geoLibro.org

MetaCarta’s GeoTagger apparently does excellent, impressive, cool work on unstructured documents. The result of its awesomeness is geotagged xml with which one can do whatever one pleases. Make sense? I spoke to a sales rep from MetaCarta at the Indianapolis “What’s New with ArcGIS 9.2″ seminar about GeoTagger and grilled him about what could be done. Not too many specifics from that, but then I got a call from the great MetaCarta themselves since I expressed interest. Unless they’re mean-spirited liars, GeoTagger does do natural language processing and does put out very useful xml and does handle versioned data and does include user-specified structured data (think MySQL tables) and does…do more still.

But today’s post is a leech off of Fantom Planet’s post about another slick product built on top of GeoTagger. It’s PageMapper, and you can think of it as a more invasive, more thorough GeoTagThings. Sounds like it’s a little lab-y still, but have you built such a system?

Nobody needs me to monitor news about geotagging, but I have to mention that it’s finally gotten very easy to tag photos with spatial attributes on a Mac. Like it should be. Ogle Earth reports that iPhotoToGoogleEarth’s Craig Stanton has recently and quickly taken advantage of AppleScript support in Google Earth. The result is a small .app called Geotagger that takes a dragged image and ascribes coordinates to its exif fields based on where your also-running Google Earth is centered. Very easy, and a great, great way to tag photos (if you don’t already have a GPS track available to sync to).

And it works, too. Below this is a screencap of four shows’ worth of album art from Tom Waits’ tour through the midwest/east. It proves Geotagger works, yes, but it also reinforces my disappointment at not being able to attend any of these shows (I was busy starting a new job, see, and traveling across the country). I’m almost the centroid of the polygon these four corners would create.

About Google Spreadsheet: I don’t know, I don’t find myself collaborating on spreadsheets that often, to begin with. Also, it will certainly have less functionality than a desktop app. However: it will most certainly be a boon for mashup makers and it might make it easier for, say, a GIS Librarian to send or share data with a patron or vice versa. But more important than all of that is the possibility that it might startle people into realizing that there is a bright, easy, (inexpensive) beautiful world outside of Excel and the rest of the Office dungeon.