Category: Thoughts

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

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.

Well my first day at WeoGeo actually was the first day of the ESRI UC. Nothing like starting out at the most important GIS conference of the year. My first day at WeoGeo also corresponded with WeoGeo’s first time at the ESRI UC itself.

There has been much written up about the conference, but I thought I’d hit on some of the things that came up at the booth listening to people talk about problems they are having with content management.

First off, clearly everyone knows they can do better with content management. Asking people if they could use help organizing their data is like asking them if they’d like a million dollars. OF COURSE! Sharing data is great and a goal everyone has, but if you can’t get your data organized and figure out which datasets are the latest (or even figure out what was “the latest” last year) you can’t share anything. In fact, I think sharing is the easy part of the equation compared to the management of the spatial data. Of course not everyone can or wants to put their data in the cloud so WeoGeo also offers an appliance that allows you to stick the WeoGeo Library behind your firewalls and keep sensitive data safe.

The other interesting topic that came up was how do you share data in formats that people can consume. Sure, uploading your parcel database is great. Sharing it is great. But allowing people to use the data in software that they are comfortable using is where you really start seeing cost savings. With Safe FME built into the WeoGeo Library and Marketplace, users can transform any dataset into a couple hundred formats. An ESRI ArcGIS user can’t consume GeoJSON without converting it to a Geodatabase first, nor can a AutoCAD user read MapInfo files without converting them to DWG. With the WeoGeo Library, users can request to download those same spatial datasets (Raster or Vector) in any formats you choose to enable.

On top of organizing and sharing data, you also need to set up access to these datasets. Do you want to publish to the world (and maybe monetize them) or do you want to lock them down behind users and groups? Sure you’d love to share data with everyone, but you don’t always own the rights to do so. Being able to grant user access and then take it away when a project is over helps keep that under control.

Of course once your data is loaded into the WeoGeo Library, you can still work with it in many different ways. There is a great RESTful API to allow you to programmatically update users, their groups and their access to datasets as well as work with them while they are there. Everything is scriptable with Python so you can transfer your skills over very quickly to get results from organizing and sharing your data.

So where next? Well if you’d like to try out the Library (which is in private beta), fill out the contact form and we’ll get an invite sent out to you. Browse the wiki to see some of the great features of the Library and Market. Get your data loaded into the Library using the WeoApp or if you are using ArcMap, email me and I’ll add you to our ArcGIS Toolbar beta loader test.

If you are in the Bay Area tonight, come by the WebMapSocial Meetup in Mountain View to see Paul Bissett present the WeoGeo Library and Market and I’ll be presenting at the GeoWeb 2009 conference next week. It was great seeing everyone who had an opportunity to come by the booth and see the demonstration of the WeoGeo Library.

Lastly I just wanted to make sure I posted this video of my son dancing at the Thursday Night celebration. I can only hope YouTube is still around when he brings his prom date home.

Ron Lake sets the tone of the 2009 GeoWeb Conference and it isn’t upbeat.

Wither the world. It is hard at times not to be pessimistic. The world, our world, is admittedly finite. The illusion of expansion and of conquering frontiers, a hangover from the European expansion (the great reconnaissance) and their subsequent temporary dominance of the world, made us think otherwise, but only for a time. There are no more hidden worlds to discover and no more frontiers to conquer. The economy of the West, meaning that of the United States and Europe, seems to be in inevitable decline. The power and influence of the BRIC countries and the GCC seems to be on an inevitable rise. If one clings to the importance of the dominance of the West, this change of affairs may seem to be an unfortunate one indeed. If one looks at the betterment of the balance of humanity, it could equally be a cause for celebration.

As a voter in the United States, I take full responsibility for bringing down western civilization. Seriously though Ron is doing what he does best, foster discussion. I can only imagine “in the round” we’ll be discussing the above and much more. One thing that is for sure, I’ll be presenting a technical session on “Enabling the GeoWeb with Small Organizations” (at the same time as Peter Batty and Xavier Lopez of Oracle).

I’m interested in seeing how the conference shapes up after Where 2.0 2009 being so much smaller than in previous years. The ESRI UC seemed to show that some conferences are still going strong and this could be an indicator as to the GeoWeb Conference’s position in the geospatial conference pecking order. I’m doing my part by going.