Author: James

I wish I was able to go but if you are like me, you can live the experience through others.

Peter Batty’s FME User Conference Report

Jason Birch on KML Goodness

Matt Ball on 3D and FME

Look I believe in the concept, but I’m so sick and tired of these freaking terms. Personally I think folks use the term VGI to segregate themselves from the community at large. I mean look at this list of participants at a workshop late last year.

Does it bother anyone else that a workshop meeting on social cartography, limited to 40 persons is elitist? This infatuation with VGI is becoming unhealthy to the direction we all want GIS and Geography to move. Why waste efforts down a side street when the main street geospatial crowd is working so hard to get more open. This VGI fad is just more of that “University” mentality that drags down innovation.

Update Fantomplanet says:

You take VGI for what it is. Someone has to sort that crap out half the time……. I asked Goodchild how his concept isn’t any different that the stuff the wiki-blog crowd is trying to sort out. “It isn’t.

Well if Wikipedia is a goal of the concept, then VGI is a non-starter. The world needs less, not more gatekeepers and the whole Wiki concept is based on editors deciding what is right and wrong, not the community. Just because you can edit something doesn’t mean that it is collaborative. Wikipedia is flawed and cult-like and if that is the direction of Geography, count me out.

I’m not sure why this “blog” post is getting much traction. I see no reference to where they got that information, I see no information about what this API is going to be (you can already skin AGX). All I see is ESRI Marketing sending a small email to Directions Magazine and they posting it without giving thought to what they are doing. I had thought the whole point of Directions Magazine was that they’ll have higher standards than us bloggers. But APB has really fallen off in the past 6 months to the point it only appears that they post press releases. I remember when APB used to break news on their own.

Where are the standards over there Joe?

Updated: See below, Joe assures us they are as dedicated as ever. Good enough for me.

I like that ESRI has started to focus on getting ArcIMS developers ready for their eventual move to ArcGIS Server. There is a podcast up describing the “ArcGIS Server for ArcIMS Developers” session at the Developer Summit.

ESRI has no ArcIMS technical sessions planned for the 2008 Dev Summit so everyone should take that as a sign as the future of ArcIMS. Time to migrate folks.

MechaArcGIS consoling ArcIMS on its fate

This has to be a mistake. I can’t imagine the logic for forcing such a policy.

We’ve hit on this discussion before and with the Developer Summit coming up maybe it is a good time to think about the direction processors and their movement to multi-cores and 64-bit processors.

At 9.3, ArcGIS Server Enterprise (or whatever ArcSDE is called these days) will move to 64-bit. This is a huge improvement as I would guess most new database deployments are built on 64-bit servers. But clearly ArcGIS Server itself is not going to be 64-bit at 9.3. When spec’ing out new servers, it is impossible not to go down the 64-bit route and servers going multi-core only in the next year ArcGIS Server will only get slower because it cannot take advantage of new technology. With the focus moving from clock speeds to cores, ArcGIS Server users run the risk of being stuck at a level of performance that is going to be unacceptable in the future.

I’ve been told that ArcGIS 10 will support multi-core/64-bit, but given that it probably won’t go final until at least late 2009/early 2010 that means we’ll be running into trouble way before we can even deploy beta version of ArcGIS 10. But is this really a concern for users? Generally speaking, most folks I’ve talked to don’t seem to really be bothered by this and maybe that is why ESRI is waiting until v10 to ship multi-core support.

Is the lack of 64-bit ArcGIS Server going to impact your business moving forward?

Moony only runs 64-bit servers, do you?

ArcGIS 9.2 Service Pack 5 will be available by the end of March. This appears to be a “true” service pack release and not a feature release. I’m not sure I’ll bother installing it on our ArcGIS Server implementations, but we’ll deploy on all our ArcGIS Desktop seats. One change did catch my eye.

Launching maps and globes from web pages (new in SP5)

• Service Pack 5 includes a fix that enables you to launch maps (MXDs), globes (3DDs) and scenes (SXDs) by clicking on them in web pages. Previously you had to right-click the files and save them to a folder, and then launch them from the folder. With this fix, it is much easier to launch maps and globes containing internet content, such as those on the ArcGIS Online beta website: http://arcgisonline.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=access.desktop

This enhancement provides a useful way to make map services that you are serving with ArcIMS or ArcGIS Server easily accessible to other ArcGIS Desktop users, because you can simply include a map or globe referencing your service(s) on a web page.
Layer files can also be added to web pages for download, but ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 users have to right-click on a layer file on a web page and save it to a folder in order to access it. In the ArcGIS Desktop 9.3 release we are adding full support for adding layer files from web pages to your maps and globes simply by clicking on them.

The ArcGIS Server RESTful API will come out at 9.3, but what about those who need it now? Well Dave Bouwman has blogged about its release. Because we all love demos, here is the link to the ArcGIS Server RESTful API.

http://65.101.234.201/rest/

Notice that it is running on OpenLayers. Think about what you are seeing there. You’ve got the ArcDeveloper.net RESTful API to adding features to the map. The source data is stored in ArcSDE in SQL Server, and is accessed via the ArcGIS Server SOAP API. As Dave Bouwman says, “lean and mean, but works quite nicely with OpenLayers and VE”. That is exactly what many of us have been asking for over the last year.

OK, as promised, we are going to have yet another meetup this year at the ESRI Developer Summit. If you are going and want to hang out and talk shop, feel free to drop on by. You don’t need to be a blogger, developer or even at the Summit to attend. Just drop by and say hello and feel free to talk about anything you wish.

When: Monday 3/17 @ 6:30
Where: Wyndham Lobby Bar
Who: Anyone who wants to talk ESRI or GIS
What: Dinner/Drinks/Talking

I can think of two big things to talk about.

A reader forwarded me this article from Federal Computer Week about the Navy looking at only accepting “systems based on open technologies and standards”.

Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communications, broke the news March 5 to a Navy IT Day audience in Vienna, Va., sponsored by AFCEA International. ‘The days of proprietary technology must come to an end,’ he said. ‘We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data.’

By using an open network architecture, the Navy could rapidly upgrade its capabilities and handle increases for demand, Edwards said. ‘Above all, we must break the stovepipes of data so that we can share information across domains,’ he said.

Now he is talking in general (no pun intended) here, but the point is clear. If you want to do business with the Navy, including GIS, you’ll need to support open standards. I’m guessing this means using WMS with your ArcIMS and ArcGIS Server implementations and not using Personal Geodatabases anymore. I’m pretty sure loading the data into SQL Server 2008 Spatial and then connecting to it from ArcMap is acceptable, but we are going to start having to change the way we implement GIS for our Navy clients.

Should be interesting to see how quickly this gets implemented.

Navy personnel excited about leaving “stovepipe GIS”