This week is of course Melbourne Cup week, so the wires are filled with horse-related news. Even the spatial sphere isn’t immune, with the CSIRO 3D scanning and virtually combining the various parts of one of our national heroes – Phar Lap – using its own Museum Robot.

Pia Waugh has created a massive mind map of the current state of the Government data landscape in Australia, including “all related projects, policies, community initiatives and government groups doing data.” It’ provides a great insight for anyone that uses government data in their day-to-day work (which is most of the GIS folk out there, right?).

Jonathan Crowe of the Map Room alerts readers to the USGS’ recent release of PDF quadmaps of Mercury’s entire surface. A must for any space-carto nerds out there (and who isn’t?).

Geoawesomeness has a post that talks about a project that has laser scanned the caves at Nottingham, which even includes a pretty cool fly-through video. Your vicarious fantasy of living as Robin Hood just became that much more true-to-life.

Coming back to the CSIRO, it has also announced that it will play a lead role in the next stage of the development of the world’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), to be located in Australia and in Africa.

Directions Magazine has announced that the OGC Technical Committee has approved the charter for a new OGC Health Domain Working Group (DWG), which will advance spatial standards in the health domain.

In what is probably more of a testament to the size of the gun problem in the USA, Google Maps Mania shows readers a very interesting gunshot map, which uses data from over 300 acoustic sensors placed around Washington DC.