My Hometown County Has a Case of the Stupids

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…

June 7, 2011 Thoughts






My Hometown County Has a Case of the Stupids

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…

June 7, 2011 Thoughts






Microsoft Magicshop Frontdoor — Improved Address Locations, Released to OpenStreetMap

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?).

Magicshop FrontdoorMagicshop Frontdoor

June 6, 2011 Thoughts






Is QGIS a Drop-in Replacement for ArcView?

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.

Esri VertigoEsri Vertigo

Is ArcView use about to fall off the ledge?

June 6, 2011 Thoughts






Is QGIS a Drop-in Replacement for ArcView?

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.

Esri VertigoEsri Vertigo

Is ArcView use about to fall off the ledge?

June 6, 2011 Thoughts






The Consultants - Sweco

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!

May 31, 2011 Thoughts