rajsingh.org blog

the geoweb, interoperability, OGC, and random rants
October 31st, 2007

I was working on a Yahoo Pipe last night, and I noticed that Pipes will automatically figure out if you have created a geospatial pipe, and show it on a map without you having to do anything! And to top it off, you can get KML output of your pipe! Now if they drop the old-fashioned W3C Geo point-only format and support real GeoRSS they’ll really have something (hint, hint).

What this means is that you can create and export KML content from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! now. The mind bubbles at the possibilities…

By the way, if you’re actually interested the content of my Cambridge, MA Happenings pipe and not just the technology, you should know that there are a lot of good events that aren’t getting properly geo-located, so read the feed, not just the map.

October 29th, 2007

I’d like to send out a welcome to one of OGC’s newest members, Microsoft. The SQL Server team is readying spatial support in the database with SQL Server 2008, which will have lot’s of OGC goodness built-in, like Well-Known Text and GML data encodings, and Simple Features for SQL access.

The Virtual Earth team has long supported GeoRSS in their Collections, and KML import and export is the newest OGC-related feature in the Virtual Earth/Live Maps product. Check out Steve Lombardi’s excellent blog for more info. MapCruncher is another very cool offering in the online-geo space that allows “regular” folks to upload scanned maps and perform some basic image rectification so that they can be overlaid on orthophotos.

I can’t wait to see what people do with all these features, and hope to see some cool cross-product mashups with all the content in Google, Microsoft and Yahoo geo-services.