In a video for Reuters, Ed Parsons describes the future of geospatial from Google. The convergence of geospatial with personal information – including a vision that your phone may one day alert you at breakfast that you can take your time this morning, as your train has been delayed 20 minutes.

 

MSNBC have a post showing a recently created map of each of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 4.0 or greater recorded between 1898 and 2003. It’s a great-looking map that, unsurprisingly, does a fine job of highlighting the plate boundaries.

 

Esri (US) has published an article entitled ‘Strengthening the GIS profession’, which asks how GIS, as a profession, fits within the other geospatial disciplines, and how we can better define the standards of training that go into creating a ‘GIS Professional.’ A good read with some salient points.

 

The American Surveyor has an article written by a land surveyor that discusses the benefits of GIS to surveyors, and addresses some common misconceptions. Worth a read if you haven’t yet integrated a GIS into your surveying workflow.

 

Andy Woodruff has posted a wonderful piece on ‘The end of imagination’, which talks about how, as maps move closer and closer toward real-world representations, that it may spell the end of the imaginative cartographer. A nice afternoon read outlining some experiences that readers of Spatial Source can surely relate to.

 

Ogle Earth has a post that talks about the way that government bodies pressure online maps providers (the focus of the piece is Google) into censoring their maps. The post details some of the restrictions placed on South Korea, but also questions the point of such censorship when international domains – still accessible from within the censored country – can display the unfettered information, anyway.

 

Science 2.0 has an overview of the many Earth Observation networks available worldwide, and asks the question: are there too many, or too little?