The most recent download of Google Earth (client) includes a number of enhancements but support for OGC's Web Map Service Spec is most exciting to readers of this blog. The software can be downloaded here and Stefan Geens offers a nice graphics rich walk through how it works. Of note, "There are plenty of WMS servers preloaded for you to try right out of the box."

Sam Bacharach was interviewed on A Very Spatial Podcast, episode 58 (at minute 12:17). He explains what OGC is about and how it it helping to enable interoperability.

You can see the impact of OGC on the IT/geospatial market via job ads. This one says it all. The job is in Australia.

Key desirable skills include: System Support/Administration for Unix (Solaris, Linux) & J2EE platforms Scripting (Shell, Perl).

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 | Adena Schutzberg's blog | 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.