Author: James

John Hanke and Jack Dangermond on the evolution of the GeoWeb.

Editors Note 01-10-2017:
Video was on Blink.tv which is now dead.

I guess interesting stuff does come out of Where 2.0. Simply put, the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform creates an ID called WOEID (Where On Earth ID) for every location on earth and has an API to geocode back and forth from that WOEID.

In simple terms, the Service allows you to look up the unique identifier – called the Where on Earth ID, or WOEID – for almost any named place on the Earth; it also allows you to resolve a WOEID you have received from a third party – such as Fire Eagle’ or Upcoming – to the place it represents.

The API is accessed via HTTP GET; the following examples can be cut-and-paste into a web browser to view the results (note that these links do not work properly with IE6):

Find the WOEID of a significant landmark:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘sydney%20opera%20house’)

Resolve a WOEID to a place:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2507854

Find the WOEID of a specific place:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘northfield%20mn%20usa’)

Obtain a range of WOEIDs that match a given place, ordered by the most likely:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘springfield’);start=0;count=5

Find the parent of a given WOEID (and return a detailed record):
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/638242/parent?select=long

Return the Placename for a given WOEID in a specific language (where it exists):
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘usa’)?lang=fr

To obtain the representation of a place in JSON format:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2487956?format=json

To obtain a list of geographies that neighbor a specific WOEID:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/12795711/neighbors

The Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog explains it as “a more elegant way to abstract the relationships of location, and unambiguously describe places in a permanent, language-neutral manner.”
One of the overused examples of a place in Arizona is the Grand Canyon so lets put that in the system and see what we get:

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘grand%20canyon’)

I like the hierarchy here: In the above example, Grand Canyons Village’s parent is the county of Coconino, whose parent is Arizona, whose parent is the United States. These relationships should help users get more information out of places than they did before.

Dan Catt has some details on his blog about WOEID and how Yahoo! is using it.

Dave Bouwman has some thoughts on using PostgreSQL as a RDBMS for ArcSDE (or ArcGIS Server Enterprise as we should be calling it).

Thus far I’ve simply come to realize that I have a lot to learn. I need to grok a lot more about Postgresql and PostGIS to start, and then add ArcSDE into the mix.

While everyone is really excited about PostgreSQL support at 9.3, remember it won’t be as easy to administer as SQL Server is (at least to those who already use SQL Server). Just keep that in mind before abandoning SQL Server outright for PostgreSQL.

I’ve asked the question on Twitter, but I’d like to get a more broad idea of what people think about developing applications inside a virtual environment. Results were pretty much on both extremes, either people love it, or people told me I need to get a new IT staff. We do have virtual servers running already, but the reality of actually developing inside a “virtual workstation” might be totally different. The upside of having different virtual environments available to me to use and not have any spillover into my “real” operating system seems greater than the downside of performance (especially on my laptop). But what do you guys think?

I sure as heck don’t want to end up like Arnold

All too often we have to request people resend datasets to each other because they get blocked by email, one important file gets left off or systems just don’t recognize a file type. I’ve run into a problem today where a company FTP site is rejecting a shapefile because it doesn’t recognize the .shp, .shx, .dbf extensions. I thought I could get around by zipping the data, but it appears to scan the zip file for extension types. So the “solution” was to zip the shapefile, change its extension to .doc and tell the recipient that they need to change the extension back to .zip.

This kind of stuff happens way too often. Personal Geodatabases have the problem of the .mdb extension that is rejected outright by most email systems and other formats aren’t readily usable by folks systems. The “old days” were easy because we all used coverages and shared them via the .e00 format that was almost always acceptable by everyone. Amazing how we take such steps back over time and you’d think data sharing would be easier than it was in 1995.

How do you folks share data? KML, GML, Etch A Sketch, e00, zip, web services, etc?

Update: Jason Birch has some ideas about using SQLite as an interchange format. Well worth the read.

Congratulations to Matt Giger for pushing out EarthBrowser 3.0. I have been following Matt’s triumphs and struggles on his blog as he’s worked at getting the latest EarthBrowser release out on his blog. I was more than happy to purchase a license and I encourage everyone else to do the same as well. I am very interested to see how folks use the Adobe Air based digital globe moving forward.

A thread has developed on the OSGeo email list (out of an “open source career” post in fact) asking how one can perform the same tasks using open source software as they do with ESRI.

Paul Ramsey as usual writes a spot on response to the question:

My general synopsis: for server-side, for scriptability, for automation, for web-based, open source wins for most use cases, given a technically savvy user; for ad hoc, for cartographic production, for a user who is used to a point-n-click experience end to end, proprietary still wins.

Nacho Libre – defender of open source

I’ll be back hopefully next week.

I’m sure most ESRI customers received the following email from ESRI regarding the Oracle 10.2.0.4 patch and ArcSDE:

If you are a user of the ArcGIS Server 9.2 ST_GEOMETRY data type with Oracle, we would like to make you aware of the following issue:

The recently released Oracle patch version 10.2.0.4 may make unexpected changes to the ST_GEOMETRY schema. ESRI is in contact with Oracle, and we are working together to understand and quickly resolve the problem in this Oracle 10.2.0.4 patch upgrade.

ESRI strongly recommends that all Oracle-based customers not upgrade to the Oracle 10.2.0.4 patch until ESRI has certified this Oracle patch release with ArcGIS Server 9.2.

If you have already upgraded to Oracle 10.2.0.4 and think you may be experiencing this issue, contact ESRI Support.

What is humorous about the whole issue (well at least funny to those not caught up in it) is that Oracle includes the following statement on their readme for 10.2.0.4 patch.

“Patch sets are a mechanism for delivering fully tested and integrated product fixes. Patch sets provide bug fixes only; they do not include new functionality and they do not require certification on the target system.”

Guess that isn’t the case, eh Oracle?

It seems that every time we meet, I have nothing but bad news. I’m sorry about that, I surely am.

Brian Flood has apparently been busy.

Now that Google Earth 4.3 is officially out the door, I wanted to share another product that we’ve been working on. It started out as the framework for a standalone version of Arc2Earth but it quickly became apparent that the core functionality would be very beneficial to other Google Earth developers. So, we decided to create a custom tools harness that would load both .Net extensions (which the standalone version of Arc2Earth will be) and also runtime downloadable javascript.

Scripting in Google Earth? Now that is something that I really could take advantage of. Check out his videos on his blog post to see it all in action.