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Sad news from one of the biggest Open Source map client frameworks: The mapbuilder community decided to stop developing the framework, as announed in this post. This is mostly due to the fact, that OpenLayers got so popular and the overlap between those two projects got so significant, that there does not seem to be a need to have two competitors for MapClient frameworks within OSGeo.
Myself, I did like MapBuilder, as it was so easy to configure and did not require any knowledge about browser scripting and all this. You just configured your XML map context document and you were ready to go.
Anyway the mapbuilder community will release a last stable version of the framework called 1.5. The ppl working on mapbuilder will contribute to the OpenLayers project (as they already did in the past), so maybe some nice features of mapbuilder might appear in OpenLayers in the future.

The Universities of Münster, Bremen and Buffalo have announced a new joint international research training group on semantic integration of geospatial information, starting October 2008:

With this International Research Training Group (IRTG), we address 
problems arising when integrating geospatial information from 
multiple sources to reason and support decisions about the 
human environment. These problems are situated in the overall 
research challenge of supporting effective geospatial reasoning 
across age and cultures. The common scientific thread of the 
entire program is the ambition to create computationally 
tractable solutions to problems of semantic integration.

The program offers 6 PhD and 2 post-doc positions. If you want to join us in Münster (or the group in Bremen), have a look at the details (PDF).

Yahoo! is currently running an invitation-only beta test for it’s Fire Eagle location broker. The idea is as simple as useful: Fire Eagle takes your current location as input from different services or applications and passes them on to other services or applications. To locate yourself, the Fire Eagle web site, services like plazes.com, or (possibly GPS-based) applications on mobile devices can be used. The location information is then passed on to all kinds of location based services that provide you with local weather information, shopping guides or simply update your current location on twitter.

It is quite obvious that this raises privacy issues, but I think the people behind Fire Eagle have done quite a good job addressing them: every application or service must be enabled for every user, both for setting and receiving the user’s current location. This permission can be revoked for any service at any time. What is more, Fire Eagle can even be activated only for a given time (1 or 3 months), before the user is required to reactivate it. This is supposed to prevent users from forgetting they are on this services, but still (unknowingly) providing it with location information. And, of course, you can just temporarily disable it.

Having that said, you still have to decide whether you want a to permanently provide Yahoo! with updates on your current location, since they provide the collection point for all your location information, which might raise concerns for some people, although the website says:

If a new piece of ‘Exact Location’ information comes in, then we throw away the old one. No historical record is kept of your location.

After all, you need trust the people behind such a tool. This applies both for Fire Eagle and the applications that you permit to share it your location with. If you do not trust these people, it is probably better not use such tools at all. (Which makes the whole post sound more negative than it was meant to be. It is a neat idea.)

This just came through the FreeGIS Mailinglist:

The 52°North Open Source Initiative hereby issues a call for entries for the 52°North Student Innovation Prize for Geoinformatics.

The aim of this innovation prize is to encourage students to make a contribution to the development and practical realization of innovative concepts in the field of geoinformatics. The competition is directed primarily at students of geoinformatics, computer science, business informatics and media informatics. Applications are requested from small teams of students (2-4 members); applications will also be accepted from individuals (who will also be referred to as teams for the purposes of the competition).

More here

Sounds interesting. The winner team wins some cash and is invited to spend time here in Münster with 52North to further develop their ideas in a professional environment. Hope they get some high quality submissions.

The Center for Geospatial Science (CGS) and the Service-Oriented Software Research Network (SOSoRNET) are organizing a workshop about Geospatial Web Services. It will be held at the CGS in Nottingham from 16-17 June 2008. It is meant to get insights into key research activities in the field of Geospatial Web Services, but also to give researchers the opportunity for networking. The workshop is free of charge and the number of participants is limited to 50. So anybody, who is around in the UK and not able to travel to the GI-days conference might suggest going there.

The demos here at Google I/O today made me seriously think about installing Windows on my Mac for the very first time. The reason: Google Earth API. Putting Google Earth into your browser just like Google Maps, with full hardware acceleration. Only on Windows (FF2+, IE6/7) for now, Mac and Linux are announced to be out in August.

This beast is based on a browser plugin (hence the OS-dependence), and it has all the cool stuff you (as a user) know from Google Earth, plus all the cool stuff you (as a developer) know from Google Maps. Just like Google Maps, it is controlled via its JavaScript API – which means that you can even add it (with a single line of code) to existing Google Maps sites. You will get an additional button for the map type selection on the top right and once a user clicks on it (labeled Earth), the plugin will load in exactly the same place where your Google Map used to be, with all the layovers and markers you created on it – just in 3D.

If I had some time right now, I would develop a new version of our ArgooMap (which is now a SourceForge project; check out the demo) based on that. Maybe later.

For some reason, we have not yet advertised the Network of Young Researchers in GISc here that we started for last year’s GI-Days conference. Feel free to join the network for an exchange on topics of interest to starting academics in GIScience, and don’t let the young deter you – young at heart is also fine with us.

This year’s GI-days conference (16-17 June), held in Muenster, Germany, is focusing on Interoperability and spatial processing in GI applications. The conference program has just been released and it seems, that Processing Services are one of the major topics. Two separate sessions are held on WPS. Additionally there will be workshops on Wednesday, which also cover topics such as WPS, GRID and geosensor networks.

The overall program can be found here.

Google announced yesterday that KML is now an official OGC standard. With this step, KML has taken yet another step in a remarkable “career”: originally developed by Keyhole (hence the name Keyhole Markup Language) for their product Earth Viewer, the format was adopted by Google for Google Earth, which was developed based on the Keyhole Earth Viewer after Google’s acquisition of Keyhole in 2004. KML has since been added as a supported format to numerous (Web-)mapping and GIS tools. With the adoption by the OGC, KML is no longer under control of Google. OGC regards it as complementary to their existing standards (especially GML) and will probably harmonize future versions of KML with other OGC standards. I think this step will bring the two worlds of map mash-ups / online GIS and professional GIS a bit closer together and make exchange a lot easier, which will finally also make professional use of volunteered geographic information (VGI) a lot easier.

The Institute for Geoinformatics here at University of Münster is looking for a new Junior Professor, this time with tenure track. So if you are looking for a job - here is the advertisement.