Geospatial and Mapping eSeminar
An interesting Webinar takes place this Wednesday at 10am PDT. The AdobeUsers.com GeospatialPDF Webinar covers:
- How GIS professionals can create full-featured map layouts with attributes, labels and layers in ESRI’s ArcMap and use TerraGo Publisher to export them to a geo-registered, portable PDF
- How to use PDF maps in the field, including querying the spatial data (e.g., find coordinates of a location or accurately measure distance, perimeter and area) and creating spatially intelligent markup using the tools in Acrobat 9
- How GIS staff in the office can roll field markups within a PDF map back into the enterprise quickly and efficiently
It sounds like a good overview of using PDF to share spatial data and maps. Definitely worth the time.
Even Ben Franklin was interested in getting the message out to the old world about geospatial PDFs.
Even Ben Franklin was interested in getting the message out to the old world about geospatial PDFs.
GeoWeb 2009 is Around the Corner
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.
GeoWeb 2009 is Around the Corner
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.
ESRI’s MapIt vs MapDotNet vs IDV Solutions
A couple people asked me at the ESRI UC what I thought about the ESRI MapIt announcement and how it related to MapDotNet and IDV Solutions products. Both MapDotNet and IDV Solutions have great products and really impressive support teams so don’t expect either to just disappear anytime soon (if at all). One thing is for sure though, MapIt is like no other ESRI product before it on how it is sold, supported and how agile the development team is. I suspect we’ll be seeing more ESRI MapIt type products from ESRI (smaller more nimble development teams like ArcGIS Explorer and the API teams) in the coming year.
From a user standpoint, Microsoft seems to favor ESRI’s product (though one could say they were at the ESRI UC so we’ll have to see how Microsoft plays MapIt moving forward). Enterprise customers seem to prefer ESRI, but MapIt isn’t aimed at them (I can’t tell you how many times I heard ESRI say that I didn’t need MapIt because I already had everything I needed; ArcGIS Server). Thus this is a play for the market outside their traditional space and one that is possibly very disruptive if they can pull it off. At the very least, MapDotNet says bring it on! So we are starting to see the Microsoft stack get very spatial.
SQL Server 2008 Spatial + SharePoint + Silverlight = GIS
The only thing this can result in is better development tools for programmers and thus better tools for users.
ESRI’s MapIt vs MapDotNet vs IDV Solutions
A couple people asked me at the ESRI UC what I thought about the ESRI MapIt announcement and how it related to MapDotNet and IDV Solutions products. Both MapDotNet and IDV Solutions have great products and really impressive support teams so don’t expect either to just disappear anytime soon (if at all). One thing is for sure though, MapIt is like no other ESRI product before it on how it is sold, supported and how agile the development team is. I suspect we’ll be seeing more ESRI MapIt type products from ESRI (smaller more nimble development teams like ArcGIS Explorer and the API teams) in the coming year.
From a user standpoint, Microsoft seems to favor ESRI’s product (though one could say they were at the ESRI UC so we’ll have to see how Microsoft plays MapIt moving forward). Enterprise customers seem to prefer ESRI, but MapIt isn’t aimed at them (I can’t tell you how many times I heard ESRI say that I didn’t need MapIt because I already had everything I needed; ArcGIS Server). Thus this is a play for the market outside their traditional space and one that is possibly very disruptive if they can pull it off. At the very least, MapDotNet says bring it on! So we are starting to see the Microsoft stack get very spatial.
SQL Server 2008 Spatial + SharePoint + Silverlight = GIS
The only thing this can result in is better development tools for programmers and thus better tools for users.
ESRI RESTful API 9.4
I didn’t get as much time to talk with ESRI about the RESTful API, but I did two things answered that were bothering me.
- You will be able edit with the RESTful API. Opens up the ability to edit ESRI Geodatabases with just about any client you can imagine.
- You will be able to query and work with other tables in the geodatabase (tables don’t need to be joined to query them). I always seem to have lots of related tables in my projects so this should lessen the need to roll my own ASP.NET connector to work with tables.
Bonus news is that the ESRI JavaScript API will support HTML 5 for some really slick web applications. Of course this is all based on ArcGIS 9.4 which should roll into our hands the first half of 2010.
Restful