Author: James

Jeff Thurston asks a simple question:

Why take perfectly projected GIS data and stick it into Bing Maps or Google Maps? Isn’t it time that the 49th parallel was not a straight line?

I hate to break it to Jeff but 90% of the world has no idea that Bing or Google maps have a projection. People expect their web maps to look a certain way (you know where Greenland is bigger than Brazil) and because of that we’ll continue “sticking” our data in Bing or Google Maps. Anyway when projections matter, use something other than Mercator. I talked a little bit about my problems trying to work with the poles before here and here.

Much like the flat earth society, these Mercator haters want to make lives harder for average users to navigate maps. If projecting your data to Mercator is causing it to be incorrect, then you are obviously doing it wrong.

The GeoMonkey has always enjoyed the Mercator projection because he doesn’t like going to the poles

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

The SQL Server 2008 R2 August CTP is out on MSDN and Technet as I write this. This is much that is new in this CTP, but I think it is best to focus on what is new in Spatial. Ed Katibah gave us a preview of the new reporting builder back in May.

We provided sneak previews of this functionality at past conferences, including a popular ‘BI Power Hour’ demo. Maps can be very powerful visualizations. They can consume and visualize geospatial and geometry data directly (as shown by Ed Katibah here), ‘regular’ data, and combine multiple datasets using map layers. Maps can integrate ESRI shape files, as well as directly integrate with Bing Maps.

Sounds like a pretty powerful platform for visualizing spatial data. I can’t wait to give it a shot.

Well how about this? Draggable routes in MapQuest.

One notable feature in this initial release is that Draggable Route functionality is included. This will allow developers to build applications that let their users dynamically edit their directions right from the map.

You can test it out here. Could MapQuest under the “new AOL” become a competitor again?

I’ll be running up the hill to Denver next week to join everyone at WhereCamp5280. If you’ve never been to an ‘unconference” before you are in for a treat. What is special about this is that there is no set agenda so everyone can pick what they want to talk about. ESRI, Google, Microsoft, .NET, Python, Ruby, C++ are all welcome. In fact, I’m a firm believe that if we get more people with different backgrounds in one room, some really amazing things will happen. So you don’t have to be Steve Coast to speak and add to the conversation, just yourself.

The attendee list is looking impressive. If you think you’ll be going, please add your name to the bottom and what days you’ll be attending. If you’ve thought about what you’d like to talk about, add that to the potential talks page as well. There will also be a social event in LoDo as well Friday Night. The economy is still at the top of everyone’s mind so a free “unconference” for the Rocky Mountain region is a good thing. Given the attendee list, I’m not sure we’ll see another get together in Denver until FOSS4G 2011 (we got next).

Looks like Microsoft rolled out a huge new release of Bing Maps. From Chris Pendleton’s blog:

We just deployed 41TB of new satellite imagery, aerial photography and vector data forBing Maps covering 189,000+ square kilometers of Earth including 12,000+ square kilometers of Bird’s Eye photography. Did we get your town this time? Check out the?Bing Maps World Tour to sit back, relax and watch the?Bing Maps Silverlight Control take you through every new local with new data. Alternatively, you can immerse yourself into the application and explore for yourself.

You can get the whole list by clicking through to Chris’ blog.

The 2009 GeoWeb Conference has come and gone once again. 2009 was special to me because we have started to see some really great GeoWeb enabled websites really take flight. Clearly many have stopped talking about how discovery and sharing of data should be done and have begun implementing it.

I was lucky enough to see Jason Birch’s talk before having to go to the airport and now he’s posted his slideshow up on Slideshare. I highly recommend that you take a look at it and a look at the City of Nanaimo’s website to see that you don’t have to get all “SDI” to share data and have Google index it. Jason has a blog post that gets more into the details of making your data discoverable.

https://www.slideshare.net/JasonBirch/moving-beyond-the-desk

While there is still discussions about OGC and “working with them”, implementors are not waiting for OGC to get their act together, nor are they waiting for INSPIRE or Data.gov to “lead the way”. I think one can sum it up this way, users are more important than standards. Consensus is hard to achieve and usually when people can agree on something, it becomes bloated and difficult to use. That isn’t to say that standards and standards organizations aren’t important. What it does say is if you want your data to get out to your users it is best to think of what works for them and not what ISO or OGC standard you can apply.

So maybe GeoWeb 2009 is about doing something about all this great technology and then seeing the results. Jason’s presentation above clearly shows that if you take the time to implement good SEO and make everything discoverable, people will find your data and use it. ESRI, Oracle, Google (and I assume Microsoft, but they seemed to skip GeoWeb this year) are all working hard at allowing users to get data out of these systems (to greatly different degrees of course) and into the hands of their customers/users.

Ron Lake puts on a great show and I was glad to both present and spend time with presenters all week. The new academic track looked really interesting with some real cutting edge stuff. As I said last year, the really great part of GeoWeb is connecting with people you have not met before. GeoWeb Conference does a really good job of bringing together Europe and North America to discuss implications of the internet on our business practices. The tile of this post references the one thing that did get everyone’s attention at GeoWeb 2009, the heat. Of course a cold beer with friends has a way to make all that hot air go away.

Ron Lake and Andrew Turner got into a water gun fight over GML.

So every couple weeks, we get the neo is moving on up post. My good friend Peter Batty wrote one titled, “How “neogeography” is rapidly moving into the “GIS” space”.

At several conferences I have attended recently – Where 2.0, WhereCamp and State of the Map (SOTM) – I have been struck by the amount of activity and innovation in areas that would have previously been regarded as firmly in the domain of “traditional GIS”. I’ll mention three: cartography, data creation and analysis.

So after reading his post, Peter and I shared some tweets back and forth and it became clear 140 characters is not enough. Good thing I still blog.

So lets look at the basis of what Peter and many others are saying about “Neo”. Peter is right in calling out Stamen Design as an innovator in our space (and many others). But I disagree with his assessment that they are doing anything that is particularly neo. What Stamen does is just incredible and really changes how web graphics are presented. But I don’t think it really matters if they are Neo or not. Their work stands on its own without having to put labels on it. Oh sure they use OSM, Mapnik and many other Web 2.0 technologies, but that doesn’t make them Neo. I also don’t buy the argument some make that if you are innovative, you must be neo. Innovation is something that transcends a label.

Am I neo because I run Mapnik at the same time I’m paleo because I run ArcGIS Desktop? Stamen, OSM and GeoCommons are all important because they innovate, not because they put a label on their shirts. In the end what is important is companies that innovate should be rewarded. But I don’t think just because you use one piece of software or another should you be limited in your ability to take part in the revolution.

Peter’s underlying message is that you can be innovative without spending money tens of thousands of dollars. That is a huge point to make about this “revolution”. Being able to pick and choose platforms to develop on is a huge departure from the silos and stacks that we’ve been dealing with for years. Heck, I wouldn’t have joined WeoGeo unless I didn’t believe things were changing for the better.

Viva la Revolución

Well lucky you, you can still watch it here.

Safe Software just opened up all the videos from the 2009 FME UC. If you didn’t go and want to see what the fuss is all about, now is your chance.

We hope you enjoy the beer, oh, like I mean the videos, eh.