Ovum has recently released a market report titled, “The potential of mapping mashups.” The report focuses on the value and potential for map mashups, and draws a distinction between mashups versus portals. There’s also details here about enterprise versus consumer applications, and the value of spatial analysis.

“Mashups have enormous potential and a wide range of uses across both business and consumer domains, but their value is also tightly linked to underlying Web 2.0 ideals that bring together a rapid and less expensive development process with the ability to separate information from its presentation in a way that makes it open, collaborative, reusable and shareable. This report examines the phenomenon behind mapping mashups and looks at potential and constraints of usages in a Web 2.0 world.”

You can view the report outline, and order it for £399, here.

The Fraud Discovery Institute is investigating Trimble Navigation regarding a resume misrepresentation in a recent Wall Street Journal article as well as recent share activity. According to the PR, the resume of the Chief Technical Officer, Dennis Workman, indicates a master’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT that the school denies.

The company has also invested $250 Million in a share repurchase program that represents 91% of the company’s net income and 82% of cash flow, while company insiders have sold more than 90,000 shares with proceeds of more than $3 million. The pattern is said to resemble a ‘pump-and-dump’ strategy.

The average sale price of the insider sales was $31.23 per share, while the stock is currently trading at $16.14. Given the recent slide in all stocks, it seems like fortunate timing to have unloaded stocks near their 52-week high of $41.

It’s unfortunate when any company comes under such scrutiny, and it will be interesting to see how Trimble responds.

President-elect Obama sent a strong message to delegates of a climate change conference in California this week by delivering a video taped address that unequivocally stated his stance on global warming, and his support for global cooperation.

“Once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations. . . . Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”

Read more in this story in the Los Angeles Times.

Kass Green, president of Kass Green & Associates and former president of Space Imaging Solutions, spoke yesterday at the Pecora Remote Sensing Symposium about the 30 years of national land imaging success that is still in jeopardy without action from the incoming administration. Green indicated that while the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LCDM) is now funded, there’s still a need for the incoming administration to act in order to shore up the commitment to earth observation, including the call for Imagery for the Nation.

Green mentioned that president-elect Obama has spelled out a space policy that includes a commitment to the Landsat program. I found record of this in a status report released in mid-August by SpaceRef, but not referenced on Obama’s own policy pages on his website:

Enhancing Earth Mapping: Obama will continue support for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, which allows study of the earth’s land surfaces and provides valuable data for agricultural, educational, scientific, and government use.

While there is growing excitement for a strong future of earth observation and mapping policy from the incoming administration, there’s also a tempering of expectations given the large issues of the war, energy and the economy. In fact, Gene Whitney, former Assistant director for Environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, spoke solely about a reasoned approach to the incoming administration that would focus less on technology and the investments that are needed, and more on the societal benefits of earth observation.

The earth observation and mapping communities are energized by the potential for dramatic change that would revitalize national technology investment and provide clearer policy objectives. It’s good to see the direct mention of Earth mapping in Obama’s stance on space policy, and it will be interesting to see a clarification of commitments in the coming months.

I visited with Dynamic Aviation yesterday at the Pecora Symposium, and learned of some interesting large-scale aerial operations to control pests and disease. Dynamic Aviation was responsible for the aerial spraying of thousands of acres in Texas after Hurricane Ike to kill mosquitos that were reaching epic proportions due to the saturated ground.

These planes are also equipped with hoppers that have been used to disperse oral vaccines from the air. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is conducting a broad-scale effort to limit the western expansion of raccoon rabies. The planes drop biscuits made of fish meal that contain the rabies vaccine, that animals find and eat, inoculating themselves. This large-scale “vaccine barrier” effort runs from eastern Ohio at the border of Lake Erie all the way down the Appalachian ridge to Mobile County, Alabama at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.

Another interesting application is designed to halt the spread of the Mediterranean fruit fly by dropping sterilized male fruit flies from the air. A contract company breeds the fruit fly, the males are separated and sterilized with gamma rays and then chilled to induce suspended animation. The flies are dropped from the air at 8,000 feet and as they fall they warm up and begin flying. The sterilized males court the females and mate without producing any offspring, and the insects die out. All without spraying harmful chemicals.

I’m attending the 17th Annual Pecora Seminar in Denver today, and have just heard a stirring presentation by Berrien Moore, executive director of Climate Central, and chair of the committee on Earth Studies at the National Research Council. Moore began his discussions by relating the current economic crisis with the climate crisis, warning that all complex systems have instabilities and that we need to beware of positive feedback loops.

Moore pointed out the Keeling Record of the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere from 1958 through 2005, recorded daily at Mauna Loa for that time period. The record and increase of carbon cycle records continue to outperform our worst case models, and we don’t understand the implications. We are also faced with decreasing performance from our oceans and forests as their carbon sequestration capability becomes saturated.

One slide helped bring the decrease of Arctic sea ice into perspective. In 1980 sea ice was the same size as the contiguous United States, and by 2007 the melt was equal to all states east of the Mississippi. All models of sea ice melt are being shattered by the increased melt cycles taking place, and we don’t understand the implications.

While economic activity has driven the emission growth, the current economic realities make it an excellent time to act. But, to stabilize the atmosphere we have to drop emissions by 80%. Moore was rather blunt in his assessment and recommendations for climate policy action in order to address this issue by suggesting that we have to:

• Create a national system, and not individual states making their own choices
• Make mandatory carbon emission limits.
• Ensure that limits are verifiable. Carbon offsets could be a $700B annual business by 2012 to address the limits. But with such a large market untruths will happen without observations
• Penalties need to be stiff for companies, and emission charges must be difficult to soften
• We have to act soon.

Moore’s final thoughts for this time of great change and call to action are that we:

• Need a new federation between NASA, NOAA and Interior (but not a combination into a new department). This federation has to have real teeth, because observational issues go well beyond the scientific issues
• Need a National Climate Council on par with the National Security Council
• Need to better understand the fossil carbon cycle
• And the United States needs to be a creative leader

In closing, Moore reminded all of us that climate change and the challenge of climate change are above and on top of all the other problems on the planet (food, fisheries, water, energy, biodiversity, etc.)

There’s a growing movement of young farmers returning to the land to grow food in a natural way. The website Serve Your Country Food aims to map and create a community for these farmers for advocacy, education and infrastructure. The above map is a creative Google Maps mashup, and there’s a whole page devoted to maps on this site. Turns out that there’s more than one green advocate with a love and advocacy for mapping.

The issue of standards is quite complex in the BIM world, but the benefits are perhaps even greater for open systems than in the GIS space. The eagerness of the BIM community to move toward interoperability has led them to tap the tried and proven approach of the Open Geospatial Consortium to conduct an interoperability testbed that’s now underway.

Louis Hecht, director of business development at OGC is coordinating the AECOO-1 Testbed to align AEC industry information technology and information pathways. He just wrote a feature that is now posted on the V1 Magazine homepage that outlines some of the issues that this market faces.

Excerpt:

“The “I” in BIM is not about automating paper-based processes.  It is about synchronizing information across applications to speed up, make more relevant and shorten certain building-related workflows. It is about simulation, decision support, data bases, and purpose-driven content sharing. To address the business issues confronting the global building industry, any vendor’s BIM needs to interoperate across the Internet with a wide range of other software solutions, providing a reliable basis for tracking and making decisions during the building’s life cycle.”

Read the full feature here.

GITA has released the first in a series of whitepapers on, The Geospatial Dimensions of Critical Infrastructure and Emergency Response. The first of the series is titled, “Infrastructure Interdependencies,” and it contains valuable insight into how the failure of one piece of infrastructure can have rippling effects that take down the multiple and often co-located systems that we rely on for modern life.

The report specifically focuses on the infrastructure of transportation, communication, water/wastewater, and energy (both electric and oil and gas). The geospatial dimensions of these critical infrastructures are discussed with several compelling examples of the ripple effect of disaster from recent incidents.

“This interrelationship among infrastructures and its potential for Infrastructure Interdependencies cascading effects was never more evident than in late July 2001 when a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel, resulting in a fire. This disaster, in addition to its expected effect on rail system traffic, automobile traffic, and emergency services, caused a cascading degradation of infrastructure components not previously anticipated. For example, the fire in the tunnel caused a water main to break directly above the tunnel. The break also caused localized flooding in the surrounding area. As a direct result of the flooding, an electrical outage affected several thousand Baltimore residences. Fiber optical lines running through the tunnel were also destroyed. This resulted in major disruptions to phone and cell phone service, e-mail service, Web services, and data services to major corporations. Disruption to rail services and its effects on the Middle Atlantic States included delays in coal delivery and also limestone delivery for steel production.”

The whitepaper report is the first in a series of six that will next address each specific infrastructure category individually, and is part of a broad mission by GITA to identify geospatial technology as a centeral tool for addressing infrastructure degradation, critical infrastructure protection and emergency response. Each of these themes is also part of the program for the 2009 Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference that will take place in Tampa in April.

I spoke to Bob Samborski, GITA’s executive director about the planned outreach on this subject. He described a three-phased approach to raise awareness about the vulnerability of the interdependies of this critical infrastructure in each vertical market, a connection of the geospatial toolset to connect these communities and provide a plan of action in emergencies, and an effort to outline the spatial data infrastructure (the ‘dial tone’ as he put it) that will efficiently bring these communities together.

I’m excited about this measured and ongoing approach to raise awareness about this important issue. I’ll be following the release of each subsequent whitepaper in this series and look forward to attending presentations on this top in Tampa in April.

This first installment was written by Dave DiSera, Talbot Brooks and Brent Jones. You can download the full whitepaper in PDF format here.

Archaeologists have discovered a series of connected caves and tunnels that the Mayans altered to match their stories about the journey to the afterlife. It has been understood that the Mayans viewed caves as sacred, and other altered caves have been found, but this series of caves are the largest ever found. There are underground roads and alters, and carvings dedicated to their gods of death. The caves are located in the center of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.

Watch this video from National Geographic that reports on this discovery, and takes you down in the caves. You can read more about the discovery in this AP story.