Category: Thoughts

When I wrote about the Esri ArcGIS new naming convention yesterday, you’ll notice there was one thing I didn’t mention. Basic, Standard, Advanced are the new View, Editor, Info. And you know what? It makes perfect sense to me, I’ve been telling Esri to fix this problem for years and finally they’ve had to guts to do so. ArcView has been devalued in the Esri stack for years. It can’t edit SDE Geodatabases, it can’t edit advanced cartography and it sure as heck can’t handle advanced analysis. Editor is the standard authoring tool in the Esri world and if that bothers you, take your money elsewhere. There are lots of other tools out there that duplicate or exceed ArcGIS for Desktop Basic that are either a fraction of the cost or free.

ArcView users are nothing but a drain on Esri resources. They don’t want to pay for the features Esri wants to sell, clutter the support forum with questions about NAD83/WGS84 conversions and want VBA to continue as a scripting engine in ArcGIS for Desktop. Getting emotional about a product that didn’t change what it was (ArcView has the same features it did last week) and is now more aptly named given its purpose is a distraction to the reality you live in. Finally I can look at Esri’s desktop lineup and understand the purpose of each application. View/Editor/Info are confusing arbitrary terms that mean nothing to anyone but a small niche of users.

The cold hard facts of the matter is that if you wish to play in Esri’s silo, you need to have ArcGIS for Desktop Standard. Otherwise, what’s the point?

The FOSS4G 2011 Local Organizing Committee has been hard at work (I know because somehow I volunteered) at preparing for the best geospatial conference in the world. By now, those presenters who submitted talks should know if they were accepted or not. You, being lazy of course, who did not submit can see the schedule now online.

Remember, the early bird registration ends at the end of this month (June 30th) so go ahead and get registered. Tyler Mitchell blogged about the hotel rooms at the conference (Who wants to walk home after beers anyway?) so make sure you book a room at the Sheraton as well.

FOSS4G 2011 will be a huge Rocky Mountain High my friends. Don’t miss out on epic awesomeness.

So the classic thinking is Esri can’t figure out what to name anything. You either put the Prefix “Arc” in front of something, use the company name Esri (though you’d be better at using ESRI for the classic touch), or put the phrase ArcGIS in front of any simple word. Those days of wacky are over apparently as there is now a guide to the new naming convention for Esri products.

Thus the keyword is now ArcGIS and it may or may not be “for” something else. Because as Esri points out, “The reason for these modifications is to reinforce the fact that, regardless of where and how ArcGIS is used, it is the same system.” Natch! My favorite which isn’t listed here is the new ArcGIS for the Internet which was previously known as ArcGIS.com.

Who is ArcGIS?

Last week I was lucky enough to spend time at the M Resort in Las Vegas, NV for the 2011 PBBI Insights Conference. I had a wonderful time seeing everyone again (many who I hadn’t seen since the last Insights Conference in Miami last year). There was a ton going on given the new focus from Pitney Bowes on their location intelligence division. Here are some highlights:

• MapInfo 11 – Should be out by the end of the month (if not sooner). I liked that there were no “goes to 11” jokes (at least none that I noticed) given that stopped being funny at least 20 years ago. One new features in MiPro that should be of interest to folks is that it will now be available as a 64-bit application (Grapevine got that wrong) to run under a 64-bit operating system and take advantage of 4GB of memory. Desktop GIS should take advantage of the great new hardware we’ve had for years and not be limited to what was expected in 1999, right? also noticed that OpenStreetMap will be available as a basemap (joining the Bing Aerial, Hybrid and Road layers). Also the biggest frustration with me and MiPro has been fixed; working with tabular data is finally workable and could actually stop me from exporting data into other databases to work with it.
• MapInfo Manager – This is a relatively new product at attempts to help you manage your spatial data. The session was very well attended so it appears this is a huge want from the PBBI community. Being browser based, MapInfo Manager seems to be a better choice for organizations to use than a traditional desktop application. It also is INSPIRE compliant offering up CSW feeds to clients to use (including MiPro 10.5 or later).
• MapInfo Spatial Server – I didn’t get as much time to spend on these sessions, but APB has a detailed rundown. This will replace most of the legacy MapInfo server technology with a modern spatial server. It is still very early in its implementation so we’ll need to keep an eye out on functionality as PBBI releases some demos and use cases. Definitely something to watch.
• Geosk – While this was released last year, 2011 will be a big year (disclaimer: PBBI is using WeoGeo technology on it). PBBI is in the process of loading up their latest data to Geosk and has signed up Mentum as a Geosk Library customer and you’ll see their data on Geosk (as well as WeoGeo Market) very soon. For data vendors, DaaS is critical for them to scale up. Those who persist in sending out DVDs via snail mail will wither and die (Fair warning folks).
• From MapInfo to Pitney Bowes – The new President of PBBI, John O’Hara, was definitely on message with MapInfo and Group1 being integrated into the greater Pitney Bowes strategy. While I don’t think this means that PBBI is going to abandon the “traditional” geo market (You know the one where nobody has any money?), but they are going to focus on Fortune 100 companies who want to to integrate spatial data into their business decisions. PBBI was on message as being part of Pitney Bowes. I liked the focus!

As with most conferences, I didn’t get a chance to sit in on every session and PBBI unlike many other geospatial companies does do a traditional plenary where they roll down each product in front of everyone. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the next year with the new MapInfo Spatial Server and of course Geosk!

Bruce Joffe puts it plainly:

Many GIS professionals, users of public agency GIS databases, and advocates for transparency in government through accessible data records are concerned that this decision, if it stands, would enable many more counties to charge restrictive prices for their GIS databases.

This is my warning to all those who think they are smarter than they really are. The tides are a-changing how people are using data, eventually, you’ll drown if you don’t ride with them. That is all…

If I worked for Orange County, I’d kill myself…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7stpw4UfAs

The minute I saw this I knew it was going to be awesome:

A few months ago an experimental service to automatically find roads and other features in aerial imagery was launched. Today we’re adding to that a service to help improve local search results.
The frontdoor app allows anyone on the web to help improve our address location results. The site allows you to drag a pin from where we think an address currently is to the front door of the property.

It works on a similar concept to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Only here the output is freely available OpenStreetMap (Or will be soon) address data. I’ve been working through Magicshop Frontdoor quite a bit this week so I know this is easy enough. Can’t be that many addresses in the USA, can there? The great thing about helping Microsoft here over lets say Google is that your efforts are helping the community at large. I wish other mapping companies would embrace this concept as Microsoft has (Wait, did I just call Microsoft a mapping company?).

I’m kind of thinking that has become the case after reading this from a MapInfo user:

The worst part about the rule based rendering [in QGIS] is that I have gotten so used to their power that I feel crippled when I go back to MapInfo and try to do styling 🙂
Yea, cartography has been the one area people still say ArcGIS is king. Times, they be a changing though…

He’s looking at it from a MacInfo user perspective, but you could look at it as a proprietary GIS perspective.

Is ArcView use about to fall off the ledge?

While I was in Sweden at the Sweco developer conference, a really awesome video was shown that was done in house (clearly) by the Sweco team. Anyone who’s done any consulting will get an absolute kick out of it. Glad to see it was finally available on YouTube. Enjoy!

Now I’ll be the first one to admit, I’m a total Apple fanboy (That said, I’m still rolling around with an old iPhone 3GS), but I love looking at other platforms. The webOS platform from HP is one that I’m very interested but Blackberry is one that is sort of a wildcard. Blackberry has taken its lumps from Apple and Android, but it seems to be holding its own in market share. The Blackberry Playbook has gotten some mixed reviews, but given that Blackberry is very enterprise, I have to expect them to sell quite a bit of the Playbooks.

WebMapSolutions.com has posted a couple of examples of some BlackBerry Playbook geospatial applications. First off they’ve got an OpenScales demo application running on the Playbook. If you are a Flex/AIR application developer it is a good overview of how one can leverage these technologies on non-iOS tablets running Adobe technology.

The second demo is yet another AIR application, though this one running ArcGIS Mobile. Looks early one, but clearly WebMapSolutions.com has an extensible AIR application running on a tablet that integrates with either open source technology or proprietary GIS systems.

Could it be that Adobe Air and the Blackberry Playbook are about to score a basket?

This gem was shared by Marc Prioleau.

Internet firm Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) may replace its Geo-Platform with Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG), a move that could reduce its operating costs by about 2 percent to 5 percent, according to an analyst at Global Equities Research.

“Yahoo Geo-platform is lagging behind both Google and Microsoft Geo-Platform,” analyst Trip Chowdhry wrote in a note to clients.

Adena Schutzberg cuts to the chase:

There are so many errors in the IB Times article discussing the note, errors I fear are from the original note, I am very skeptical.

My Grandmother, bless her heart, always told me; “If you don’t know what you are talking about, keep your mouth shut!”. Clearly that doesn’t apply to “analysts”. To be fair, he did call Salesforce.com a “modern day Visi-Calc”. Wait, that wasn’t right…