[Freegis-list] Geoweb tools - Platial Launches MapKit

[Jo Walsh]

dear Roger,
On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 07:34:19PM +0100, Roger Longhorn wrote:
> Another interesting advance in free tools to make Google Earth more 
> useful to those wishing to do more than merely paste a 'push pin' onto 
> an image. 

While it's great that Platial have sent out a press release, I don't
see how this is different from worldkit, mapbureau, mapufacture, openmap,
openlayers, mapbuilder, mapbender, or any of the heritage tools, open
source or not, that have been released in a less PR-friendly climate.

> And with more and more imagery becoming available for free 
> (see recent Canadian government announcements), this is just another 
> example of how "GIS Lite" can be extended in the future to open up new 
> possibilities for non-core GIS functionality in freely available services.

I wonder how "Freely available" is defined here. Not freely available
to redistribute, to use in any kind of offline application, to
repackage or to adapt. No guarantees about future functionality,
sustainability or quality of service, not strong enough for a real
commercial or a reliable civic application. 
http://blog.okfn.org/2006/09/04/open-apis-dont-equal-open-knowledge/ 

> Perhaps Ed Parsons summed it up best when he said that the GIS industry 
> needed to "look to the edge to innovate". Unfortunately, playing 
> 'catch-up' is hard to do. Most GIS vendors seem to have trouble simply 
> launching the latest upgrades to their software based on known customer 
> demands without adding yet more complexity to their offerings by 
> 'looking to the edge'.

Well, both you and I are preaching to the choir here, knowing that the
open source GIS community is leading over the edge, driving the
implementation and development of open standards which will benefit 
all customers and eventually even trickles back into proprietary products.
And what has held the community back - what led the WorldWind project,
deluged with non-US users demanding to know where their data was, to
start the Free Earth Foundation - what led the Open Source Geospatial
Foundation to start working on open geodata as well as open source
software right from the start - is data availability, the lack thereof.

> important contributions - and one wonders just how many hundreds of 
> similar applications have never been implemented, by resource-starved 
> NGOs, small firms, citizens groups, etc. - because they lacked the 
> knowledge and resources (cash!) to afford to implement a 'heavy lift' 
> GIS solution, let alone a web server, geo or otherwise.

Knowledge and resources are still needed to write applications to a
proprietary API. Web service storage space has been a free-as-in-beer
commodity for a long time, and recently at a sophisticated level,
looking at hosted app services like Ning. All i can really see that
has changed is the level of PR awareness and the amounts of gold that
the West Coast megacorps are throwing around in data licensing costs
in order to capitalise on that PR to boost imaginary-numbers market-cap.

Well, let our friends at Platial keep sending out press releases, and
hope that rising tide keeps raising all boats and doesn't swamp a lot
of small ones,


jo