Category: Thoughts

So you can’t have Silverlight, Java or Flash to develop interactive mapping on the iPhone and have to “resort” to using JavaScript. Well maybe not, could SVG be the way forward to creating mapping websites on the iPhone?? My 2G iPhone seems to support SVG fairly well, but many SVG sites aren’t optimized for the iPhone. Take ESRI’s abandoned (?) SVG Viewer:

ESRI’s ArcWeb SVG Viewer

It loads and you can turn on and off the “widgets” with ease. But navigating it was impossible. I know zero about developing with SVG so I suppose someone else will have to comment on if it is possible to create iPhone compatible navigation for SVG apps. Heck if ESRI were to make a ArcGIS Server SVG API compatible for the iPhone, every ArcGIS Server implementation would be viewable on the iPhone.

GIS Analysts are usually in the back room performing support rolls with most law enforcement operations, but recently a GIS Analyst was part of a marijuana eradication raid in California.

A GIS specialist went in with the raid teams for the first time in NPS history to perform an immediate on the ground evaluation of the impacts to the natural resource during the raid.

Just think how much better some law enforcement situations might have gone if GIS had been part of the raid.

Redwood National and State Parks (CA)
Major Interagency Raid Conducted On Marijuana Plantation_

On September 10th, Redwood National and State Parks conducted a marijuana eradication raid, utilizing an interagency anti-drug task force. The focus of the effort was a marijuana plantation in Redwood Creek that contained 9,564 plants and covered approximately five acres on steep terrain. This marijuana site is within six miles of the world’s tallest tree in a park that is also a World Heritage Site and International Biosphere Reserve. Rangers detained five Mexican nationals for questioning about a mile from the marijuana growing operation. Three of them had prior deportations and were transferred to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). One who is on felony probation for marijuana was held on that violation and will be deported later. The fifth was charged with providing false information to an officer. A GIS specialist went in with the raid teams for the first time in NPS history to perform an immediate on the ground evaluation of the impacts to the natural resource during the raid. This documentation will be very beneficial for the restoration process. Significant resource damage has resulted from this illegal activity and an initial cleanup operation using California National Guard soldiers and helicopter is planned for October. This raid included almost 60 law enforcement and support staff. The National Park Service wishes to acknowledge and thank the support provided by Humboldt County Sheriff Office, Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP), North State Marijuana Investigation Team, California Department of Justice, California Fish and Game, California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, Green Diamond Resources Company, United States Coast Guard, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), United States Marshall Service, California State Park Rangers, National Park Service SETT II team and ISB Pacific West special agents.

[Submitted by Rick Nolan, Chief of Interpretation and Education]

Vish wonders aloud if we are close to using online tools to replace ESRI’s venerable Model Builder.

Why can’t you get RESTful with ESRI’s Web Services?

And I, for one, welcome our new geospatial overlords

I didn’t bother to blog about the Google and GeoEye announcement (Google launches satellite?? Are you kidding me Information Week?) from a couple weeks ago (or was it a couple days ago?) because I really didn’t see what was so newsworthy about it. It isn’t like this is the first announcement we’ve seen from Google and a satellite company. Plus Microsoft even went out and bought Vexcel (hmm didn’t blog about that acquisition either).

I just don’t care too much about these deals as they don’t affect me in any way. I still aquire my imagery the way I did before and I still use the free services the way I did before. The only thing this confirms to me is that you can’t make money from selling sattelite imagery on an open market, you need a sugar daddy to pay the bills. I guess that is what is the most telling thing out of this announcement, GeoEye’s and Digital Globe’s business models are broken.

You might remember The United Countries of Baseball Map from last year.

Any time you attempt to make a map such as this, you know people are going to find faults with it. Well Drew Silva took comments people made about the map on sites such as Deadspin and revised some of the boundaries of the map. I think the refinement really tightens up one of my favorite maps that I’ve ever seen. Check out the result below and compare with the CommonCensus Sports Map of MLB Team Fan Areas.

Thanks to Dan for pointing this out to me. He also offered up the Major League Baseball blackout map. Also, no need to bring up the collapse of the Diamondbacks. I’m a fair-weather fan of them so it doesn’t really hurt me too much, especially since my team is surging in the standings (but unfortunately has nothing to play for).

All Points Blog has the news that Netezza is set to release a “spatial extension” to their Data Warehouse Appliance. You may? not think you know much about Netezza, but know that their success keeps Larry Ellison up at night. There was some discussion on this blog about super fast geospatial analysis and what the target would be. I think basically Netezza is trying to solve problems that we currently can’t do with existing spatial databases in both scale and speed. I wouldn’t suspect seeing their product replacing Oracle Spatial or SQL Server, but for those who have the money to pay for the product this could help them answer questions they cannot do right now. For most of us, just sit back and marvel at what you could do if money was no option and know that in a year or two, much of this technology will be in your hands. Peter Batty says he’ll be blogging more about what exactly this means in the next week. Can’t wait to read it.

This is Star Trek quality spatial data analysis folks

Photo by paper or plastic?

Brian Timoney has updated his Gulf Coast Energy Impact website with Hurricane Ike information. It also looks like Brian has gotten a sponsor for his work, IHS (who many might better know as the publisher of this).

Ike’s impacts on Gulf Coast energy

ISC keeps pushing the .NET web mapping front and has released MapDotNET UX Beta. MapDotNet UX Server has WCF-based web services and a WPF map and tile renderer. MapDotNet UX Studio includes advanced map design (XAML editing), support for shapefiles, SQL Server 2008 as well as ArcSDE ArcGIS Server and PostGIS and tile cache management.

ISC has some demos available to show the new MapDotNet UX in action. The beta is closed at this time, but interested developers who want to showcase WPF and Silverlight mapping are encouraged to apply. Another item to note is that the MapDotNet UX Studio will be free. ISC describes UX Studio this way:

It (MapDotNet UX Studio) was built with the WPF map control and allows developers/cartographers to develop their map configuration file (the .mapx), create/manage tile caches, perform data import/export to all of the support data types (SQL 08, SDE, PostGIS and Shapefile) and create starter Silverlight & WPF apps.

Of course their web services will still be licensed as normal. Some screenshots of UX Studio are below and I have to say they remind me of another product. 😉

So deCarta has a new product called deCarta Mobile. Everyone has their own mobile development platform, so why not offer your own? I’m sure they have some developers lined up to showcase their Java LBS platform so there will probably be some interesting apps coming forward. I can understand that deCarta brings much expertise to the LBS arena, but I’m just not sure that will matter much given the huge developer bases for Android and the iPhone (I await Glenn’s comment below about Nokia mattering).

In the end I suspect this is a niche platform for users who need a very specific application and not meant for consumer applications (not saying that it isn’t possible, just there are other SDKs that developers might choose before this one). deCarta did a good job of explaining why they think they are important in the hosted service world in the comments of this post on the Virtual Earth /Live Maps Blog. Ignore all the porn links and go to the last comment (note to Microsoft, Live Spaces is a horrible blogging platform and using it just proves to everyone what a poorly thought out concept “Live” is).

The deCarta model might be just what some companies are looking for (being able to pick and chose providers or hosting your own data) and I suppose we’ll see how if deCarta Mobile takes off. For me Java is irrelevant on the mobile platform (iPhone) and on my desktop (I think only my Oracle management tools are Java) so I’m definitely not its market.

Jerry loves GeoJSON

Yahoo! announced some updates to GeoPlanet including GeoJSON support. Yahoo! seems much more quiet than most companies about their endeavors (Fire Eagle, GeoPlanet, Pipes) and I’m glad to see them improving given the pressures they are under these days. I really like how GeoPlanet is organized and I hope it (and Fire Eagle and Pipes) continues to be improved and enhanced. Plus not having to deal with XML is a huge bonus. Now if ESRI can support GeoJSON with their RESTful API we’ll all be very happy.