It’s Just Data

Glenn Letham pointed out that there has been a ton of talk about DWG and WeoGeo in the past few weeks. He’s right in the sense that DWG is a new format of ours, but not a new direction. WeoGeo has always been about getting data to users in platforms that they need. Just that simple. DWG to us is the same as Shapefile, ECW, or even GeoJSON. Glenn got it figured out:

That’s totally right. GIS is a user of data, just like CAD is, or BI, or even Excel. What we’re trying to do is get that data, whatever it is, in the native format of that platform. Thus it makes sense for us to have both Esri formats and AutoCAD formats in our system. Take this Undersea Communication Cables and Landing Stations layer:

http://market.weogeo.com/datasets/open-undersea-communication-cables-and-landing-stations/widget.html?zoom=0&lat=18.693090912&lon=0 Undersea Communication Cables and Landing Stations

Why should GIS software packages have all the fun? Of course, it shouldn’t and remember this works both ways. There are some great CAD data out there locked away” in DWG formats that aren’t always readable inside of GIS software packages. We just enable that for every vector dataset in WeoGeo. Sweet!

This is a different philosophy from some other companies. They’d rather engineer plugins to tools to enable their GIS services into apps. This is great for their business model, but not for your workflow. Simplicity is how you get people to actually use data, not some huge add-on that requires lots of money, time, and effort to get working. As a co-worker said years ago to me while she was trying to order some demographic data, Just give me the damn data!”. Exactly, we give you the damn data in your preferred format.

When you list your data in the WeoGeo Market, your data is accessible to users on any supported platform without you having to do a thing. Out of the box support for hundreds of formats. Brilliant!

DWG-UnderseaDWG-Undersea


Tags
Thoughts

Date
July 16, 2012