I was excited to see this. I think Pipes and YQL are some of the most exciting mashup technologies out there right now, so it’s heartening to see Yahoo! hiring for this team in the midst of all the turmoil there.
http://blog.pipes.yahoo.net/2009/10/22/job-principal-software-engineer-pipes-team/
Bjørn Sandvik does a great job explaining why the usual ways of projecting KML data don’t work well for world maps. For example, often “Greenland looks like the same size of South America, while it is actually 8 times smaller.” Specifying coordinate reference systems (CRS) in KML was one issue OGC struggles with when considering new features for KML. Do you think one should be able to at least “hint” at what CRS should be used for a particular KML file?
KML projections [From KML projections]
Interesting Amazon “geo-cloud” news via O’Reilly Radar. The skinny is that you can use TIGER shapefiles on a virtual hard drive, IF you buy Amazon EC2 services. This could be a great business model showing how free data can promote the use of pay services.
Last week at Ignite Where Eric Gundersen of Development Seed made a significant announcement for geohackers looking for easy access to open geodata. Amazon will be hosting a copy of TIGER data on EC2 as an EBS (Elastic Block Storage).
This means that you can now load all of this data directly onto one of Amazon’s virtual machines, use the power of the cloud to work with these large data sets, generate output that you can then save on Amazon’s storage, and even use Amazon’s cloud to distribute what you make.
Google announced a data API for Maps this morning in San Jose. This is basically a CRUD service for storing geodata in “the cloud” that leverages Atom in lots of ways. That didn’t sound very world-shaking to me at first since there aren’t even any basic spatial query functions, but there are some ways in which this could be a game-changing service — if you trust Google to be your data custodian.
I’ve felt something like this has been needed for a long time. In my past life doing GIS for urban planning a lot of great initiatives got bogged down by the complexities of how and where to store data and who would administer it after the MIT “techies” left. Hopefully this kind of service gets us over that hurdle.
It will be very interesting to see the uptake of this.
One of the most interesting presentations I saw at ETech was on credit risk data. Here’s a summary from: http://en.oreilly.com/et2009/public/schedule/detail/7513
With our latest project, FreeRisk, we aggregate accurate, accredited risk data, enabling users to generate crowd-sourced algorithms to analyze credit risk and allowing anyone to view the results of these algorithms. FreeRisk aggregates both all standardized XBRL data and public-domain financial data, as well as user-generated content incorporating unstructured data released in financial reports like footnotes, critical to accurate risk assessment. This system allows credit evaluators to focus exclusively on creating and applying risk analytics, instead of working through the complex data management tasks traditionally required to solve these problems or relying on black-box credit ratings.
These guys are extremely smart and have spent a lot of time working with XBRL, and yet one of their main conclusions was that XBRL was too complicated and therefore didn’t have a bright future. Thought that was very interesting.