Tag Archive for 'neogeography'

Open Street Maps as Shapefile for your GIS

Published
by
joesonic
on September 19, 2008
in GIS, GeoWeb and Internet
. 1 Comment

The German company Geofabrik is specialized to neogeography and open geospatial data. Now they provide the download of OpenStreetMaps as daily updated shapefiles. 

The data on their server are regional hierarchical structured. All shapefiles are based on OpenStreetmap-raw data. This XML-based file format dist described  in the OpenStreetMap-Wiki at OSM Protocol Version 0.5.

 

But not all layers of the available OSM data is converted special layers can be requested as additional service.

OSM data is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0-License.

[via Mapperz]

Angelina Jolie and the wikification of GIS

Published
by
admin
on March 3, 2008
in GIS
. 0 Comments

I know, I’m late about this news of Angelinas Geo-tattoo. The Geo-community has produced mash-ups of these locations and so millions of users of Google Maps and Google earth can view an these coordinates on street-level information or uising high resolution statellite imageries for these four places.

jolieTattoo
(Source: “Angelina Jolie is a Geowanker” at O’Reilly Radar)

Example mashup of the coordinates:

TatGraphic

N 11 33 0 E 104 51 00 Maddox Phnom Penh, Cambodia
N 9 2 0 E 38 45 0 Zahara Marley Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
S 22 40 26 E 14 31 40 Shiloh Nouvel Swakopmund, Nambia
N 10 46 0 E 106 41 40 Pax Thien Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

A well-known definition of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)devide GIS in four major component - hardware, software, data and people. The wikification of GIS has clearly been manifested in all these four aspects (Sui 2008). This is one aspect where web 2.0 has influence in GI Science. Also the borders across geographic, social, economic, cultural, and demographic information are blurring. It is not so unusal that J. Dangermond commented in 2007 that the information available over the entire World Wide Web could be georeferenced or geo-tagged in the near future, and that filly georeferenced or geo-tagged world is approaching us far mich faster than anybody ever predicted.

The accelerating wikification of GIS has also promoted the emergence of what Turner (2006) calls NeoGeography. As demonstrated by the Angelina Jolie story, the NeoGeography is practiced by the masses using the last Web 2.0 technologies.

[The wikification of GIS and its consequences: Or Angelina Jolie's new tattoo and the future of this, Daniel Z. Sui, 2008, Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, United States]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.