Karpasyanda.

Selected places from map 65 of the Barrington Atlas, covering Lycia and Pisidia, are at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/nwlink.

Looks like Dr. Fee-enstein has finished bolting together his new creation, and is beginning to run some current through it. I see more feeds than ever, which i suspect means even more press releases, thinly-disguised product blogola, .NET fanboys, zimboe minions of SOA, and Python nutjobs that you'll want to filter. As soon as Planet Geospatial consolidates, I'll update my Greasemonkey script.

Update: If you're a user of the Planet Geospatial Scrubber and have any ideas for it, feel free to let me know with a comment or email.

Google's Geographic Web is now searchable, and all the other wanna-be Geo-Webs just became much less relevant.

Update: more coverage here and here.