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If a Yahoo! Turns off Their Maps API and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Last week something very unsurprising happened:

As part of Yahoo!’s commitment to creating deeply personal digital experiences, we have been reprioritizing our current portfolio of mapping products to refocus on a great consumer Mapping and Local Search experience.

So there you go, finally Yahoo! Maps API is going away. Seems like just a couple years ago, Yahoo! was one the most prolific GeoAPI companies. Now they are telling you to go look at OviMaps which might be just as unused as Yahoo!’s own APIs.

Jerry Yang seems still excited about Yahoo!’s chances though.

Jerry is happyJerry is happy

Thanks for visiting Yahoo! Now go find your APIs somewhere else

June 20, 2011 Thoughts





If a Yahoo! Turns off Their Maps API and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Last week something very unsurprising happened:

As part of Yahoo!’s commitment to creating deeply personal digital experiences, we have been reprioritizing our current portfolio of mapping products to refocus on a great consumer Mapping and Local Search experience.

So there you go, finally Yahoo! Maps API is going away. Seems like just a couple years ago, Yahoo! was one the most prolific GeoAPI companies. Now they are telling you to go look at OviMaps which might be just as unused as Yahoo!’s own APIs.

Jerry Yang seems still excited about Yahoo!’s chances though.

Jerry is happyJerry is happy

Thanks for visiting Yahoo! Now go find your APIs somewhere else

June 20, 2011 Thoughts





Google Earth Builder — A Serious Geospatial Play From Google

So let me get this right out of the way. I for one welcome our new geospatial overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted GIS personality, I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground geoprocessing caves (see here: ).

Google OverloardsGoogle Overloards

I had seen the announcement of Google Earth Builder (GEB) at Where 2.0 and like many of us, I laughed it off as a distraction. Well not anymore as I was lucky enough to take part in a Directions Magazine Webinar today that gave Google an opportunity to show off GEB and I’ve come away impressed. This is a company that has a vision about sharing and visualizing geospatial data and is developing tools to make publishing and visualizing it, much easier. Imagine a combination of Esri, Geocommons, SimpleGeo, Cloudmade, Microsoft and a little Amazon (It doesn’t do everything they do, but crosses all boundaries. Who else by Google could do that?) thrown in for good measure.

You can view the GEB webinar on Directions Magazine by registering. If you get a chance to see it you really should. Basically Google gives you the ability to upload shp, csv, kml, GeoTIFF, JP2 or MrSid with almost no limit in file size. Plus 3D models (COLLADA and probably SketchUp) are also supported. You manage it with a Voyager GIS/MapInfo Manager looking tool and then visualize it using Google’s map styling tools. On the fly rendering of vector data, your vector data (Freaky, right?). On top of it all they give you advanced analytic tools to see who is using your maps. Data sharing? As simple as the data sharing you’ve already seen with Google Docs. Plus tie in OAuth2 for granting access to resources. Bam!

Google is delivering access to this data via the web browser, Google Earth, Mobile (iOS and Android), the Google Maps and Earth APIs, OGC standards and as raw vector features. That means no matter where you are, the data will be available on your platform (Missed references to Microsoft Windows Phone, but that’s got to be around the corner, cough). GEB is built partially on Google Fusion Tables, so if you’ve already gotten familiar with that product, you should be able to get working with GEB. The limits of features goes up million fold vs Fusion Tables and you get that great rich cartography visualization tools I talked about above.

Pricing is still vague, but Google is looking at this as a Page Views vs Storage model. You get changed based on how many map views and disk space you are using, but they aren’t tied together. You could have 10TB of imagery on GEB but accessed by 2 people, or you could have one dinky little KML accessed by millions of users. The licensing scales either way.

The commercial version (I’m assuming this is a reference to the federal government already using it) is due out this fall. Google will have tools available for migrating ArcGIS Server for Server implementations which they didn’t get into details so we’ll have to hear about their plans for Esri users. Quite a bit they talked about migrating Esri products and data formats to GEB so it is clear who they are going after.

So as I’m sitting there, all I could think of was how many different ways WeoGeo can work with GEB. We’re looking forward to working with the GEB APIs for delivery of WeoGeo Market and Library data and hope to talk more about it over the summer. Very exciting times!

Bolo PageBolo Page

Larry Page is gunning for you. Look at those pecs!

June 16, 2011 Thoughts





Esri REST API Could Be an OGC Standard

Update:

Confirmation by the OGC on the status of the Esri REST API and the OGC process.

Now I’m sorry if I butchered that name, I don’t recall being briefed on what the API Is called these days. (Seems like REST API for ArcGIS Server would be right) It appears that over last weekend Esri announced that they were “giving” their REST API to OGC as a standard. Big news if you ask me given that the OGC has just never been able to get an OGC REST Standard adopted. Plus it might make more sense given that the Esri REST API is pretty damn awesome and you got to think that the OGC would rather have awesome over a committee standard that no one uses.

One curious outcome of this is that we could now have a JSON standard in OGC, in this case, Esri JSON. GeoJSON, despite the fact that almost everyone uses it, is a community standard (And there isn’t anything wrong with that), not an OGC one (like GeoRSS). If the OGC adopts the Esri JSON standard in the REST API, we could finally have a JSON standard for the INSPIRE project (Does anyone else use OGC on purpose, or is it only by law?) Brian Flood thinks it makes sense and I tend to agree with him.

https://twitter.com/bFlood/status/81375894324789248

Bill Dollins isn’t so sure

If this is all going to happen, we’ll see a couple of things come out of this. First, we’ll probably see Geoserver and Mapserver start supporting this standard (Though we’ve seen Esri’s REST API documented for months, no one that I know of has implemented it) which means that Esri Desktop users can add these servers without having to use WMS or WFS. It also may mean that clients such as QGIS, gvSIG, and OpenLayers will have native Esri REST API (And thus Esri ArcGIS for Server) reading.

If OGC was an open organization, we’d probably know more. Heck, something to talk about at the UC next month, right?

Wonder how Esri was able to do this?

June 16, 2011 Thoughts





Esri REST API Could Be an OGC Standard

Update:

Confirmation by the OGC on the status of the Esri REST API and the OGC process.

Now I’m sorry if I butchered that name, I don’t recall being briefed on what the API Is called these days. (Seems like REST API for ArcGIS Server would be right) It appears that over last weekend Esri announced that they were “giving” their REST API to OGC as a standard. Big news if you ask me given that the OGC has just never been able to get an OGC REST Standard adopted. Plus it might make more sense given that the Esri REST API is pretty damn awesome and you got to think that the OGC would rather have awesome over a committee standard that no one uses.

One curious outcome of this is that we could now have a JSON standard in OGC, in this case, Esri JSON. GeoJSON, despite the fact that almost everyone uses it, is a community standard (And there isn’t anything wrong with that), not an OGC one (like GeoRSS). If the OGC adopts the Esri JSON standard in the REST API, we could finally have a JSON standard for the INSPIRE project (Does anyone else use OGC on purpose, or is it only by law?) Brian Flood thinks it makes sense and I tend to agree with him.

https://twitter.com/bFlood/status/81375894324789248

Bill Dollins isn’t so sure

If this is all going to happen, we’ll see a couple of things come out of this. First, we’ll probably see Geoserver and Mapserver start supporting this standard (Though we’ve seen Esri’s REST API documented for months, no one that I know of has implemented it) which means that Esri Desktop users can add these servers without having to use WMS or WFS. It also may mean that clients such as QGIS, gvSIG, and OpenLayers will have native Esri REST API (And thus Esri ArcGIS for Server) reading.

If OGC was an open organization, we’d probably know more. Heck, something to talk about at the UC next month, right?

Wonder how Esri was able to do this?

June 16, 2011 Thoughts





Drama for ArcGIS

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?

June 15, 2011 Thoughts