Quoting James Fee:

First we’ve got new functionality in the Google Maps Data API. First off you can now perform geospatial and attribution queries on data stored on Google’s MyMap. Now of course this isn’t paleo-type spatial queries, just simple stuff that solve 80% of all queries you’d need to complete. Simple web apps need not fancy complicated APIs and clearly Google is the master of this. So upload your data into Google’s My Maps and then query it to display on a Google Maps application. Simple and sweet.

This is also sweet from an engineering perspective. Yes, simple bounding box or radius search are "only" "80-20 rule" features, but at the same time are also features that power users are going to use almost 100 percent of the time for a lot of tasks. In other words: highly reusable features. Let's say you want to select features of a collection that are contained within another feature. You could build up a result set by iterating over each feature in the collection no matter where it is and evaluate containment with the filtering feature for every single one of them. Better yet would be to first eliminate candidate features that aren't even in the same ballpark as the filtering feature by using an indexed bounding box search. This is the default mode of operation for newer functions in PostGIS, for example, like ST_Contains:

This function call will automatically include a bounding box comparison that will make use of any indexes that are available on the geometries. To avoid index use, use the function _ST_Contains.

(By the way, nice new docs there, PostGIS people!) Simple indexed search is the initial boost to more interesting queries. Indexed operations are best provided by the map data collections themselves. Higher order processing, some of which can be done in parallel, can be left to other resources or services. This is, of course (except for the parallel considerations), the premise of the OGC's Web Processing Service, but taken to an extreme where a WFS provides only bounding box and attribute filtering and the WPS does everything else. A familiar pattern, but I'd be surprised if a future Google spatial data processing platform wasn't as different from OGC WPS as the maps data API is from WFS.

Right on the heels of this announcement by a company dipping its toe into queryable geographic feature services is word that my patch for an Atom format has been accepted into OpenLayers. OL features can be serialized to Atom + GeoRSS for posting to an AtomPub collection and fetched feeds with GeoRSS annotated entries can be deserialized into OL feature collections with a large degree of conformance to RFC 4287. Thanks, Tim.

It'll be interesting to see if this takes off and in which direction: position as extension or payload?

Ed Parsons has been beating the drum for open climate data. I like open data, but it's not not without its own problems. A potential problem for science, and scientific consensus, in a brave new world where we are all now climate scientists, is the ramping up of the social denial of service attacks identified by Steve Easterbrook:

But in reality, the denialists don’t care about the science at all; their aim is a PR campaign to sow doubt in the minds of the general public. In the process, they effect a denial-of-service attack on the scientists – the scientists can’t get on with doing their science because their time is taken up responding to frivolous queries (and criticisms) about specific features of the data. And their failure to respond to each and every such query will be trumpeted as an admission that an alleged error is indeed an error. In such an environment, is it perfectly rational not to release data and code – it’s better to pull up the drawbridge and get on with the drudgery of real science in private. That way the only attacks are complaints about lack of openness. Such complaints are bothersome, but much better than the alternative.

In this case, because the science is vitally important for all of us, it’s actually in the public interest that climate scientists be allowed to withhold their data. Which is really a tragic state of affairs. The forces of anti-science have a lot to answer for.

Joe Gregorio has this social denial of service thing nailed:

Let's go back to electronic denial-of-service attacks. They worked because of an inherent asymmetry between the attacker and the attacked. [i.e. from earlier in Gregorio's post: The attacker performs very little computation to send the packets, but the server has to accept them and perform some computation to determine if they are valid or bogus. In this way an attacker with the same or less computational power can overwhelm a bigger host.] The same is true of the social denial-of-service attack where arguments, responses, rebuttals and more importantly time has to be spent responding to the bad faith objections, which are easily written up and tossed onto the mailing list.

Denial of service on climate science was bad enough before the leaked emails, now scientists have to read the emails, parse them, and explain how they don't falsify the science in every public forum and every media outlet. Next, add to the mix climate data and models. What happens when some blog or cable TV gasbag complains that not only do the model results of scientists not match his interpretation of the data, but that he couldn't even get the model to run on his computer, no matter how hard he tried, and that the code itself might be fraudulent. That's not going to be a victory for transparency.

Perhaps we need to match open climate data and models with a change in the rules of our climate debate. Gregorio explains the rules used by the IETF:

Remember that one way to fight a denial of service attack is to raise the amount of computation required by the attacker. In the case of a Working Group the way to do that is by requiring disruptions to take more time and energy. This is where the call for "camera ready copy in the form of a Pace" comes from in the AtomPub WG. Camera ready copy is much more difficult to write than a one or two line objection tossed into a mailing list. Only if you are willing to put in the work to write up a Pace with reasonable text will it start to take up the time of the WG. Your willingness to put in the time and effort to create camera ready copy will distinguish your proposals and objections from those of an attacker.

Similarly, in the climate debate, we could demand that denialists publish their arguments and supporting evidence in peer-reviewed journals. (Note that I'm distinguishing denialists from the skeptics who already do publish in peer-reviewed journals.) Does it risk giving them unwarranted credibility? Maybe, but I think that it's balanced by increased cost. Even low-cost electronic journals completely stacked with friendly reviewers will help level the asymmetry that makes a DOS attack possible. Forcing the denialists to read and personally sign off on the work of others, or even just keeping them occupied correcting each other's grammar and spelling, would be a good start.

We could demand this, and by "we" I mostly mean our media, but that would require our media to transform itself into something that infotains us a little less and edifies us a little more, and that's probably too much to ask, yeah? I don't have an answer, but it's interesting to look at some aspects of the climate debate as a denial of service attack, and I didn't see that perspective come up in any of the many comments on Ed's blog. I also recommend Bryan Lawrence's post on this topic. He doesn't use the word "attack", but certainly expresses some frustration at the extra load put on climate scientists in these times.

There is some inspired street art in Montpellier, the likes of which I've never seen in the uptight places I've previously called home. The works (by Mear One and Asylm, I learned today) on the exterior of the Gymnase Alain Achille caught my eye on my first tram ride to the centre-ville and today I finally took the time to hop off at the Stade Philippidès tram stop and take some photos. The first 4 are of the east-facing wall (click for higher-resolution images):

The north-facing wall has some interesting art too, not signed or having lost its signature:

A little research turned up documentation by Sophie. of this amazing work on a gymnase in Boutonnet. Wow! Must find this one. Mear One, again, I'm guessing, and also guessing that the humping deer weren't part of the original. The gym on Avenue Rimbaud direction Celleneuve has another good one (street view) that I'm hoping to be able to post photos of soon.

Sophie.'s Montpellier set also has some good shots of "Jonny Style" on the streets of Montpellier, like this on Rue du Père Soulas:

Whuh?

I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

I think Google's hiding behind the Patriot Act here. A search engine company wants to hang on to data to analyze it for trends and develop predictive models that it can turn into revenue. There's a business need for the data that the company would find a way to justify, legislation or no.

The second sentence there, the one that Eric Schmidt is taking so much flak over, doesn't disturb me as much as it confuses me. Is he saying that we all need to simply drop the acts and quit keeping secrets from each other? Be more real? Let it all hang out, man? Is he using a provocative statement to check the internet community's pulse? Is it a "tell"? Is he just winding up the haters?

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

How do we keep the tyranny implied in that statement out of the "GeoWeb"?

Somedays I have very mixed feelings about where the "GeoWeb" is going:

Example 1: Intelligent Traffic Systems

Roughly translated: A million cars idling for 10 minutes will consume some 140,000 litres of gasoline. At the same time we have serious global problems with climate change and local problems with air pollution. Why should this be the case? The problem can be seen as one in which there is a lack of communication between the vehicles and the road.

I interpret this to mean that the traffic systems should regulate the highways such that this condition does not take place, or takes place much less frequently. One of the functions of Intelligent Traffic Systems would be to minimize the pollution generated by the use of the highway system. Of course, he does not say how that might entail regulation of an individual’s actions but one can easily imagine the vehicle being told it cannot enter a particular section of the highway, or cannot even be taken out of the drive way. What is key in Wen Jiabao’s remarks is that we can use technology to help us understand the consequences of individual actions, and the relationship between those actions and physical laws (”wisdom of the earth”). We can choose to let a million vehicles idle on the highway, but in doing so we cannot avoid the consequences for air pollution, and for damage to our health and to the planet. What an intelligent traffic system might do then, at the very least, is to make the linkage between actions and consequences visible to all of us, even if it does not yet constrain those actions.

I'm all for a "planetary nervous system", but the thought that it would sooner or later be hooked up to a state-operated planetary immune system that constrains our actions is a bit chilling, no? I'm probably to the left of many, if not most, of my readers, but I'm not ready to be of the body. I suspect it's going to be constant struggle to keep the "Wisdom of the Earth" from being rigged against civil liberties.

David Rees and Get Your War On helped me weather the crazy bender the USA went on from 2001 to 2009. His short essay on Dennes Boon and the Minutemen from Christmas, 2005, is the best piece of rock and roll fan writing of all time:

The first time I heard the Minutemen--on a Saturday afternoon in 8th grade, when my friend lowered the stylus onto "Shit From An Old Notebook," and the song somersaulted out of his RadioShack speakers in an ecstasy of spasmodic guitar and drum fills--is the greatest "first time someone heard a band and their life changed for all time" of all time.

I've opined that GIS programmers should be taught to use Python idioms in the classroom. Less code, fewer bugs, efficiency, and to a smaller degree, socialization into the community of Python programmers are what I see as the happy results. I take it as a given that one wants to use and modify the code of others, share code with others, and see it all improve, which is why I value socialization. "Open Source" isn't just about the license, it's also about code as conversation. Because I've been learning Python (and computer programming in general) as I go, I've written as much clunky Python code as anyone else. Regretfully, I've even exposed some learners to clunky code in workshops. Looking back, I'd prefer to have been taught, and to have taught others, idiomatic Python.

I expect that opinions more informed than mine on the subject of language idioms are likely to appear in comments on Tim Bray's post on idiomatic Clojure.

You can make a spec short and sweet, but there is no guarantee that it will be implemented correctly. Did my woofing about agile standardization anger the format gods, or is GeoJSON really the dribble cup of the "GeoWeb" after all? Check out this excerpt from the timeline of Bill Dollins, who writes from the countryside near Washington, D.C.:

{ ...,
  "id":5993294422,
  "geo":{"type":"Point","coordinates":[38.50745,-76.76051]},
  }

For all the bloggage, not a single geo pundit has noticed that there's a problem. Do you?

Update (2009-11-25): Chris Schmidt summarizes the GeoJSON coordinate order debate.

Update (2009-11-26): To be fixed in the next version of the Twitter API (via Andrew Larcombe and Bill Dollins).

Back channel #geocom chatter inspired me to make this cartoon dedicated to "GeoWeb" evangelists everywhere.

Credits: engraving reproduction from Wikimedia, cutout from http://imaletyoufinish.com.