Slashgeo

Very Spatial provide a link who ultimately ends up on textually.org where we learn about a pointing-based search solution for mobile phones. From the GeoVector website: "With Mapion Local Search, users can now walk down the street anywhere in Japan and point at over 700,000 objects such as buildings, shops, restaurants, banks, historical sites and instantly retrieve information on what they are looking at or find what they are looking for just by pointing their phone. Just like one uses a mouse to click on an object on a computer screen and retrieve information, now users can Click on the Real World using their mobile phone."

The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog describes iPointer, a device to identify landmarks using GPS phones. From the blog: "Once the user information is arrived at the remote server, the server uses various algorithms to approximate the exact physical thing that the user is interested. There is a predefined database of physical things that the server has knowledge about." This service sounds very similar to this previous story.

Here's a wrap-up of last month's geonews regarding OpenStreetMap. First is a long discussion on the licence attributed to data contributed to the OpenStreetMap project, an exert: "Many of the problems arise because Creative Commons (the “CC” of our licence), as the name suggests, is largely concerned with “creative works” - music, literature, art, and so on. OpenStreetMap, on the other hand, produces data: a factual, uncontroversial recording of the world around us. [...] In the [Science Commons initiative] protocol, Creative Commons restates the problem that copyright simply does not apply universally to factual information." Then there's an update on Nestoria, the first commercial application now using exclusively OSM data. We also have Google's Ed Parsons discussing the differences between data in Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. Other OSM entries include a short discussion on the community surrounding OSM vs "old timers", a mention of OSM during the KDE 4 keynote, a visual comparison of Google data vs OSM + OpenAerialMap data over China, a short account of using JOSM, the advanced OpenStreetMap editor, and finally, the announcement of this year's State of the Map 2008 conference will be held in Ireland. See also the numerous related stories below (more if you search the Slashgeo archives). On a personal note, I used to say about OSM that data is particularly useful in Europe, but not in North America yet... after a quick peak today at the status of OSM completion in NA, I admit I'm impressed, data has been added very rapidly and this is obviously great news for public domain data.

Anonymous Voxel writes "Geopedia is an application for iPhone which shows Wikipedia articles with locations near you. Geographical coordinate support in Wikipedia is still being developed but enough people have been adding location data that there are thousands of points defined."