History of GIS - the Canada GIS

Part 2 of documentation ; Part 3 of documentation

I just wanted to draw attention to this great set of videos that give a great overview of one of the first large scale Geographical Information Systems, in this case the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS). Dr Roger Tomlinson was the initiator, planner and director of this for the time very ambitious project, which meant that he has gone down in history as the "father" of GIS.  I feel quite proud to note that he wrote his PhD thesis here at University College London!

From the Wikipedia article:

The Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) was developed in the 1960s and 1970s to assist in regulatory procedures of land-use management and resource monitoring. At that time, Canada was beginning to realize problems associated with its seemingly endless boundaries, in combination with natural resource availability. The government therefore decided to launch a national program to assist in management and inventory of its resources. The simple automated computer processes designed to store and process large amounts of data enabled Canada to begin a national land-use management program and become a foremost promoter of geographic information systems (GIS).

OpenStreetMap Tiles now available for Manifold!

Just saw this post on the forum. After a long time where the idea of a OpenStreetMap ISI Driver for Manifold was thrown around on the forum, James K. finally stepped up to the plate!
James did a stellar job, not only generating a ISI Dll for the default OSM Mapnik Tile Layer, but also adding the Tiles@Home and Cloudmade Cycle Map. The Dll works fine in both x32 and x64, and finally allows map makers to quickly and easily add a high quality OSM background map to their products.

This is a significant step for map makers, as the OSM tiles offer a level of freedom in terms of usage license. Altough a acknowledgement of the OSM license is needed in any mapping products which contain any OSM data, this is a simple requirement when compared with the grey and murky licensing requirements for Google, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Yahoo tiles.

It remains to be seen with the imminent update to 9.0, if Manifold.net are going to support OSM XML as a Import/Export format. Altough there are existing scripts to enable the import of OSM XML data, these scripts have issues and don't scale efficiently to bulk downloads. A native solution hopefully would enable bulk imports and the ability to save (or even upload directly to OSM) to OSM XML for update of OSM.

PS: AFAIK planet.osm, representing a database dump in XML form of the whole OSM dataset, is one of the largest publicily available vector datasets out there (over 364 million elements). Import and display of such a huge dataset could be a great benchmark test for upcoming versions of Manifold!