GeoEverything!

Thanks George for the introduction...I really appreciate it! I've been reading through this blog and must say that you have covered a ton of industry-related topics. Your entry from October 8th is of particular interest to me! It was such a brilliant idea that the USGS created a Google Maps mashup. They were able to leverage using Google's Search API with a Google Map canvas embedded in to the USGS Store to find raster data for the entire US. This is the perfect marriage of a great search engine and valuable geospatial data services! Every year there are more and more geo-COTS products and Open Source Projects that are publicly available for use. I am particularly fond of Google Maps (of course), GDAL/OGR, and PostGIS which is the spatial component to Postresql. If a developer with enough time on his hands put all three of these things together, we could have a really cool enterprise solution. The OGC is making tremendous headway in data interoperability which is great! I know ArcGIS now supports GML which is basically KML's big brother. Hopefully, more software vendors will follow suit. We will certainly see in the months and years to come!!!