Following in the footsteps of the increasingly successful Open Street Map project, OpenAddresses.org has been launched as a web portal for the management of free and open address data, plus free and open geocoding and reverse geocoding. OpenAddresses.org includes actual address data, so it is much finer grained than the similar GeoNames.org database which is limited to places. OpenAddresses.org is intended to be complementary to Open Street Map and not in competition.

I suspect OpenAddresses.org will have data completeness problems: Can it guarantee that it has all (or a reasonably high percentage of all) of the street addresses for a particular area?  Will people delete their own addresses for privacy?

Further information can be found at the Open Addresses User Guide Wiki. We already have a technical overview of GeoNames.org due for publication in the next couple of weeks, and will publish a full overview of OpenAddresses.org in the next couple of months.

As a part of the new v3 Google Maps API, Google have announced the addition of a new Elevation Web Service.  Limited elevation data has been available from a number of map web services, but the Elevation Web Service allows individual coordinates and complete path profiles to be queried. Going by the samples, it looks like this works for both land and ocean. 

I would imagine that this will be useful for hikers and sport teams (eg. the profile of a cycle or running route), as well as geological education ( eg. the ocean profile across a spreading ridge or the Hawaii Plume).

Google's blog announcement is here.

Adrià Mercader has just announced the first public release of WMS Inspector - an add-on for Firefox that allows a developer to view, and debug WMS (Web Map Services) requests and responses.

The main features are described as:

• Load all WMS requests in the current page and their parameters
• Requests sorting by service or type
• Individual WMS requests (images or errors) visualization
• Copy services, requests or parameters to the clipboard
• Direct edit of request parameter values
• Output GetCapabilities response as an HTML report or original file

It is noted that it will be especially useful when working with JavaScript map libraries such as OpenLayers and MapBender, or when setting up WMS Services; and I agree. This should be a useful utility when trying to match an OpenLayers client with a MapServer WMS server when non-default projections and map coordinates are in use.

WMS Inspector can be download from Mozilla here; and the announcement can be found on the OSGeo-Discuss listserver, here.