Kurt Schwehr's post about hCard reminded me of something I had been thinking about before Thanksgiving: the geo microformat needs to be towed into the shop for a major makeover. Compared to GeoRSS or GeoJSON it has very little power. I'm interested in applying hAtom to the Pleiades XHTML docs. Add location and I'd have something like an "hGeoRSS", but the geo microformat isn't going to be adequate for expressing the locations of Pleiades roads or regions.

As part of my work on migrating Pleiades to Plone 3, I'm distilling Zope packages from the original old-style Plone products. The zgeo.geographer introduces the conventional GIS data model of geometries, features, and collections (ala GeoJSON) to Zope and describes an interface for annotating objects with geographic location metadata. The zgeo.spatialindex provides a container-local R-Tree spatial index for geographically annotated objects, enabling fast spatial bounding box searches.

Funny. Yesterday I would have bet that a fake Jack Dangermond would have been the first to appear. Ed really set himself up for this by being such a stark raving Apple fanboy.

Just kidding, Dave. I know people feel the same about REST. There's some similarity between the Agile and REST movements: each really got going about 6-7 years ago and have only just now reached the GIS industry mainstream.

"Domestic Spying, Inc." via an All Points Blog post is a interesting look at GEOINT and the corporations who profit from expanding the War on Terror's home front. In comparison, the GIS media coverage of GEOINT was pretty much what you'd expect from a Trekker's account of Star Trek Con. Kirk Kuykendall also has commentary.

I've made a Plone 3 buildout to get people up and running with reliable versions of PleiadesGeocoder, SpatialIndex, and all their dependencies. You can get it from our repository, build it up, and start it like so:

$ svn co http://svn.gispython.org/svn/zope/geo-products-example/trunk pgx
$ cd pgx
$ python bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout -v
$ ./bin/instance start

Create a Plone site through the ZMI, install the PleiadesGeocoder and SpatialIndex products through the Plone control panel, and you're all set to geocode and spatially index content. Unfortunately, it's not going to work on Windows. I haven't even started looking into how to build GEOS or the spatialindex lib on win32.

Rtree 0.3.0 is in PyPI. This version allows you to delete objects from indexes and perform nearest neighbor queries.

And here's the newest package on the Topic :: Scientific/Engineering :: GIS block: GDAL.

There's an interesting map in "Red, White and 'Green': The Cost of Carbon In the Global Wine Trade," a paper by Tyler "Dr Vino" Colman and Pablo Paster.

The authors find that transportation from vineyard to glass is the major factor in a bottle of wine's carbon footprint, and that east of the of the line the greater efficiency of shipping by boat offsets the distance between Bordeaux and Napa. See Colman's blog post for more. I can already visualize how an online version of their calculator would work.

I've made the necessary configuration changes so that PleiadesGeocoder 1.0b2 works with Plone 2.5 or Plone 3.0. To deploy PleiadesGeocoder in a Plone 3 buildout, add geopy and simplejson to the buildout eggs in buildout.cfg:

[buildout]
...
eggs =
    elementtree
    geopy
    simplejson

and add the PleiadesGeocoder tarball to the list of product distro URLs:

...
[productdistros]
recipe = plone.recipe.distros
urls =
    http://gispython.org/downloads/zope/PleiadesGeocoder-1.0b2.tar.gz
...

Then run the buildout script again to update.

Thanks to David Siedband for the initial testing on Plone 3.

I'll add to the spasm of shallow posts about Kindle in the geo blogosphere: the Kindle does nothing for me. I like paper books. I like the user interface and I like the freedom. Mark Pilgrim captures Amazon's evolving view on this freedom with a couple of quotes:

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007