The Open Geospatial Consortium has been hard at work on many fronts to drive down barriers to interoperability and to facilitate more open dialog between organizations and institutions. I just conducted a Q&A with David Schell, founder and chairman of the board of OGC, in order to get up to date on the many initiatives. One of the more interesting areas for our coverage deals with the better sharing of information about global change, and I enjoyed Schell’s answer, paraphrased below.

“GI Science” as it’s usually used is still too narrow a term. “Interoperability science” encompasses what we are talking about. One of the first interoperability science issues we need to address is the issue of sharing of information between various data centers, and making research data more discoverable and accessible. Data centers can’t be stovepipes anymore, they have to be “loosely coupled,” so any data center can be accessed by any data provider or user, with appropriate permissions, of course.

We’ve been working toward this for years in terms of technical interoperability issues, and we have working groups in hydrology, Earth system science, etc. who are developing application schemas that meet their intra-community and inter-community data sharing needs. We see individual scientists and small groups in various projects moving in this direction, but what’s really needed is a cultural dialog.

The OGC working groups are hard at work on things like geosemantics, data quality and uncertainty, geospatial rights management, “table joining,” and many other challenges, and application domains are using the OGC to facilitate both technical and semantic interoperability.

This focus on interoperability science is a growing niche to drive through both process and workflow in order to deal with global change. Read the full interview with Schell for more insight into OGC’s ongoing work.

The White House released a list of appointees on Friday to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel that’s in charge of oversight and feedback on how the recovery dollars are being spent and communicated. The appointment that’s chiefly of interest here for geospatial users is Edward Tufte, professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale University. His books on the Visual Display of Quantitative Information place him as a key force for the concise and insightful display of information.

Tufte is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for Technical Communication, and the American Statistical Association. He includes several maps in his work, and his ideas have influenced cartographers equally among other infographics practitioners.

It’s great to see the emphasis here on crystal-clear communication of information in a visual fashion. Let’s hope that his counsel results in some interesting and concise condensations of critical information.

High quality videos from the GeoDesign Summit are now online and free for viewing. There are some excellent presentations there from a variety of presenters. I’d like to point out the video of Michael Gallis as a good starting point. He delves into the definition of GeoDesign in the context of government decision making and points out the promise for a “truly meaningful” toolset with outcomes on policy. The tone and delivery are exhilarating as a rallying cry to speed the adoption.

Digital 3D visualizations and simulations of urban areas have been possible for a long time. The shelf life of one of these creations however hasn’t been impressive. I’m sure that most large cities have various moth-balled models that may have been effective for their purpose when created, but now don’t have much utility because they are just like snapshots in time that become dusty and outdated.

The thing that most of the moth-balled models have in common is that they’re simply a different means of rendering rather than really modeling in the full sense of that word. To fully model reality means that the model contains details and intelligence about construction, materials, and various network connectivity so that it can be used for all means of analysis.

The business case for creating a dumb 3D model has always been suspect. It’s received ho-hum reactions from many professional quarters when its realized that it doesn’t have much utility beyond an individual project. Thankfully that old dumb model is slowly going away, and with it goes the ho-hum attitude about models. When users realize that they can access and analyze the model specific to their own interests, then the questions of utility fade away and the business case for their creation manifests itself. The business return on an intelligent model is frankly limitless, because the more intelligence that the model has the more efficient a municipality becomes — saving time and dollars and creating a more livable community.

The model itself is uninteresting. It’s the ongoing use and ever-increasing fidelity and intelligence that will power wider adoption. The rise of intelligent models for more intelligent infrastructure will power a myriad number of careers and business opportunities in the years to come.

The new digital resource center at the State Library of Queensland envisions the future library as a place for creativity for, “art, design, gaming, engineering, sound, science, craft and architecture.” The idea of the new facility called the Edge is to foster connections for multidisciplinary design work and to foster innovation.

The $7.9 million construction project has created a multipurpose space that includes sound and image recording labs and meeting and function rooms, all equipped with high end digital equipment. The director of the center has an idea for the center to become a hub for urban informatics – the study of how people interact with urban spaces by tapping information and data of our digital lives.

Read more about this cutting-edge facility in this feature in The Australian.

I’m a fan of Thomas Friedman’s mix of doomsaying and praise of innovation. He’s a great cheerleader of the American drive to be the best in the world through innovation. In his column today he outlines two innovators in the green technology space. There’s a truly exciting process that could make coal fired powerplants much cheaper while also producing a useful bi-product as well as a nod to the much-hyped fuel cells from Bloom Energy. To “do good and to make good” is the mantra of green entrepreneurs.

The Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control has just released an online fatal injury mapping model that allows you to query injury statistics to create custom maps of death rates throughout the United States. There’s a fascinating level of detail to this resource, including the intent of injury, ethnicity, age, and cost of injury. The map can be detailed at several different levels of detail, and there’s the ability to smooth and color code the data for definitions.

After the successful and ongoing largely-volunteer mapping efforts to respond to the Haiti earthquake, it’s heartening to see that there’s momentum for this approach in response to the massive earthquake that struck Chile. There are Crisis Camps this weekend and stretching into the future for both Haiti and Chile that are viewable at this page of the Crisis Commons website. There also appears to be growing cultural awareness and celebration of the concept, with a planned event at the SXSW technology, music and film gathering in Austin, Texas in a few weeks.

With just one crisis response, the advent of the geek relief response squads of Crisis Commons would have just been a fad. Now that there’s ongoing commitment, and increased tool refinement, this idea of Crisis Camps is becoming a movement that has the potential to influence policy direction and to speed thoughtful responses to crisis situations. Crisis Commons adds transparency, social networking, interactive assessments, global outreach and a rich communication medium to what has long been disparate mapping efforts.

We’ve seen growing interest in opportunities to showcase innovation that have largely been competitive affairs such as robot wars, and other contests. What the world needs are more opportunities for geeks to show their stuff in a collective and innovative fashion, and the Crisis Commons points the way. The Crisis Commons has a bright future in aiding the world, and particularly the developing world where technology capacity is lacking, while also providing a platform for technology development and STEM education.

The Ushahidi blog has a nice summary of the first week of activities responding to the earthquake in Chile. Students at Colombia University’s School of International and Public Affairs have been responsible for setting up the Ushahidi-Chile platform, and they’ve mapped more than 800 incidents in the first week of response.

Canada’s 2010 Federal Budget was announced yesterday, including a five-year, $397 Million investment in the Canadian Space Agency’s RADARSAT Constellation Mission. This group of three satellites will provide complete coverage of Canada’s land and oceans with daily revisits as well as coverage of 95% of the world for international users. The satellites are planned for launch in 2014 and 2015.

There’s a nice book review in today’s New York Times that professes a love for books about maps and reviews several recent examples.

“There’s nothing like sitting by the fire with a good book, except maybe sitting by the fire with a good map — or better yet, a good book about maps. I’ve noticed an upsurge in cartographic interest these days, especially for maps’ value as conceptual artwork. They can be maps of the designer’s mind as well as maps of terrain, concerned not just with topography but with typography too.”

Read the book review here.