Public GeoData Organisation petition

The petition states:

We the undersigned, ask Members of the European Parliament to adequately amend or, failing that, to reject the current draft of the INSPIRE Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastructure because it:

* Does not guarantee that European citizens and businesses can download and freely re-use Geographic Information collected by government.
* Instead it entrenches a policy of charging citizens for information they have already paid to collect, enforced by state copyright over geographic information.

Given that:

* Public Geographic Information is the bedrock of how civil society is managed in the information age.
* Free map data could enable a new generation of location-based technologies with enormous economic and social potential.
* Open access to geodata is the best way to ensure co-operation between Europe's government agencies on environmental and census data, and in other important fields.

The INSPIRE Directive in its current form risks holding back the economic and social potential in maps and location-based technology in Europe by many years.

7200 signatures and counting. What is the deal with GeoData collected in Australia, anyone know? (What is Inspire?)

Technorati Tags: LBS, location based services, geodata, petition, public geodata, inspire, spatial, australia, europe, gps, global, positioning

GSMLoc project

From Christopher Schmidt, Web Developer and GSM/LBS enthusiast - his GSMLOC project.

Ever wanted to know where you were, but didn't have a GPS handy? Wondered about ways to use that cell phone sitting in your pocket to find out where you are?

These are things that the network providers want to offer to you -- at high cost, either to you or a partner that would charge the cost back to you.

As a broke college student, I asked myself these things. Then I got a GPS, and realized that there *is* another way around it. With some Python code and a lot of free time, I wandered around town, recording GPS traces and associating them with cell towers.

This project was born of that. I've loaded my data in, and I'm working with other people around the country (US) and the world to collect data in every city, town, country. Want to help? Grab a program, grab a GPS, and upload some data. Don't have a GPS? Use the simple form to enter your location and cell ID.

Wired had something to say about it too:

Schmidt spends his time wandering around his hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, using his custom cell-phone software to unmask the ID numbers on each GSM cell tower he passes. Then he associates that tower ID with a GPS-defined location, and uploads it to his website.

When his electronic surveying is complete, Schmidt will have a system that can tell him where he is at all times -- without GPS -- by triangulating the signals from the newly mapped cell towers.

Calling himself a "neogeographer," Schmidt is part of a generation of coders whose work is inspired by easily obtained map data, as well as the mashups made possible by Google Maps and Microsoft's Virtual Earth.

The Geowanking project sounds coooool.
I've long been a fan of such projects as platial - I was speaking last year about how these mashups will change the face of GSM and LBS. Bring it on!

Technorati Tags: LBS, GPS, Location Based Services, GSM, triangulation, Christopher Schmidt, GSMLoc, Wired, GeoWank, platial