Spatially Adjusted

Category: Thoughts

  • GaaS: The Future That Wasn’t

    Years ago in the Arc/Info world, we used to perform most of our geoprocessing in ArcInfo Workstation on Windows.  But when we needed to really get work done, we’d use a HP-UX beast of a server to handle some of the more complex geoprocessing.  It was really easy to do right, Esri even use to have some tools to help you accomplish this.  I remember thinking that very soon we’d be able to offload most geoprocessing on remote constellations and then just get back the results.  My personal workstation wouldn’t be bogged down with processing and the server would be doing what we paid good money for.

    Well we didn’t know what we were talking about at the time was “GIS as a Service”.  Mostly because we didn’t think of clouds anything more than rain makers.  But the idea of offloading our geoprocessing was something to a person we’d wager would be built into GIS by now.  Of course products like ArcGIS Server and FME Server can run processing remotely but it is not built into workflows.  You have to go out of your way to author scripts that can handle this. I’m curious why things worked out this way.

    It could be that with Arc/INFO on Unix going away there wasn’t servers that could handle geoprocessing.  Or it could be that workstations these days are so fast that you don’t need to remote process.  Maybe I’m just old and stuck in my ways that I want to use an Unix server for processing, maybe put a couple of Perl scripts in there and call it a day.  But I think I’m disappointed that we just haven’t seen that much uptake on remote geoprocessing.  The only workflow I’ve used this on that was supported by the software is authoring on FME Desktop and running those workbench scripts on FME Server.

    I guess we always assume there will be flying cars and houses on the moon but we’re left with airport departure TVs that show the blue screen of death, smartphones that can be hacked with SMS and our credit cards being stolen left and right.  The reality of GIS in 2015 is it is still enterprise work being done in a workgroup fashion.  GIS isn’t taken seriously by IT because we don’t take ourselves seriously.  Hiding in a corner “doing GIS” is how we’re seen by others.  Time to break the mold.

  • Esri Geodatabase Archive Updated

    Something I started in 2006 is still widely used.  I created it originally as I was trying to create ArcGIS 9.1 Personal Geodatabases with ArcGIS 9.2.  It wasn’t possible then to create older Geodatabases but Esri eventually added in functionality to create older versions.  The reason we need these is that you can use older Geodatases in newer versions of ArcGIS but not the other way around.  So if you are on ArcGIS 10.2 and your client is on ArcGIS 9.3, you’ll have a problem sharing data.  But if you have a 9.3 version Geodatabase, then you can save your data to that version and share away.

    I like this archive because each one of these Geodatabases was created with that version of the software.  They will work perfectly since they are natively created. So next time you need to have a 8.3 Geodatabase (You totally know that day will come), you’ll have a native Geodatabase to work with.  Bookmark and use!

    Special thanks to @GIS_katie for providing the updated blank ArcGIS 10.3 File and Personal Geodatabases.

  • Google Map Maker is Officially Back in the USA

    Well good news for those who want to help a down on its luck company like Google update their maps.

    Google Map Maker, the tool which allows anyone around the world to contribute information to Google’s worldwide map, has re-opened in 45 countries after going live again in 6 countries two weeks ago. The product was temporarily shut down in May after it was discovered that some nefarious edits to the map, like geographic polygons shaped to depict an Android peeing on what is ostensibly an Apple logo, were being approved.

    If you want to help Google, just go to Google Map Maker and start editing.  Just know your edits will get locked up and used to make a ton of money.  Here in the USA you can’t create polygons yet but I suppose that will be back soon.

  • Google Maps Gets Lost in Photos

    Look I love iOS but I still use Google Maps as much as possible because it works better than any other mapping service out there.  But I’m beginning to wonder what Google is thinking by adding some new features.

    Now Google is looking to capitalize on this ongoing trend with a new feature in Google Maps that encourages users to share their “foodie pics” with others by posting the photo to Google Maps itself.

    It could be that I live in a car town and navigation is the reason I use Google Maps but the idea that I would use my mapping app to take pictures of food is a bit out there.  I mean don’t they have their own social media network to handle this?  Oh right…

  • AAA’s TripTik Still a Thing

    It’s always interesting to hear about the latest mobile mapping apps but I thought this was interesting.

    Its signature TripTik is still going strong, the auto club says, even in the age of in-dash GPS and Google Maps. The TripTiks come free with AAA membership.

    AAA is not only still making TripTiks but they are still giving them out free.  Given the article doesn’t give ages but they sound from the older generation.  TripTik is still around but it’s day is numbered.

  • ArcGIS Server Revisited

    Legacy GIS System

    We were talking this weekend about how much serving up GIS data has changed in the past 3 years.  GIS Server used to be so important to many of my friends companies to the point they spent tens of thousands of dollars on it a year.  But no longer, each one said that they stopped paying for server because they all use other options.  Now before I go on, I want to say this isn’t about sales data of Esri products.  It’s more about changes in how people are sharing spatial data.  Feel free to replace ArcGIS Server with your favorite GIS server package (Title is a bit of SEO, right?  Heck I’m not even talking about ArcGIS Server in this post).

    I gave a talk years ago about something we did at the GNOCDC mapping recovery from Hurricane Katrina.  You can see the slide deck here and watch the video here.  Basically it was the seeds of what we are going through right now.  It wasn’t that what we were doing back there was very unique, it was just a realization that GIS can’t be hosting “enterprise” data in a “workgroup” environment.  Just like Katrina basically broke the GNOCDC GIS servers, it has become clear that there is almost no way for an organization to use classic GIS servers without putting a lot of load balancing and networking decisions in front of them.

    For most companies this is just way too much infrastructure and licensing costs.  We’ve seen the rise of CartoDB, Mapbox and ArcGIS Online (or whatever it is called these days).  Each has pluses and minuses and while there is overlap, they all do things unique to themselves.  But what the big attraction for each is that you don’t have to manage the constellation yourself.

    The biggest drawback each said was the unknown in licensing.  Most hosted GIS plans are costed in ways that GIS people aren’t familiar with.  Mapviews?  Nobody has analytics on that until you put it in these services.  100,000 map views sounds huge doesn’t it?  But how do you really know?  Service credits?  We’ve wondered what that even means for years.  But I’d wager beers that even with the unknown, you’ll still save money over your ArcGIS Server license or other maintenance you pay for hosting your own GIS server.

    We’re at a crossroads here.  People have begun to start realizing standing up ArcGIS Server, Geoserver or other map servers makes little to no sense in the new marketplace.  Paying for hosting maps is cheaper in the long run, has more availability and is easier to use that classic self hosted mapping solutions.  ArcGIS Online for all it’s confusion is beginning to be leveraged by users and everyone I knew at the Esri UC knows what CartoDB and Mapbox do.  Back in the old days of WeoGeo, we had to prove what we know now every day.  The cost of “doing it yourself” is magnitudes higher than paying for hosting.

    Tide is changing…

  • Hangouts with James Fee Season 4 is Arriving Soon. I Need Your Help!

    Since I’ve decided to break Hangouts with James Fee into Spring and Fall “seasons” (sounds official doesn’t it?) the summer has been left to swimming and vacations.  But with Fall around the corner (temps in Tempe have dropped back down below 110F), it’s time to get serious about scheduling the next batch of hangouts.  I asked for feedback from people last season and it was a great help.  For the fall though I’d love to interview people who haven’t been on the show before or are not as well-known.  If you can email me with suggestions (heck include yourself if you want) I’d really appreciate it.  My favorite Hangout from last spring was with Lyzi Diamond and I’d love to have more like that.

  • Is GIS Heavy?

    The other day I posted about using Turf.js to perform some simple GIS processes.  The venerable Brian Timoney made note of it.

    I hadn’t really thought of the article in that context, I was just looking at a quick way to turn a CSV into a GeoJSON file quickly.  But let’s look at Brian’s point, is desktop GIS heavy?

    Esri_logo.svg

    I’ve maintained since Esri abandoned ArcInfo Workstation in the early 2000s, GIS has become difficult to use.  Not in the sense that any idiot1 can click the next button, but the simple fact they have no idea what they’re doing.  To accomplish this, Esri spent tons of R&D to make GIS as simple as drag a couple of layers to a dialog and just click next until you have an output.  You don’t even need to understand the setting, they default pretty much out of the box.  Setting fuzzy tolerance?  Not a problem, it’s labeled as optional.  The need to understand why you are performing analysis is not needed.

    Now that isn’t to say Esri is doing something bad.  They’re simplifying something that was very scientific and required understanding of FORTRAN or UNIX into something that almost anyone can do.  I think at some level they should be commended for making GIS easier and not limited to a bunch of weirdos with Sun SPARCstation 20 workstations.  But in doing so they turned something lightweight into something of a beast.  Thus Brian’s heavy comment.

    But that’s not the end to the story, at least from an Esri perspective.  Esri at the same time they were throwing wizards in from of every tool in ArcGIS Desktop, created one of the most powerful GIS libraries ever created, ArcPy.  It’s everything we wanted ArcInfo Workstation to become, a modern, no proprietary scripting language with tons of GIS analysis tools.  But for some reason, Esri doesn’t highlight it as they should.  Just go to Esri.com and search for ArcPy. Typical Esri results, it’s a mess.  Brian is reading this now nodding, “GIS is heavy”.

    My example using Turf.js could have as easily been done with a simple Python script as it could have been done with Turf.js.  I just chose JavaScript because I was in a mood I suppose.  But the process of creating a script in ArcPy isn’t much more complicated2.  Is ArcPy “desktop GIS”?  I would say so as you get it when you install ArcGIS Desktop.  But it isn’t heavy, you can create Python in notepad.exe and run from the command line.  Or as most are now preferring, use Visual Studio 2015.

    Heavy GIS is starting up ArcMap, starting up ArcCatalog, dragging and dropping into a wizard, and fighting through the next screens.  The process is similar in QGIS which seems to be adopting some of the same wizard dialogs as ArcGIS.  They’re heavy because that’s what they need to be.  Scott Morehouse years ago told me ArcGIS was complicated because it is “scientific software”.  At the time I laughed but I do get it.  It’s the long tail of long tails in GIS, solving GIS analysis in so many edge cases that it gets bloated.

    Esri should3 have a section of their website devoted to Python scripting.  Showing how much easier (and faster) it is to do your analysis with ArcPy over ArcGIS Toolbox4.  There are pieces all over their website about Python and ArcGIS, but “Scripting” section.  That would go a long way to making Desktop GIS not heavy.  Searching Google for “Esri Scripting” gives you a dead-end to ArcScripts.  That should change.

    1. Meant with love of course ↩
    2. At least for those who know the Esri Geoprocessing library ↩
    3. Double negative aside… I can’t believe they don’t but their search is awful ↩
    4. Is that a thing anymore ↩

  • Minecraft, Second Life and Google Earth

    This hilarious article on abandoned Universities in Second Life got me thinking about 3D worlds and GIS.

    Colleges were among those that bought the hype of the Linden Lab-developed virtual world. Many universities set up their own private islands to engage students; some even held classes within Second Life.

    Most of these virtual universities are gone –– it costs almost $300 per month to host your own island –– but it turns out a handful remain as ghost towns. I decided to travel through several of the campuses, to see what’s happening in Second Life college-world in 2015

    I mean seriously, what the heck were we thinking with Second Life? But while Second Life was more hype than function, KML and Google Earth was our great hope.  KML export, Arc2Earth, SketchUp all were tools that were used liberally to export our GIS models to Google Earth in hopes we’d finally have a universal GIS viewer.  My site is littered with KML export articles that we all thought would change our lives.  But honestly none of them really have taken off.  In fact I rarely create KML anymore, my clients just doesn’t use Google Earth anymore.

    So where is Minecraft in all of this?  Safe Software has an Minecraft conversation as part of FME.  If I look at the analytics to this site, most of the top 10 search terms have some tie in to Minecraft.  But it feels so much different from Second Life or even Google Earth.  I honestly have put some thought into licensing FME and putting up a GIS to Minecraft conversion service due to the interest in it.

    But are we exporting GIS to Minecraft for visualization?  No but I think there is a different thing going on here.  Minecraft is as consumer as we get.  GIS is very enterprise and business focused.  We’ve always wondered how do we get ordinary people to use GIS data1.  What Minecraft does is bring all that analysis, data conversion, transformation and scripting into the mainstream.  I can’t recall my son ever being so interested in anything as he is in Minecraft.  I’m sure your kids are the same way.

    I’m still not really sure if Minecraft GIS is has any more traction than Second Life or KML for GIS professionals.  It could very well be that in 3 years I’ll look back on this post and laugh at my words.  But I’m betting that Microsoft will make Minecraft bigger than it’s ever been and Minecraft export format will be built into every GIS package.

    1. Well other than to find a Starbucks ↩

  • Simply GIS

    I had some endpoints of a lines that I needed to convert to GeoJSON today.  Before I started I do what every GIS professional does, take inventory of the multitude of ways to actually accomplish this.  I mentally jotted down the following:

    • Esri ArcGIS
    • QGIS
    • Online tools (csv -> json)
    • R
    • Python

    I started to realize that these are all pretty heavy tools to just accomplish something as simple as a line string to line.  We literally pull out a chainsaw when all we want it to trim a little piece of paper.  Nothing simple about converting some coordinates into JSON.  Enter Turf.js.

    turf.linestring – Creates a LineString based on a coordinate array. Properties can be added optionally.

    https://gist.github.com/cageyjames/400f050b24db613f83a3.js

    So simple, plus it’s JavaScript already.  Honestly I need to keep coming back to Turf.js, the docs cover easily 90% of what we mostly do with GIS every day.  I just run Turf.js on my laptop and now I don’t even have to open up QGIS to get my work done.  The best part, all JavaScript!  So who is writing the Turf.js book right now?