If you build it, they will come…

If you create a web service, no matter what, someone out there will use it! This is a fact and these days there is a web service for just about everything from the weather to where the most recent earthquakes are. There are private instances and publicly available ones that are designed to sell more software licenses. There are also a wide variety of free services out there for you to choose from but all in all, my point is that with this whole Geoweb phenomenon I think the days of creating your own truly unique data sets will be coming to a slow halt. I foresee geo-minded folks utilizing what other people have created in their apps and why not? It saves time and money which is what really matters, huh?

The nature of our business and the data we use is so simple! We deal with pixels, points, lines and polygons that can be manipulated a million different ways through attribution and symbology. There are format-specific standards to adhere to and models on how store and disseminate them so why not leverage what other people have created and published. I for one am constantly on the lookout for more data and software that will gobble it up. This is where applications (on the web) like GeoCommons and WeoGeo come in to play. They allow you to publish your data, do stuff with it and then open it up for anyone to reuse. WeoGeo’s model is pretty cool because they also allow you to monetize on other people using your data by selling it as the owner sees fit. GeoCommons has Finder! and Maker! which really help you upload or search for data and then create some cool maps but they have a model that is more like OpenStreetMap or Cloudmade. My opinion on this is that free data is good data If you’re self sufficient enough to have your own IT infrastructure and want to publish your data that way, look at ArcGIS Server or the two competing FOSS options GeoServer and MapServer.

QGIS

I am a Mac user and use QGIS pretty extensively to read WMS and WFS services that I come across over the web. I encourage anyone out there to do the same thing as the latest and greatest build of QGIS is REALLY nice! So I guess my question is, where are the services that you use the most?

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