"The model will serve as a resource for career guidance, curriculum development and evaluation, career pathway development, recruitment and hiring, continuing professional development, certification and assessment development, apprenticeship program development and outreach efforts to promote geospatial technology careers," the DOL said in a press release Thursday.

What This Means for the Geospatial Community

The creation of a DOL competency model affirms that the U.S. government now considers geospatial technology to be an emerging industry that is important to the economic success of the nation. The attention and recognition of the industry certainly shines a positive light to fans of geographic information systems (GIS), but what does having a competency model actually mean? What will it change?

First of all, the GIS Certification Institute (GISCI) announced today that it would be reviewing the methods by which individuals are granted certification. Previously the GISCI required applicants to send in a portfolio to attain certification, but says that with the new DOL models, competency-based certification methods, which could include a required written examination "for some or all applicants." These changes, however, are as many as four years away, says the GISCI.

Secondly, this could mean the government may decide to actively fund elementary and secondary geography education programs. As Directions Magazine editor Joe Francica pointed out today, the Department of Education's "No Child Left Behind" initiative has to date managed to "leave behind" geography students - a seemingly strange disconnect from the DOL, he says.

Association of American Geographers (AAG) president Doug Richardson says his organization is concerned that "geography is the only core academic subject identified within the law that does not receive a specific funding allocation for implementing programs to further the teaching of geography at the K-12 level." Perhaps the new attention being paid to GIS through these competency models will help to change this trend.

Photo by Flickr user stevecadman.

The app only supports maps from ArcGIS, ESRI's suite of mapping software, including those available on ArcGIS Online and on custom server installations. Users can sign into an existing ArcGIS server to access their personal or corporate GIS data while on their iOS device. The app also categorizes public maps into groups, including featured, popular, highest-rated, recent and favorite maps.

ESRI says it is working on including the ability to collect and update GIS features and attributes, as well as perform GIS analysis through geoprocessing tasks. This means iPhone owners could use their devices to collect GIS data and upload it to services like OpenStreetMap, one of the featured map sets on the app. The next time you are walking through a park whose paths are not yet mapped, you could create a GPS trace and update the map with that data.

The company is also providing an ArcGIS API that is currently in beta, with an expected full release slated for August. "Developers and ESRI partners will use the API to create applications for both external and internal use. They can also easily build applications that work with their own published Web services," the company said in a press release Tuesday.

While some are disappointed that the app is ArcGIS only and doesn't support other mapping platforms like the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the app is still very handy for those interested in GIS data. ESRI has such a large market share on mapping software that the lack of OGC support shouldn't be too big of a hurdle for mapping diehards. The ArcGIS API should also be exciting, as developers now have the opportunity to create fascinating implementations of the various layers found across the ArcGIS ecosystem.

The gist of what's being enabled is this: applications can provide the name of one location and then the Yahoo! APIs will report neighboring and "parent" locations. Flickr developer and map lover Dan Catt articulates the potential power of the API very well in a blog post today.

Yahoo! explains the breadth and depth of location data it now offers thusly: "The [Platform] contains about six million places. Coverage varies from country-to-country but globally includes several hundred thousand unique administrative areas with half a million variant names; several thousand historical administrative areas; over two million unique settlements and suburbs, and two-and-a-half million unique postcode points covering about 150 countries, plus a significant number of points of interest, Colloquial Regions, Area Codes, Time Zones, and Islands."

Geolocation is Hot Everywhere

Geolocation is hot, a number of new projects are underway to leverage increasingly sophisticated geographic knowledge to deliver value to end users. See our coverage of Brightkite and of Yahoo!'s own excellent FireEagle, for example.

Flickr developer Catt explains, for example, that Flickr could use the new APIs to offer images of nearby photos on several different levels, with accuracy as granular as Flickr is able to output.

There are a lot of interesting possibilities, not just for mapping but for services that are map aware. What would you like to see turned geo-smart? We're excited to see what developers come up with. We probably won't have to wait for long, either, since the Platform was released the day before O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference begins in Burlingame, California. Keep your eyes peeled for location savvy apps this week!

This startup is doing something far more interesting than that. While Google Maps and related consumer products have whetted the public's appetite for visualization of specific places on a map, earthmine is making those places machine readable.

The company uses a proprietary array of still-images cameras to take photos in stereo at regular spacial intervals while driving through city streets. The resulting 3D images can be measured with an accuracy that corresponds to measurements of the physical objects and distances they represent.

The company says it covered San Francisco in just three weeks. Each day's data is processed automatically and is available before the next day begins.

The initially self-funded company recently took an investment from CalTech and secured an exclusive liscence to use 3D image processing technology developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Generating dense, accurate 3D data from wide-angle images is a serious technology challenge but one that the JPL worked on to process data returned by the Mars Rover.

What it means

Just as we here at ReadWriteWeb are excited about the potential offered by a machine-readable, or semantic, web - so too are the possibilities countless when thinking about a data rich, accurate and machine-readable 3D representation of the urban environment. earthmine offers a usable looking web interface but that's just the friendly wrapper around a dataset of far greater consequence.

From urban planning to mobile services to security applications, this kind of data and interface has a lot of potential. If the value of mapping and of GIS are clear, the value of a geospatial 3D dataset about urban environments should be clear as well. Combine all three and you'll be able to assemble some very interesting resources on almost any topic.

It is important to me to say that I don't care for the way the company talks about the technology, as "reality mining" and "indexing reality." To call that tasteless would be an understatement. I'm concerned that such reductionism could have substantial adverse political consequences. Maybe I'm just old fashioned to believe that there's far more that's important in "reality" than the things that can be digitized - and that much of it ought not be mined. I should probably stop, though, before a corporate exit puts me in thumbscrews listening to a well-fed Dr. Evil laugh. This technology itself could be put to use for good or ill, I'm sure.

Either way, this is fascinating stuff and worth some thought no matter how you relate to it. In addition to the very well produced company-produced video below this interview with the young earthmine CEO and this one of his time on stage at the DEMO Fall conference is worth a watch.