Blogger and OS CTO Ed Parsons described Jack Dangermond's vision of the future this way.

There is a clear vision developing around the concept of the Geoweb, a network of both GI clients and servers which offer the potential to democratise not just geographic data, but also geographical knowledge as represented by the publishing of spatial models or the mounting of analytical task based servers, the ability for example for a server in Australia to process data on a server in the USA, for display on a PDA in England.

Sean Gilles notes on his blog that he's at work on a Python client library for OGC Web Services. He writes in his blog about the project: OWSLib.

NASA announced the awards for the Earth Applications Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program. Ninety-nine proposals offered explorations into smart sensing, sensor web communications and enabling model interactions in sensor webs. Twenty-eight projects were selected for approximately $31 million in funding, over a period of three years.

c|net offers a NASA video highlighting the use of Sensor Webs for tracking forest fires.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the creation of the Geospatial Incubator Group on July 5th. The group will address "issues of location and geographical properties of resources for the Web of today and tomorrow."

Yours truly penned an article for GeoInformatics to highlight the differences and synergies between open source and open standards. read more | add new comment

WMS Javascript Library is, per the website, a tool "to facilitate the creation of dynamics maps using freely available WMS servers." Further:

The WMS Javascript Library provides an API to allow the creation of dynamic maps including simple zoom functionality, clickable googlemap-like overlays, and GetFeatureInfo queries by clicking the map (coming soon).
See the examples for details.

I'm not a programmer, but this looks really easy to use.

OGC gave a formal presentation at this year's Where 2.0, but its work showed up elsewhere, according to bloggers who covered the event.

Coverage of OSGeo from Wired notes a demo of WMS and WFS.

They [Brent Owens and Arnulf Benno Christi of Mapbender fame] walked through the process of simple map creation using the WMS and WFS protocols defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Through GetMap and GetFeature requests, users can retrieve vector-based map data, add or delete elements, and then output the results. The maps can be outputted as GIF or JPG for display in a browser, a PDF or SVG for publication, and as KML (Keyhole Markup Language) for insertion into Google Earth.

The confusion abounds in the marketplace about the distinction between "open source" and "open standards." GeoWorld offers a primer by OGC's Sam Bacharach that should help alleviate some of the mix ups.

Amit Shah, a Project Manager at IndiaNIC Infotec offers up a nice introductory article on "GIS and Spatial Extensions with MySQL" in his blog. He concludes:

In the current implementation of spatial extensions in MySQL, parts of the OpenGIS Simple Features have been left out. Among these are:

Functions - Some functions are missing, among them some that deal with creating new spatial data values from existing ones, such as Union() (not to be confused with the SQL UNION operator) and Intersection() (not to be confused with the Intersect() spatial function).