Welcome to the MetaCarta blog! In this blog, you will find a variety of posts about topics related to geography, geo tagging, mapping, and geography-related open source and Internet technology.
Post topics
The main categories for the posts will be:
- OpenLayers/open source. MetaCarta developed OpenLayers, and now it is part of the public domain. Built off Javascript, OpenLayers is all about making it relatively easy to add dynamic, geographic content to Web pages. In the blog, we plan to highlight advances in OpenLayers, as well as the underlying or related open source technology that makes it possible.
- Use cases. The public is most familiar with geo tagging concepts in terms of free consumer services, such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Business executives often point to well-known examples of adding geographic context to data, as in the case of using it for natural resource exploration and extraction. However, there are many other uses for the technology, and we plan to highlight the most well known, the most promising, the uses with the most return, and new, obscure uses that highlight new opportunities for applying the technology.
- Industry happenings. We will comment on some of the major industry events, including conferences, product release, and changes in industry leadership.
- Cool stuff. There are a variety of products or services that relate to geo tagging, geography, and Web services that will fall into this catch all category of posts.
- Education. Geography and a well-balanced education are critical. We plan on a series of posts that explore how geo tagging and related technology are being or can be used to enhance education at all levels.
- Natural language processing (NSP). To successfully apply data to maps, systems need to be able to analyze the underlying data and understand its applicability. Otherwise, data for Berlin in Germany may be displayed in Berlin in Connecticut, or information about the Northeast won’t be applied to the northern states in the US. We plan to post a variety of articles about the NSP technology, as well as how NSP solutions are fueling geo tagging the most effective solutions.
As you can tell by its name, this is a corporate sponsored blog. That said, the goal of the blog is to open up discussion on a wide-range of geography-related issues — not to be a PR mouthpiece for MetaCarta. Besides posts from our own authors, we will have content from a wide range of guest authors. We will rely on our own internal checks to makes sure we stay true to the vision of the blog, and we will also count on your feedback to make sure we stay the course (your readership and comments will help greatly in that regard).
Moderated comments
As with any blog, user-contributed content — comments — are an important part of the overall value of the site. Encouraging a vibrant discussion on any post is a fundamental goal. As such, we plan to take a light touch in terms of comment moderation. Obviously, any comments that contain offensive comments or personal attacks will not be published. We also won’t publish comments that are off-topic. Other than that, we will publish any comments that further the discussion — including criticisms of the post, feedback about the post content, and ideas for extending the debate.
Looking for your input
We believe you will find the content — both posts and the comments of your peers — well worth the time invested in reading and participating in the discussions. We encourage you to forward this site address — or specific post permalinks — to those you think would find value in the content. And, beyond post-specific feedback, we always encourage reader input, especially on topic we should cover.
Thanks for visiting.
