From the reviews:
"The Geospatial Web is an edited volume of 25 chapters, which attempts to bring together the academic research on Geospatial web technologies and provide an up-to-date review of this fast moving discipline. … would suit postgraduate students who have the knowledge to be selective: picking out chapters of particular relevance." (Ed. Parsons, GIS Professional, Issue 17, 2007)
The Geospatial Web will have a profound impact on managing knowledge, structuring workflows within and across organizations, and communicating with like-minded individuals in virtual communities. The enabling technologies for the Geospatial Web are geo-browsers such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth and Microsoft Live Local 3D. These three-dimensional platforms revolutionize the production and consumption of media products. They not only reveal the geographic distribution of Web resources and services, but also bring together people of similar interests, browsing behavior, or geographic location.
This book summarizes the latest research on the Geospatial Web’s technical foundations, describes information services and collaborative tools built on top of geo-browsers, and investigates the environmental, social and economic impacts of geospatial applications. The role of contextual knowledge in shaping the emerging network society deserves particular attention. By integrating geospatial and semantic technology, such contextual knowledge can be extracted automatically – for example, when processing Web documents to identify relevant content for customized news services.
Presenting 25 chapters from renowned international experts, this edited volume will be invaluable to scientists, students, practitioners, and all those interested in the emerging field of geospatial Web technology. Updates and additional resources are available at www.geospatialweb.com.
Foreword by Patrick J. Hogan, Program Manager of NASA World Wind.
Google's roving Street View spycam may blur your face, but it's got your number. The Street View service is under fire in Germany for scanning private WLAN networks, and recording users' unique Mac (Media Access Control) addresses, as the car trundles along.
Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar says he's "horrified" by the discovery.
"I am appalled… I call upon Google to delete previously unlawfully collected personal data on the wireless network immediately and stop the rides for Street View," according to German broadcaster ARD.
Spooks have long desired the ability to cross reference the Mac address of a user's connection with their real identity and virtual identity, such as their Gmail or Facebook account.
Other companies have logged broadcasting WLAN networks and published the information. By contrast Google has not published the WLAN map, or Street View in Germany; Google hopes to launch the service by the end of the year.
But Google's uniquely cavalier approach to privacy, and its potential ability to cross reference the information raises additional concerns. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said internet users shouldn't worry about privacy unless they have something to hide. And when there's nowhere left to hide...?
More from ARD here and Der Spiegel, here. The latter describes Google as a "data octopus". ®
Next Thursday, April 29th, the first of a series of free live training seminars focused on different features of the upcoming ArcGIS 10 release will kick off. For the remainder of the year, we will be broadcasting about two live training seminars per month (with the exception of July, when all attention shifts to the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego).
If you haven't yet been able to attend an ESRI conference or seminar where ArcGIS 10 has been previewed, don't miss these opportunities to learn about the new ArcGIS 10 tools that will change the way you do your GIS tasks (for the better) and improve the quality of your GIS products.
Next week's seminar covers some of the major enhancements coming in ArcMap. The second seminar in the series covers how you can use Python scripting, which is more fully integrated into the software at ArcGIS 10, to automate time-consuming GIS workflows. Have you ever had the experience of a well-meaning colleague moving your map data to a different network location, which then resulted in you having to cycle through dozens of map documents fixing the red exclamation marks next to all the layers? If so, you'll definitely want to watch the May 13th seminar to see how the new ArcPy mapping module greatly enhances map document and layer management.
Other seminars planned for the remainder of the year will cover the new core tools and data model for imagery at ArcGIS 10, ArcGIS Explorer Online, editing on the desktop and on the Web, Web maps, geocoding, and more.
To request an e-mail reminder for an individual seminar, visit the live training seminar schedule page—you can also request a reminder for all seminars by clicking the link to get a reminder for an individual seminar and then checking the option to get a reminder for all future ESRI live training seminars.
As always, a couple of weeks after each live broadcast a free recording will be available for viewing on the ESRI Training Web site.
Far more people in
They also urge the world community to set a new target beyond the MDG (which calls for a 50 percent improvement in access to adequate sanitation by 2015) to the achievement of 100 percent coverage by 2025.
Recent UN research in
Worldwide some 1.1 billion people defecate in the open. And data show progress in creating access to toilets and sanitation lags far behind world MDG targets, even as mobile phone connections continue to a predicted 1 billion in
The new UNU report cites a rough cost of $300 to build a toilet, including labour, materials and advice. Worldwide, an estimated $358 billion is needed between now and 2015 to reach the MDG for sanitation -- some of this funding is already mobilized at national and international levels.
