Cityzenith Beta Release
Well today is a big day at Cityzenith, we are announcing our beta program.
Chicago CIO Brenna Berman presents Cityzenith’s 5D Smart City to Mayor Emmanuel of Chicago and Mayor Khan of London.
Cityzenith’s 5D Smart World™, the focus of the BETA User Program, is a complete, web-based Software-as-a-Service platform designed to help AEC firms and Real Estate companies transform their existing investments in BIM and other technologies into valuable tools for aggregating, searching, managing, analyzing, and reusing project information. Designed to help Smart Cities manage the massive amounts of data generated in today’s cities, the platform has been modified and adapted for this Beta Program to suit the specific needs of the professional AEC and CRE communities who design, build, own, and operate Smart Cities, Smart Campuses, and Smart Buildings the world over.
We are excited to be working with some of the biggest names in the AEC and Real Estate industries including; AECOM, WSP-Parsons Brinkerhoff, Gensler, SOM, Microsoft, RMW, Accenture, Surbana Jurong, UI Labs City Digital and the GSA.
If you’re interested in learning more, please reach out to me or sign up for our beta. We expect to have our public beta in the next couple months so be ready!
Bosch ConnctedWorld 2016
Bosch ConnctedWorld 2016 — ChicagoNext week I’ll be at Bosch ConnectedWorld Chicago talking on a panel about Connected Smart Cities. I haven’t been talking much about my new company, Cityzenith as we’ve been working hard on releasing our beta but that happens very soon so expect to read much more about Smart Cities, IoT, BIM, Cesium.js and open data. If you’re attending, let me know and we can meet up.
Last week we were in front of Mayor Emanuel of Chicago, IL and Mayor Khan of London, UK. You can see underground model inside our cesium.js world.
https://www.vimeo.com/183060781
Chicago CIO Brenna Berman Presents Cityzenith 5D Smart World to Mayor Emmanuel and Mayor Khan from Cityzenith on Vimeo.
Bosch ConnctedWorld 2016
Bosch ConnctedWorld 2016 — ChicagoNext week I’ll be at Bosch ConnectedWorld Chicago talking on a panel about Connected Smart Cities. I haven’t been talking much about my new company, Cityzenith as we’ve been working hard on releasing our beta but that happens very soon so expect to read much more about Smart Cities, IoT, BIM, Cesium.js and open data. If you’re attending, let me know and we can meet up.
Last week we were in front of Mayor Emanuel of Chicago, IL and Mayor Khan of London, UK. You can see underground model inside our cesium.js world.
https://www.vimeo.com/183060781
Chicago CIO Brenna Berman Presents Cityzenith 5D Smart World to Mayor Emmanuel and Mayor Khan from Cityzenith on Vimeo.
GIS Software has to be Hard to Use
Serious though, right? GIS has been defined by those who create much of it at “Scientific Software”. Because of such, it needs to be:
- Expensive
- Difficult to use
- Poorly documented
- Buggy
- Slow
ArcGIS Toolbars
Professional GIS*
GIS software is literally the kitchen sink. Most GIS software started out as a project for some company and then morphed into a product. They are a collection of tools created for specific projects duct taped together and sold as a subscription. We’ve talked about re-imagining how we work with spatial data but we rarely turn the page. The GIS Industrial Complex (open source and proprietary, everything is awful) is built upon making things hard to do. There has been attempts to solve the problem but then in themselves are usually built for a project rather than a product. Somewhat cynical but you have to wonder if this is true.
https://twitter.com/jeff_pickles/status/745720282086727681
Tools such as Tableau are the future and as they add more spatial capability GIS Specialists will be out of a job. Being a button pusher seems more and more like a dead end job.
GIS Software has to be Hard to Use
Serious though, right? GIS has been defined by those who create much of it at “Scientific Software”. Because of such, it needs to be:
- Expensive
- Difficult to use
- Poorly documented
- Buggy
- Slow
ArcGIS Toolbars
Professional GIS*
GIS software is literally the kitchen sink. Most GIS software started out as a project for some company and then morphed into a product. They are a collection of tools created for specific projects duct taped together and sold as a subscription. We’ve talked about re-imagining how we work with spatial data but we rarely turn the page. The GIS Industrial Complex (open source and proprietary, everything is awful) is built upon making things hard to do. There has been attempts to solve the problem but then in themselves are usually built for a project rather than a product. Somewhat cynical but you have to wonder if this is true.
https://twitter.com/jeff_pickles/status/745720282086727681
Tools such as Tableau are the future and as they add more spatial capability GIS Specialists will be out of a job. Being a button pusher seems more and more like a dead end job.
GIS and the Keyboard
I think you can usually tell when a GIS Professional learned GIS by how they use their keyboard. Those who learned either on UNIX command line programs such as ArcInfo or GDAL seem to go out of their way to type commands either through keystrokes or scripting while those who learned in the GUI era, either ArcView 3.x or ArcGIS Desktop prefer to use a mouse. Now generalizing is always dangerous but it highlights things about how GIS analysis is done.
GUI GIS
I almost feel like Yakov Smirnoff saying “What a country!” when you realize that most of the complicated scripting commands of the 90s are completed almost perfectly by dropping a couple GIS layers on a wizard and keep clicking next. Esri should be commended for making these tools drop-dead simple to use. But it brings up the issue of does anyone under stand what is going on with these tools when they run them? Let’s take a simple example for Intersect.
Esri Intersect Tool
So simple right? You just take your input features, choose where the output feature goes and hit OK. Done. But what about those optional items below. How many people actually ever set those? Not many of course and many times you don’t need to set them but not understanding why they are options makes it dangerous that you might not perform your analysis correctly. I’ll say you don’t understand how to run a GIS command unless you understand not only what the command does but all the options.
You don’t have to learn Python to be a GIS Analyst, running Model Builder or just the tools from ArcCatalog is good enough. But if you find yourself not even seeing these options on the bottom, let alone understand what they are and why they are used, you aren’t anything more than a button pusher. And button pushers are easily replaced. The Esri Intersect Tool has many options and using it like below will only give you minimum power and understanding of how GIS works.
Esri Intersect Tool with blinders on.
In the old days of keyboards, you have to type commands out and know what each one did. In fact many commands wouldn’t run unless you put an option in. Part of it is when you type the words “fuzzy_tollerance” enough times you want to know what they heck it is. I think keyboard GIS connected users to the commands and concepts of GIS more than wizards do. Much like working with your hands connects people to woodworking, working with your keyboard connects people to GIS.