http://www.geoportal-idec.cat Bulletin Board en idec@icc.cat http://www.opengeospatial.org/ Wayland, Massachusetts, April 14th, 2008. The Members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) have announced their acceptance of KML 2.2 as an official standard OGC. KML is a language that is based on XML and was developed from the beginning to manage geospatial data of Google Earth application and allowed users to overlap their own contents on Google maps. Thereafter, the language KML has become the html of cartographic content, the way to share maps created by users online. “Ron Lake. Chairman and chief executive officer of Galdos Systems Inc, said: We are pleased to see the adoption of KML as an OGC standard.. "We believe that this is a major step forward for the OGC and for the entire geographic information community, as it provides the first broadly accepted standard for the visualization of geographic information." Wed, 30 Apr 2008 http://www.geoportal-idec.net/geoportal/eng/docs/impact_study_report.MAX.pdf JRC, from the European Commission, has published under the title: “The Socio-Economic Impact of the Spatial Data Infrastructure of Catalonia” the document announced few weeks ago, under the series "JRC Scientific and Technical Reports," with the identifier EUR 23300 IN. This report summarizes the study made in 2007 by the Valuations and Land Policy Center of the Universidad Politècnica de Barcelona (UPC) on the socioeconomic impact of the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in Catalonia. The study concludes that the total investment for IDEC establishment and development in a period of three years (2002-05) will be recovered in 6 months approximately. Major socio-economic benefits have been identified, but not quantified. Particularly, the study points out that IDEC Spatial Geoservices reduce the digital gap between the smallest and the largest local administrations as far as provision of services to citizens and business concern. In addition, to valuate the economic impact of SDI in Catalonia, the study mentions the pointers used for the study and the limits arose in the information collection making suggestions for future works in this important area of research. Thu, 18 Apr 2008 http://www.geoportal-idec.cat We present a new design and contents of the Geoportal and its services. Concrete changes can be found in the map viewer, which adopts different present technologies to allow an easy and fast navigation between map servers to which Geoportal gives access. Moreover, new interactive maps servers have been incorporated to Spanish and foreign suppliers, apart from those that have been incorporated to IDEC network recently. Among them, and more concretely, map servers that offer different municipalities to Local scale information, such as urban planning http://www.geoportal-idec.net/geoportal/eng/inici.jsp in the option “maps” and then "add server", you may see the WMS available. The interface design of the catalogue has also changed and will be improving in the coming months concerning its use and quicker searching. In short, a customer with a "slight" interface will be provided, more oriented to non-professional users, both on the viewer and the catalogue. Thu, 18 Apr 2008 http://www.ec-gis.org/Workshops/inspire_2008/ JRC, of the European Commission, will organize in Maribor (Slovenia) from June 23 to 25, 2008, a conference focussed on the implementation and future of INSPIRE Directive and other topics related with Spatial Data Infrastructures. This event substitutes the EC-GIS Seminar that JRC organized annually in the past. Thu, 18 Apr 2008