Mapping Hacks

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Preface

services. A number of proposals are afoot to limit access to geospatial data

and services, to create the basis for proprietary offerings, not unlike AOL or

today’s cable media.

Meanwhile, based on fairly open mapping protocols like the RDFIG geo-

vocabulary from the W3C, as well as universal HTML, HTTP, and Java plat-

forms, thousands of independent developers worldwide are trying to take

advantage of the location-aware applications described previously to build

different kinds of location-based services. These academics, researchers,

developers, bloggers, artists, cartographers, and GPS hobbyists are experi-

menting with everything from augmented reality and robotics to psychogeo-

graphic and GPS art. The parallels are obvious: while walled gardens and

proprietary mobile applications represent the kinds of services offered in the

early days by Dialog and Prodigy, the open geoservices look more like the

period just before the Web and its web browsers created a game-changing

new medium of communication and commerce. If proprietary models don’t

dominate, some of today’s experiments will define the future model for a

broad-based platform for location-based services.

Brother, Can You Spare a Polygon Layer?

Public geodata policies directly or indirectly address geodata access, protec-

tion, and use, including such issues as privacy, ownership, and access to

public data. These matter, or ...