Stamen Design just presented a lot of really cool visualization demos. I’m always happy to see people doing something a bit more than points, and even more than lines and polygons: they’re making really fun looking maps with map data.
Schuyler, from here at MetaCarta: Mapping the Maximum City. How architectures of participation make it possible to create the geodata that we *all* need. OpenStreetMap leading the way with tag-style geodata creation, but long way to go for all of us. We need to solve the problems of a structured data geowiki, and there’s lots of work to do, and it will help everyone from the slumdwellers of mumbai to the residents living under the OSGB reign.
Topix: Creating local news pages by tagging documents on the web. “We don’t do NLP” — describing the different ways to disambiguate, from city mayor names, to names that residents attibute to themselves (Bay Stater, Nutmegger). Creating 32000 zip-code based news pages.
Google: Google Street Map View, Google Mappletts, now indexing and providing search access to GeoRSS feeds (as of this morning).
This week, John presented at the MetaCarta Users Group meeting, showing off the integration between OpenLayers, FeatureServer, and MetaCarta APIs.
MetaCarta + OpenLayers: Cool Map Tools
Of course, this video will also be available from the MetaCarta Labs on a Stick 
Check it out!
By the time I finished working on the USB drive distribution last night, I realized that there was actually a lot more that I wanted to share (and I still have about 50MB free on the USB drive). The software I put on it had gradually changed from being “FeatureServer demo and associated parts” to being “MetaCarta Labs demos”. The version I published last night took that into account insofar as the actual software included in the distribution, but not in the frontend and supporting materials.
To that end, I spent today rethinking how I wanted to do it, and I think I’ve come up with something I like better. You can check out the new labs-on-a-stick is available from the Labs on a Stick homepage, as a .tar.gz and a .zip file. This distribution is much bigger — ~9MB — because it includes video demonstrations of OpenLayers and MetaCarta’s geographic search engine. In addition, the homepage (instead of being a FeatureServer demo) is a list of all the things available, including four demos, software downloads, and video presentations.
Although this is probably not ideal for downloads by users on dialup, that’s not the target of the distribution, so for now I’m happy with that.
Now I can go back to concentrating on picking out what URLs I want to demo for my OpenLayers presentation. Hopefully (assuming I get it done in time), I’ll have that made into a video too, adding more material onto this nifty USB distribution.
Oftentimes, it’s not entirely clear to users of software like OpenLayers, TileCache, and FeatureServer what MetaCarta does.
Recently, John Frank, MetaCarta’s CTO (and my boss) put together a short (1m30s) screencast, demonstrating the power of what MetaCarta really does: The Power of Geographic Search. Schuyler graciously provided narration to the video.
This video demonstrates MetaCarta’s powerful text + geographic search engine, indexing millions of documents and responding in the blink of an eye. Using this search tool, it’s possible to do a full text and geographic search over millions of documents, finding everything written about an area even if you don’t happen to know the names of all the several hundred thousand places nearby.
As Schuyler’s voiceover says: “MetaCarta provides a powerful filter for finding everything written about any place.”
MetaCarta Labs on a Stick includes this video, and also a geographic search demonstration, showing how to use the GeoSearchCore download available from the MetaCarta Developers Downloads to add geographic text search to any OpenLayers Map. Of course, if you find this interesting, the next step is to read more about it on the official GTS Product Information page, and of course, contact us – but even if you don’t, now you know a bit more about what MetaCarta does.
So, right after FeatureServer was released, I realized I finally had the full stack I had an interest in handing out to users:
However, I know that one of the things that makes the use of things like FeatureServer a bit more difficult is that it depends on the installation of a number of Python modules for full usage. The GeoJSON service, for example, requires simplejson to be installed, and if you’re on Windows, even getting Python up and running in a sane way can be a bit of a challenge.
The solution? MetaCarta Labs on a Stick.
A collection of distributions for the latest in MetaCarta Labs software, including OpenLayers, TileCache, FeatureServer and GeoSearchCore, MetaCarta’s geographic text search addon for OpenLayers. A built in HTTP server that will run on Windows, OS X and Linux with nothing more than double clicking an icon or starting up a shell script. A set of tile data that will allow you to browse your local vectors over vmap0 or blue marble satellite data — without even being connected to the net.
And when I say ‘will run on Windows’, I mean it. I took a freshly formatted Windows machine, plugged the USB stick in, double clicked the ‘run_windows.bat’ icon, and I had a web server running — with no connection to the internet, I was able to draw features, save them in FeatureServer, read them as GeoRSS, and edit them as KML. (Note that this is with the USB drive version, which is different from the ‘preliminary distribution’ on the website.)
I’m going to have 14 of these things with me in California next week. (The 15th is staying on my keyring. 
) At least some of them are likely going to be used as prizes for a competition that I’ll announce during my OpenLayers presentation at Where 2.0, on Tuesday at 4:30.
You can try out a less complete version of the Labs on a Stick distribution via the preliminary download, but for a demo of the ‘real thing’, be sure to find me at Where 2.0 or WhereCamp.
I’d like to point out that this is not ‘try before you buy’ software, as was mistakenly reported last night: the software on this distribution is provided free of charge for all eternity. FeatureServer, TileCache and OpenLayers are all open source software released under BSD-like licenses. The GeoSearchCore distribution has a slightly more restrictive terms of use, but not one that limits the use of the software — it just means that to get your search results, you have to come to MetaCarta. (Who else does super-fast geographic text search anyway?)
Everyone can thank James Fee for egging me on to actually get this out the door — I was going to spend the weekend on it, but somebody had to be impatient… but it seems like he’s pretty happy with what he’s got.
MetaCarta Labs is proud to announce the release of FeatureServer, an open source, Python based RESTful feature server.
FeatureServer allows you to store points, lines, and polygons in a number of backends, and get the data out all at once or one piece at a time. You can get the data out as KML, JSON, GeoRSS, GML/WFS or even as HTML.
FeatureServer is primarily designed as a lightweight vector feature storage companion to the new OpenLayers vector capabilities.
A demo of FeatureServer in OpenLayers is available at the FeatureServer Demo page. You can see features from this demo in:
FeatureServer is the first project we’ve released under our copyright-only open source license, a move designed to protect both MetaCarta and project contributors. We’re moving forward with getting this license approved by OSI, and plan to release future open source software under this license.