Author: James

OK, well the title might be sexier than the content, but I thought I’d finally get around to linking to Sean Gorman’s blog post about a conversation we had about the GeoWeb. I was just listening to his interview on the VerySpatial podcast and it really is amazing how far we’ve come in a year. To say I had little faith in these projects/companies (WeoGeo, [FortiusOne, Pleiades, OpenStreetMap among others), is an understatement, but they are really proving that if you give people a platform to collaborate and share data, they’ll do really amazing things. I’m so excited to see where we end up in the next year. Good thing for the disclaimer at the bottom of my blog sidebar!

And the Autodesk reference? This afternoon Shaan Hurley from Autodesk stopped by the RSP Architects studio space in Tempe. Shaan and I have emailed each other for the past few years and it was great to finally meet him in person and show him around the studio space. It was a shame we weren’t able to spend more time, but since he makes it down to Arizona often, I’m sure I’ll be seeing him again really soon.

I was talking about web cartography with a client today and he was saying how he can tell any map made with GIS in a couple seconds. While he did admit that he has been fooled quite a bit, he was still disappointed that there really hasn’t been mainstream improvements to quality of maps. I think he’s a little blinded by the average ArcMap document produced as most of them look alike because many GIS professionals seem to just be happy with the default symbology (or just don’t know how to take advantage of Cartographic Representations). Now this is somewhat unfair to ESRI as most desktop GIS clients seem to fall into these faults.

OK, but why is this a problem? Tonight, while watching ASU fall apart against Fresno State in College Baseball, a couple of us came up with some ideas:

• We all graduated 1995 and earlier and we all had many cartography classes in college. Do today’s GIS students not get traditional cartographic education?
• The ease of desktop GIS clients has made “hacking” cartography elements unnecessary. The default symbology is good enough and there is no need to spend time tweaking lines, points, or polygons.
• Users of the maps (be it clients, project managers, creators) don’t value cartography. The savings of quickly producing a map outweighs excellent cartography.
• The phrase, “Good enough for government work” is used way too frequently in GIS shops.

What do you think? We all see amazing cartography and some of it is very easy to produce. Why can’t we be blowing people’s minds anymore? There are tons of great books out there to help.

Just being better than a Disney map shouldn’t be enough

My hat is off to everyone who had to work within the BIM (Building Information Modeling) space on a daily basis. Talk about using tools that aren’t refined enough (and this is coming from someone who has worked with GIS applications for 15+ years). It was painful hearing about how many hoops folks have to jump through with BIM and how it affects their workflows (not in a good way).

It has been clear to me with all the emails I’ve received from folks wanting to know more about how I’m approaching BIM and GIS, that there is great interest in the subject. Just about everyone of my clients I’ve talked to about the move to the new company has mentioned BIM as something they want to or are being required to get involved with. I’ll make it my goal in the next year or so to keep everyone informed about how things are going and what I’ve learned about working with BIM and GIS.

I’ve just gotten Revit installed on my desktop and as soon as we can square the ArcGIS Desktop licenses we’ll start working on workflows and interoperability.

We don’t need gatekeepers between BIM and GIS

I guess the “big” news today was the Acrobat 9 “maps” feature. All Points Blog and Fantom Planet both cover the news in their own unique style. Since ArcGIS 9.3 will support the new PDF maps (with a patch of course) I suspect that this will be very popular, at least in our circles. Just last week I was watching someone take a ruler and put it up to their computer screen to measure distance. Hopefully with Acrobat 9 we won’t have to see this anymore. The bonus part of Adobe putting this in is that the free Adobe Reader supports the mapping features and will hopefully mean that it will be adopted quicker than GeoPDF has.

Now I wonder if this goes with the rumor that I’ve heard that ArcGIS Desktop will support reading of PDF files in the near future.

Also, as many of you know my first day at RSP Architects was today. The best way to get a hold of me via email moving forward will be at this email address.

james.fee@rsparch.com

Lastly, I’m going to be going to the GeoWeb 2008 Conference in July and be on a Spark Panel Session moderated by Geoff Zeiss called “National Critical Infrastructure Data Models: Implications for Local Government and Utilities”. Now if that title doesn’t get you excited, I’m not sure you are alive. Seriously though, I’m looking forward to GeoWeb 2008 as the CAD-BIM papers are right up my alley these days.

So it has finally happened.

Today, I’m happy to announce the release of the new Google Earth Browser Plug-in, which brings the full power of Google Earth to the web, embeddable within your own web site. Driven by an extensive JavaScript API, you can control the camera; create lines, markers, and polygons; import 3D models from the web and overlay them anywhere on the planet. In fact, you can even overlay your content over different planets, stars, and galaxies by toggling Sky mode, letting you build 3D Google Sky mashups. You can also enable 3D buildings with a single line of JavaScript, attach JavaScript callbacks to mouse events, fetch KML data from the web, and more. Our goal is to open up the entire core of Google Earth to developers in the hopes that you’ll build the next great geo-based 3D application, and change (yet again) how we view the world.

So has this made you sit up and get excited (and rush off to download the plugin) or are you giving it a big “meh”?

I’ve been of the feeling that 3D is too complex for simple mapping applications and frustrates the community at large. That said I felt the same way about Google Earth when people started getting all excited about it. Virtual Earth 3D seems to be popular with folks so I see no reason why there won’t be a huge jump into embedding Google Earth in the browser.

My policy on Planet Geospatial has been if you want in, just ask, and you’ll be added. I’m not sure this can continue as the noise is just too much to make Planet Geospatial of any value. So I’m in the process of cleaning out the feeds and reducing it from the 144 that are currently in Planet Geospatial to about 60 50 (it ended up being 50 blogs). I know many bloggers will be unhappy that they got dropped, but the value of Planet Geospatial is at stake here. Those who blog original content should get precedence of those who blog news that has been covered elsewhere.

The end result will be something that I think will be of more value to the community at large than just an echo chamber.

If you want to grab all the feeds that made up the old Planet Geospatial list, you can do so by downloading this OPML file:

http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/media/gis/GISFeeds.opml and import it into your favorite RSS Aggregator.

The Friday before a holiday weekend is always nice. Traffic is light as folks cheat on leaving early for vacation, the office is excited about heading to the mountains for camping/boating/fishing and knowing you have an extra day for the weekend to get things done (or just sit in front of the TV) and remember those who gave their lives for this great country.

Well I did see this morning that the Google Maps API blog has some information about Google’s new Geo Sitemaps and Geo search API:

There are (atleast) two really cool consequences of this news: 1) you’ll be able to enable users of your mashups to instantly find international results where previously none existed, and to be able to find results for non-standard searches (e.g. “dog parks”), and 2) by indexing your content, waiting a few weeks, and then using the local search with a “site:yourdomain.com” appended to the query, you get to leverage the power of google search on your own content with barely any code of your own

Should be interesting to see this data populate the Google search ecosystem in the coming months.

As many already know, I have resigned from TEC Inc effective next week. I’m going to really miss all my great coworkers and clients I’ve worked with over the years. When I came to TEC, there wasn’t any “real” GIS going on and I leave with TEC being a ESRI Business Partner and with a huge backlog of GIS work. I’m proud of what I accomplished there and wish everyone at TEC the best of luck.

I’ll go into more what I’m doing next week, but feel free to read up on BIM.

So Google and ESRI will allow indexing of ArcGIS Server services by Google (and anyone who crawls the web). So what does that mean moving forward. It really isn’t big news if you think about it because this “feature” (service description) is already enabled in ArcGIS Server 9.3. The problem with this is no one has really been thinking about what this means for everyone. If you expose these metadata pages to the Google Bot, you’ll be opening up your services to the world.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is a great thing. As a user of data, I’m always wishing that I could search datasets using Google rather than the haphazard way we do it today (luck has more to do with it than anything), but data providers will lose control of their datasets. Plus how do you monetize your information in such a world?

There are two types of organizations on the Internet, those who want to work with Google and those who don’t. A great example of a company that isn’t allowing Google to index their pages (well beyond the Whitehouse) is Facebook. You never see Facebook results on the web and that is probably why they have been so successful. Giving away your data to Google can be dangerous to your business model.

That said, I’d like for everyone to expose all their data on the Google so I can perform my job much easier. Maybe I’ll be surprised and there will be millions of new datasets available from ESRI servers by the end of the year, but I’m not holding my breath.

So after almost a year of “hard work”, my son has graduated Pre-Kindergarten.

I’ve told him he’s got 3 choices:

1. Go to Kindergarten
2. Get a job
3. Enlist in the Army

He’s not freeloading on old Dad anymore.

The delivery guy just dropped off the package. I think we are looking at a final version in 4 weeks, just like Jack Dangermond said at Where 2.0. Remember, 9.3 is going to be a game changer for ESRI users with Javascript APIs, Google Maps/Virtual Earth support, KML support, the list just keeps getting better.