government

Maryland Council on Open Data

by

Back in May, I had the honor of being appointed to the newly established Maryland Council on Open Data. The Council had its inaugural meeting in Baltimore yesterday and was heavily attended, including attendance by Governor Martin O’Malley. I’ll discuss his remarks to the group later.

As the first meeting of a new group, it went off largely as I expected. The agenda consisted primarily of an overview of the establishing legislation, a review of ethics requirements, demos of the existing open data portals, discussion of the history of open data in Maryland, and remarks from the Governor.

Read more

SpatiaLite for Android Available

by

On what seems to be turning into SpatiaLite Monday, Sandro Furieri also announced on the SpatiaLite Google Group the availability of a stable version of SpatiaLite for Android. I am happy to see that this version was developed and contributed back by the US Army Geospatial Center. The fact that they contributed back to the … Read more

Wilson Center to Discuss FCC National Broadband Map

by

One of the most compelling recent success stories for open-source geospatial tools in the Federal Government has been the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) National Broadband Map initiative. It has been a very visible example of the stability, scalability, flexibility, and power of open-source geospatial tools. The Woodrow Wilson Center will be hosting a case study … Read more

FCC Open-Sources MapBox Module for Drupal

by

See the FCC announcement here.

MapBox has been winning a lot of high-profile converts lately, such as Foursquare. In my opinion, it’s one of the more perfect web mapping solutions, commercial or open-source, to come along in a while. The combination of cartographic engine (Mapnik), tile generation (TileMill) and storage (MBTiles) make MapBox one of the most elegant ways to serve beautiful maps currently available.

Read more

FCC Broadband Map Featured by CBS

by

Michael Byrne of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave a really good talk at FOSS4G, telling the story of the FCC National Broadband Map application, which is built on open-source geospatial tools. In addition to being open-source, it’s a modern web system that makes diligent use of caching and other techniques to achieve great performance. … Read more

Open Government, Open Data and Some Lessons from Arkansas

by

I was reading Brian Timoney’s excellent post “Open Government is a Slammed Door at the BLM,” when I encountered this line:

Top-down, large scale spatial-data-integration-by-directive simply doesn’t have the track record of success to justify the costs…

This resonates well with observations that I have made during the course of my recent work with the Arkansas GIO office. The immediate focus of that work was to help AGIO assess the current state of their GeoStor platform and gather data about current and emerging capabilities in order to support decision-making about whether to migrate to a hosted (cloud) environment. In the course of doing that work, I learned about the collaborative approach AGIO has taken with the cities and counties of Arkansas, which also informs some of the functional requirements of GeoStor.

Read more