Have a look at this cool demo, presented by Jack Dangermond and Jeremy Bartley, at the recent Where 2.0 conference in San Jose.

The video resolution is rather poor, however you’ll get the idea.

http://en.oreilly.com/where2009/public/schedule/detail/9102

Pay special attention to the demo part, starting at about minute 9.

If you are not a programmer, some of Jeremy’s presentation might sound like gibberish: Silverlight, Flex, JSON, REST interfaces, etc. But show this video to a programmer, especially one in the 15-30 year-old range, and you’ll like get a “cool!” kind of response.

A lot of people out there (GIS world) are under the impression that map mash-ups are necessarily wedded to Google Maps. Wow, demos such as this one show clearly how similarly interesting mash-ups can and are being created using “real” GIS software platforms. What’s the difference? Mainly, that there’s a huge collection of analysis capabilities behind the GIS-based mash-ups. Not simply pretty web maps.

Those of you attending the upcoming User Conference will see more of this, live!

- Mike Gould, Director of Higher Education