Not suggesting otherwise – last time I tried downloading the web I just couldn’t get that little hourglass thingy to go away…

I know there are lots of good reasons why GIS people use flat file formats in certain circumstances, even if these are originally extracted from a DB. But from what little I’ve seen, I wonder if this is always necessary or appropriate, and if it isn’t sometimes just a case of “we’ve always done it that way”? It reminds me of a place I worked some years ago, where a major utilities company kept most of their data on spreadsheets scattered throughout the company, and only decided they needed a more disciplined, DB-based approach when they realised they didn’t know how many customers they had and which ones owed them money. The mainstream IT world has been forced through this process of working out where to centralise its data resources, how to manage the use of snapshots etc in a disciplined manner with the available technology, and generally weaning itself away from the idea of using local spreadsheet silos by default. There is a difference between decentralisation and chaos, after all. All I’m saying is that to this outsider it looks like this is still more of a real issue in GIS, perhaps exacerbated by some of the technology which seems to encourage silos, and other comments by more experienced GIS people seem to recognise the same problem. So if my database hammer won’t work on these nails, what’s your solution?

Sorry to seem obtuse, but what’s the link between ESRI and GeoNetwork? I thought GeoNetwork was open-source from the UN FAO.

Google’s data APIs (http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/) are based on Atom too. But what do they know, right?

But I don’t see how Atom gets you round the problem of dealing with local data sets that are no longer in sync with their original source. It doesn’t matter how you request the data extract – Atom REST API, OGC W*S or whatever – or what format it’s in – ESRI geodatabase, GML etc – because once the data is extracted to your local site, you still don’t know if the source has been updated since you grabbed it, unless you explicitly check for this in some way.

And as an ex-database developer new to GIS, it strikes me that this problem is worse in GIS, because of the apparent dependence on big flat file snapshots of data that get passed around, rather than only querying the data you want from a central database when you want it.

But what do I know, right?

FME Server can be used to stream data in whatever format you like so that the users do not have to care about updating their data because it will always be up-to-date.

It can be WMS/WFS but might be any other format you need … It can be geoRSS, geoJSON, geoWhatever ..

Layer packages seem a bit yesterday to me Let’s all go ahead and email layers around the world …. why not serve them as a datastream rather than emailing them?

I hope these layer packages are only a first step in ESRI’s data sharing efforts.

I’m sure “layers” will be very cool when it is launched, but is anything going to be able to read it other than ESRI products. I can’t think it would be anyone’s best interest to create a data sharing destination that is only usable by one vendor. Well of course unless ESRI is building it – i.e. GeoNetwork