NSGIC Honors Ivan DeLoatch

The NSGIC Board has awarded FGDC Staff Director Ivan DeLoatch with its its NSGIC Distinguished Service Award for his work with the FGDC pertaining to the Geospatial Line of Business, one of the President's E-Government initiatives.

The award was presented during a Capitol Hill breakfast meeting as part of the NSGIC Mid-Year Meetings.

The NSGIC Distinguished Service Award is meant to recognize "leadership in advancing the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) by promoting NSGIC's goal of efficient and effective government through prudent implementation of geospatial technologies."

Another Step Towards Universal GIS?

The Google Operating System blog today announces a new feature: Create Personalized Google Maps.

This is a tool to allow users to create personal geodata files, in the KML format, using an interface integrated with Google Maps. The resulting data sets can be held privately or made public.

This looks like it could be a useful tool for allowing public creation of geo-enabled information, but I note that it appears to lack any notion of metadata.

I'd also be interested to know whether the eventual collection of published KML files can be set as a node in the national system of metadata collections. Am I crazy to wonder if this data might not one day be discoverable via the Geospatial One Stop?

Clearing Up Google's Take on New Orleans

Google now has recent, high resolution, and most importantly, Post-Katrina imagery loaded to Google Maps and Google Earth. This is in response to a recent storm of criticism over the loading of pre-Katrina imagery last fall.

Google took this seriously. John Hanke, the Director for Google Maps/Local/Earth, posted about it this morning on the Official Google Blog (About the New Orleans imagery in Google Maps and Earth).

...we recognize the increasingly important role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse, and so we're happy to say that we have been able to expedite the processing of recent (2006) aerial photography for the Gulf Coast area (already in process for an upcoming release) that is equal in resolution to the data it is replacing.

Hanke did note that the change to pre-Katrina imagery took place back in the fall of 2006. He expressed some surprise at the very recent storm of controversy.

The folks at Google should recognize the speed that ideas can move on-line, and the momentum they can generate, even when they are very late in getting started.

Update: Adena and her folks over at All Points Blog make a very good point (Will the Google/Katrina Affair Finally Push Metadata on GM/GE?) about the helpful role that metadata might have played in this situation. had there been any metadata.