Many of us have tried out Google Earth for viewing geographic data, but there's often a sense of "Now what?", once you've flown around above your own house, pretended you're swooping in from low Earth orbit, and checked out the neighbours' gardens (or is that just me?). What can you actually do with Google Earth?

The Geospatial Web Services Workshop 2008 will take place in Nottingham on 16-17 June.

The key aims of this workshop are:

1. to hear presentations from leading academic and industry players on their research on geospatial web services technology
2. to network and develop ideas for future collaborative research in geospatial web services
3. to understand current developments in geospatial web services with focus on generalization and schematization research.

Census.ac.uk are pleased to announce the latest in our series of census data workshops, to take place at Cartographic Laboratory, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.

Title: Geographical referencing and census data workshop
Date: 28 May 2008
Time: 10.00 - 16.00

Link to further information and booking form

The theme for the GeoWeb 2008 conference is Infrastructure: Local to Global. This implies the GeoWeb has a local or community dimension as well as a global one – that the integration of local information infrastructures will give rise to a global information infrastructure – that global aggregators will drive the creation of local infrastructures.

Google has decided to release KML into the wild and wonderful world of open standards, as KML 2.2 has been accepted as a standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the people who maintain standards such as GML, WMS and so on. Find out more from Google's LatLong blog or from the OGC press release.

An Amazon tribe is getting help via Google Earth to track illegal logging in their rainforest territory. Find out more at The Independent On Sunday.

Kevin Gurney and colleagues at Purdue University in Indiana have developed an interactive high resolution map showing CO2 emissions over time in the continental USA. You can find out more on the Vulcan Project website, from press reports e.g. in The Guardian, or you can watch a YouTube video demonstrating the map in action.

CS4S08 students are already requesting their copies of Image Analyst for ArcGIS. If all goes well, you should be up and running with it soon. but if you have problems, you can get a free 30-day trial download of the software. You need to register at this web page, then you can download and install the demo.

Bad news: it does not seem to install properly on Windows Vista - at least I could not get it to work.

It looks like there is a problem with our access to Digimap i.e. you can only download data from a university computer!

I tried to log onto Digimap from home but when I got through to the Data Download section, I got the following message:

You've probably visited the main GeoServer website already to download your copy, but you may not have seen the GeoServer blog.

This has news and information on GeoServer, including entries for some online GeoServer tutorials to help you find out how to use GeoServer for your web-mapping project.