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.

The big news of the week was Microsoft Virtual Earth’s announcement of a new version of Live Maps, and Google following days later with a new feature called My Maps. These are both ways, put simply, to do heads-up digitizing in a Web browser!
The importance of this is development is hard to exaggerate. For years the consumer marketplace has done street mapping extremely well. But that was just streets. “Real” GIS folks need to overlay data from various sources, right? Then last year OpenLayers let you have the best of both worlds, overlaying any arbitrary WMS on top of a Google Maps base map. With the merger of OpenLayers and Community Mapbuilder, expect to soon see a Google Maps base map under your choice of WMS and WFS services and/or embedded GML data, styled with SLD and all wrapped up in a nice KML or Context document.
Add to this the ability to create geographic content in your Web browser and access it via a URL, and a very interesting vision of Web-based GIS begins to emerge. It’s a vision that’s very different from the one the GIS conference circuit has been giving us all decade. I could expound on what I think that vision is, but that’s not really important. The most interesting thing I see here is that the architecture is so beautifully loosely-coupled that there is room for everyone’s vision to be realized. One thing I will predict is that the truly interesting time for Geo-startups begins now.

p.s. Does anyone else find it odd that such a major new feature was introduced by two pretty big companies in the same week? Coincidence, or something else? Please Adena get some dirt on this! inaccurate statement, see comments –Raj