Directions Magazine Podcast on Cloud Computing

August 11, 2009 1 Comment

The weekly Directions Podcast touches on Cloud Computing in Geospatial.  Clearly cloud computing is a buzz word, so it is good to see people delving deeper into the subject matter.  Both Joe and Adena did a good job of outlining what cloud computing means and pros and cons of moving toward hosted services and the pay as you go model.  Adena nicely mentions WeoGeo as the best example of SaaS GIS.

I highly recommend that you listen to this podcast  so you can break through some of the buzz words with SaaS and not sound like these guys below.

cartoon credit: geek and poke

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ESRI Friday Grab Bag

March 20, 2009 Leave a Comment

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ESRI FedUC “News”

February 19, 2009 35 Comments

Dave Smith has blogged about the first day “highlights” and I have to say I’m not impressed with the FedUC this year.  Not much news coming out which is surprising since most people I know on the east coast are treating it at their UC this year (travel to San Diego is not happening for many people).  The FedUC has always been more about application of technology than anything else so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the big news is ArcGIS Explorer Build 900 being showcased.  

I suspect the real news will happen at the Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit where we’ll learn more about ArcGIS 9.4 and get some hands on with ArcGIS 9.3.1.  Maybe we’ll hear more about the new Silverlight API which I was thinking would have been shown more than it was at the FedUC.

I guess for now we’ll just have to imagine what this means since no one is explaining it.

…ESRI is introducing the concept of “layer packages” which they believe will facilitate better data sharing. Layers referencing features can be packaged as an email or sent to the “cloud” as a searchable data file. “To me, this is a big deal,” said Dnagermond [sic]. Users will share the data and the knowledge acquired in creating their data. ESRI see users setting up a communities to share data but only those working on the project can have access to it. For those in secure environments this will be able to be used in their own back office environment. 

the cloud eh?

http://www.hulu.com/embed/de7ie6dj36OHI34pFeWZiQ

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Sharing the File Geodatabase

November 5, 2008 13 Comments

There are really good reasons to use the File Geodatabase in the ESRI world over the shapefile and Personal Geodatabase, but it doesn’t mean it is easy to share.  Sean Gorman knows that the more file formats he supports, the more likely people (especially GIS pros) will be using GeoCommons.  I suppose the simple answer for Sean is to buy a license of FME Server and support everything and anything people upload.  The cost of that solution might not make business sense just yet for him so I suppose is the lack of ESRI Geodatabase support (or any other format) limiting you when you want to share data?  I like the idea of uploading a Geodatabase full of datasets at one time, but sharing a folder/file based dataset is difficult enough on a LAN, let along the internet.  Is converting to shapefiles too much to ask for people who want to share data on services such as GeoCommons?  

WeoGeo partnered with Safe Software to bring this kind of datasharing (among other features of FME Server) to the cloud web so there might be solutions that are cheaper than outright licensing FME Server to bring translate capability to Web 2.0 services.  If that can be coupled with Amazon Web Services pricing (pay for what you use rather than a traditional license) there could be something that many people take advantage of.

 

And of course you could export out any layer in GeoCommons Finder! to any of the 200+ FME supported formats.

And of course you could export out any layer in GeoCommons Finder! to any of the 200+ FME supported formats.

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