Geospatial Technology, Web Mapping and Spatial Services
January 19, 2012 2 Comments
CES is boring, all companies do is announce products that by the time they hit the shelves they are stale. But this Ideum MT65 3D Display feels so right:
Engadget says it is available in either Windows 7 today or Linux by March, so you can totally be rolling with either your Esri or Open Source GIS tool of your choice. It costs about $18,000 so start saving those pennies!
January 13, 2012 3 Comments
So there are a lot of companies leaving Google Maps for other services. But you read about others who can’t leave because their customers demand Google Maps. Quite a fluid situation isn’t it?
Someone asked me yesterday what should they do. How can they plan for the inevitable changes they’ll be making to their web map services. A good solution might be Mapstraction. It’s a programming library that allows you to easily switch between web map providers without having to change much if any of your code.
Why Mapstraction?
By avoid dependency on any specific mapping provider (or versions within a provider) your code is easier to maintain.
A book I reviewed about a year ago, Map Scripting 101, is a great starter for those who want to read up on Mapstraction. I mentioned that Mapstraction might be a good choice for beginners, but I think with the uncertainty of licensing and costs with web mapping APIs, Mapstraction might be a good choice for anyone.
January 12, 2012 2 Comments
The crazy ride is over:
In order to deliver on this aggressive vision in the shortest amount of time possible, we need to focus our product development efforts. So, after lots of internal discussion and customer conversations, we will wind down the availability of the current versions of Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months. We will do everything we can to minimize the impact to customers as we look to end the availability of these services on March 31, 2012
And just like that, SimpleGeo API is headed out to the dead zone.
What a world! (side note: I didn't know the GeoMonkey could fly)
January 10, 2012 7 Comments
Good news for users of GDAL/OGR:
The GDAL/OGR team is pleased to announce the release of GDAL/OGR 1.9.0.
This is a major new release including the following major new features:* New GDAL drivers: ACE2, CTG, E00GRID, ECRGTOC, GRASSASCIIGrid,
GTA, NGSGEOID, SNODAS, WebP, ZMap
* New OGR drivers: ARCGEN, CouchDB, DWG, EDIGEO, ESRI FileGDB, Geomedia,
Google Fusion Tables, IDRISI, MDB, SEGUKOOA, SEGY, SVG, XLS
* Significantly improved drivers: NetCDF
* Encoding support for shapefile/dbf (#882)
* RFC 35: Delete, reorder and alter field definitions of OGR layers
* RFC 37: Add mechanism to provide user data to CPLErrorHandler (#4295)
* gdalsrsinfo: new supported utility to report SRS in various form
(supercedes testepsg)
Some nice new formats in there. How does it all work? Paolo Corti takes a look and says, “Brilliant!”.
January 10, 2012 1 Comment
So out of the blue, this just rolls out:
Autodesk, Inc., a world leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software, and Pitney Bowes Software, Inc., a global leader in customer data, location intelligence, analytics and communication software and services, today announced they have entered into a strategic alliance agreement. The new agreement will serve as a framework for both companies to provide resources, services and solutions to help infrastructure owners and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organizations make more informed decisions and drive greater efficiencies across the plan, design, build, manage lifecycle of infrastructure.
As with others, I’m not sure what this means for the geospatial space moving forward. As Joe Francica points out, unless both companies have “skin in the game”, there is no real incentive to work together. What is clear though is both companies are going on the offensive which might make 2012 very interesting. Hopefully both companies will spell out in greater detail what this means in the next month so we can all figure out where we might want to align our efforts moving forward.
Wonder Twin powers activate! Shape of ????!!!! Form of ????!!!!
January 9, 2012 5 Comments
In all fairness to my previous post, I want to share some GeoDesign links. The feedback I’m getting from those who attended is that it has become an education type initiative, rather than working toward changing how we actually do work. I guess bottom up change works sometimes, but these kids graduating with “GeoDesign emphasis” have no chance at changing how established companies are doing business. So here you go if you want to try to figure out what was discussed:
The GeoDesign Little Red Book is ready to teach a generation of students what won't work in the commercial sector.
January 6, 2012 4 Comments
Being self-aware is always best. From the announcement of the New Bing Maps Routing Engine:
Did you happen to notice the new routing engine we implemented on Bing Maps? No?
Yea, I can’t recall the last time I used Bing Maps. I’m just so used to using Google’s services, it feels unnatural to not type google.com into my browser. Also I’ve chosen to use Waze for navigation on my iPhone leaving them to handle routing and navigation while I’m out and about. So yea, its been some time since I’ve used Bing Maps. But I guess that’s water under the bridge.
Coupled with the bizarre patent that tells you not to go down a dark street alone without a shotgun, Microsoft seems interested in mapping again after what seems like years of not caring about Bing Maps. I suppose Windows Mobile devices use Bing Maps for routing, but who else uses them these days? It does sound like Microsoft has a cool algorithm going on the backend and I wish them the best of luck.
How many versions of Microsoft Maps will it take for them to be successful?
January 5, 2012 11 Comments
When was the last time you referred to the Internet as the “Information Superhighway”? Probably not since you upgraded from GEnie to AOL back in the early 90′s and saw there was this HTML world out there. Early on you figured out calling the Internet the Information Superhighway stupid and the world thanks you for it.
In 2012, lets stop using the term “the Cloud” to refer to some arbitrary hosted service. It’s like nails on a chalkboard. Just think about this statement in a year:
The Cloud roxxorz my proprietary GIS Server!
It’s like that picture of you wearing that Members Only Jacket to your Senior prom. You so want that picture to go away, but Mom keeps showing it to your friends.
Same here, don’t be that guy who uses “the Cloud”. It’s a marketing term for newspaper writers who learned how the Internet works from Ted Stevens. In a year you’ll be on to the next Gartner Hype Cycle fetish (I hear the self driving Google car is right around the corner) anyway so call it what it is, hosted services.
January 4, 2012 5 Comments
Remember AML fondly if you must, but today with Python you have tools that run circles around what AML gave you. I find myself opening up a command window and running python commands to manipulate data over starting up ArcCatalog these days and I love it.
No more excuses to not use Python.
‘Twas a very good year for Python. Seems like we’ve finally gotten out of proprietary scripting languages and picked a winner in Python. Personally, WeoGeo couldn’t do what we do on our back end without Python and I know many other companies can say the same thing. I’ll go out on a limb and say 2012 will also be a very good year for Python. *cough*
There are snakes on this GIS!
January 3, 2012 28 Comments
I’ve had it, I’m done waiting for old, slow, bloated GIS packages load while I do nothing. My new resolution this year is to focus on GIS products that start up quickly and let me start working immediately.
Seriously, what’s up with the bloated code? Features have trumped usability in GIS for far too long. This isn’t rocket science.
GIS Day is a celebration of slow moving software.
