I’ve been doing the traveling and then getting sick routine this week, but at least today when I got into work I saw that the GIS for Web Developers book showed up on my desk. I probably won’t be able to start reading it until next week because I have a couple friends coming in from Portola Hills, Orange County who narrowly avoided the Santiago Fire. They are Berkeley alumni so we are all going to go to the ASU-Cal game this weekend.
I get tons of emails from people asking where they can get free ArcView licenses for home use. People really want to work with GIS at home as well as at work which makes sense to me. I’ve always pointed folks to QGIS and other tools, but Matt Perry has a wonderful and easy way to most of the important open source GIS tools on Ubuntu with just a couple of commands.
just keeps getting easier and easier to get a fully functional open source GIS workstation up and running thanks to Ubuntu. The following instructions will take your vanilla installation of Ubuntu 7.10 and add the following top-notch desktop GIS applications:
Postgresql/PostGIS : a relational database with vector spatial data handling
GRASS : A full blown GIS analysis toolset
Quantum GIS: A user-friendly graphical GIS application
GDAL, Proj, Geos : Libraries and utilities for processing spatial data
Mapserver : web mapping program and utilites
Python bindings for QGIS, mapserver and GDAL
GPSBabel : for converting between various GPS formats
R : a high-end statistics package with spatial capabilities
GMT : the Generic Mapping Tools for automated high-quality map output
Download Ubuntu, install, run a simple command, enjoy GIS for free. Seems like a great solution to me!
Dan emailed me a link to these maps that Disney has up for their ”Twilight Zone Tower of Terror 13K” run. Take a look at the 13k and the 6.5k maps. They are both really horrible, but take a look at this part of the 13k map.
I’m not sure what happens under that hat with the route, but I’m sure it is magic! I’ve tried to piece together the route from both runs, but I’m at a loss.
I played baseball at every level (well except pro) growing up so it is great to see my son want to play baseball as well. This morning was his first T-Ball game. and we both had a blast.
As someone noted in my comments, ArcGIS for AutoCAD now supports version 2008. Now I can get back to using ArcGIS for AutoCAD with our projects. My workflow is still hampered by the CAD Client for ArcSDE being only available on AutoCAD 2006 and earlier, but the planners will be happy as they can use GIS in their CAD files again.
Phillip Holmstrand let me know that with Yahoo Maps now supporting geocoding in Europe his online geocoding website, batchgeocode.com, now supports many European addresses.
Now you can geocode and get map coordinates for these countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and Italy
It appears there is somewhat limited support for these countries: Albania, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia/Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey.
That is great news. I tried our Germany office and it worked perfectly. Now bulk geocoding is not limited to North America. You can find out more at his blog and he’s looking for suggestions or comments about the European support, leave them on his blog.
We all somewhat guess this would be coming around and tonight Microsoft releases Birds-eye View for their 3D Globe. They’ve taken those great Birds-eye View images from the 2D maps and using Photosynth they stiched them all together to create a “3D World”. Now of course this isn’t a true 3D, but if you’ve ever tried out Photosynth, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The Virtual Earth Blog spells it out quite nicely.
For background, its important to understand the challenges of visualizing our Birds eye imagery in a seamless mosaic the way we are all used to looking at satellite imagery that looks straight down at earth. Since all of the images are shot from the same point of view, it’s relatively easy to stitch them together in a convincing tapestry. There’s still challenges like doing good color balancing across images and rectifying so that buildings in tall cities don’t appear to butt heads, but these are pretty well understood problems. Birds eye images are a different story. because of the way they are captured, there is no easy way to stitch them at their edges without introducing nasty distortions. The result is that Birds eye imagery is viewed as discrete ‘scenes’ instead of 1 giant tapestry. when you navigate to the edge of the current scene, the most appropriate next scene is dynamically determined, then displayed. Since Birds eye imagery is captured from 4 angles, we have North, South, East and west views of each point on earth adding another dimension of complexity to navigation.
In 3D, the same challenges remain, but are easier to address with client side managed code. the result is a user interface that borrows concepts from MSR’s Photosysnth to allow you to navigate more fluidly and naturally than what is possible with a javascript based client.
If you ever read my blog, you know how much I love the Birds-eye View images and now combining them with the 3D globe really gives you the ability to see areas that you’d miss with a top down or even a street level view. I’m interested to see how one can now use these images with applications built on the 3D globe. The limitations of the Birds-eye images might not allow much, but it still would be interesting to see on a macro level.
The street level images are nice from a navigating sense, but I always feel like I’m in a canyon. These Birds-eye view images are much more open and having them available in 2D or 3D really pushes Virtual Earth ahead of Google Maps in my book (now how about making the darn think work in Safari?). One thing that jumped out at me was how good Microsoft’s building models look. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the Birds-eye and the 3D model. For those who can’t install the 3D add on, take a look at the video below.
Brian is obviously capping off a busy week by releasing A2EV2 (I like saying that) today. I’ve still not been able to find time to update my copy, but a quick look at the updated features on his blog really gets me excited. All the new export formats are very welcomed and I’m really anxious to test out the importer tool. Better get my upgrade sorted out.
I’ve been playing with Christopher Schmidt’s WPServer demonstration and I have to say it really makes me think about where GIS is going. Simply put, you can perform GIS analysis simply by clicking button on a simple web interface using all open source software. Jason Birch has a nice writeup on what you can do with the demo and I think most GIS analysts will be able to work though the tools without any instruction. But deep down we need to think about how this is changing GIS analysis.
This demo really can’t do much just yet, but the framework is there. I can imagine users using tools such as this WebProcessingServer and OpenLayers demo, rather than ArcView, Manifold or even QGIS to perform simple geoprocessing. Now this of course won’t replace the complex analysis that ArcGIS Desktop or even ArcGIS Server can accomplish, but why not use such lightweight tools for lightweight needs? I can’t stress enough the underlying message here.
Not only can you perform GIS analysis on the web, you can do it using freely available open source tools, you can do it with very simple websites, and it is very fast. This is definitely an area we all need to pay close attention to and I suspect BIG things are going to be happening here.
I had a talk with the Arizona State University MAS-GIS class last night and I wanted to demo this to them but unfortunately the demo was down. Hopefully some of them will be able to take a look at it today and see why this is so important to their future.
Somewhat of a follow on to my previous post about the WPServer Demo.
Ask 37signals: Is it really the number of features that matter?
Good software is about balancing value and screen real estate and understanding and outcome. If it takes 20 good features to get there, then great. If it only takes eight, even better. It’s not the number that counts, it’s the balance.
That is what I’m talking about here. The kitchen sink is wonderful, but too many times it is thrown at users who have to fight though all the tools to use just basic tasks. That is what really catches my eye about the WPServer Demo.
Also I’m not saying get rid of the kitchen sink either, it just isn’t needed by everyone.
_Update: _fixed title