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Boy, all I wanted to do is get some GIS data for GIS Day 2009. Little did I know my own hometown is one of the worst offenders of locking up GIS Data.

City of Tempe – Sale of Engineering & GIS Records

Take a look, “$568.70 for each quarter section or 1/4 mile area”. For your own information, Tempe is 40 sq miles in size so do the math. Simply nuts! Plus take a look at their “conditions”:

Conditions and Restrictions

1. All commercial orders and digital data orders will be required to document purpose of use.
2. Plotting orders in excess of $25.00 and all digital data orders will require full pre- payment before order is processed.
3. Digital data will be provided on city-issued media only.
4. All orders and payments must be done in-person only.

I mean really, not only do they “share” it in Microstation, but you have to document the purpose of public data, you have to get the data on “city-issued” media and orders must be made in person. My jaw is still on the floor a week after I looked that this. Time for a little geo-revolution in Arizona. Don’t you think? Prepare to get very tired of my “struggle” against the City of Tempe for their data.

Time to call in the troops, free public data!

Update: Andrew Turner provides a great link to put this in perspective as well as the issues with data licenses on local geodata.

Update 12/01/2009: I just received this from the city:

Hello Mr. Fee,

Thank you for bringing your concerns to the city’s attention. We will review this practice/policy with the City Attorney’s Office and I will get back to you with more information as soon as possible.

Regards,
Nikki

Nikki Ripley
City of Tempe
Communication and Media Relations Director

At least it is a response. Maybe other organizations who have more power in this valley might be able to get some results. I’m still hopeful though…

ESRI has been talking about this for months (and haphazardly blogged about on the ArcGIS Online blog last week), but they’ve now got a post up on their ArcGIS Server Blog outlining the changes coming to ESRI’s ArcGIS Online web services. (Side note, wouldn’t be nice if ESRI sort of planned their blog posts better for a common message?)

Since the release of ArcGIS Online three years ago, the 2D services have used the WGS 1984 geographic coordinate system and a 512 x 512 pixel tile size. Google and Bing, in contrast, use a modified Mercator projection and a 256 x 256 tile size. The scale sets used by both tiling schemes are similar, but not equivalent.

Make sure you read the whole ArcGIS Server blog post to understand what you have to do and when. From the ArcGIS Online blog:

The existing services in the?ArcGIS Online tiling scheme will remain available for at least six months and, depending on demand, may remain available longer. Although the services will remain available, the content in these services will no longer be updated.

I’m continuing my Geography Week 2009 in California this Friday in Ventura County, California. World GIS DAY 2009 at Ventura College is an all day event and my keynote kicks off at 8:30am in the morning. I’ve not been to a CIRGIS event yet and I’ve been told they are well attended so there should be lots of fun for everyone who comes.

I’ll be heading up to Berkeley this week to take part in GIS 2009 – Discovering the World Through GIS. I’m keynoting the event and I’m looking forward to seeing all the great presentations and meeting some folks I’ve not had an opportunity to yet. If you are in the Bay Area Wednesday night (November 18th), be sure to drop by.

Why oh why are we seeing this Map/Menu bar on all these new “Web 2.0” mapping applications? Take this beta example from the USGS National Map Viewer:

So you’ve been sitting back, watching all this great new Web 2.0 stuff and this is what you bring to the table? I know, lets see how much junk we can throw into a JavaScript API. The whiteboard on this one must have been intense… Just take every idea that someone comes up with and toss it into a ribbon interface. Sweet! But this isn’t a complex, specialized, niche application we are talking about. This is our (well if you like me are a tax paying citizen) national map. Yes the American Map! It should be something we are proud of, something we would run of a flag pole and salute!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDA9NbPAK8o&w=560&h=315]

They do expose some other ways to access the data, but don’t be fooled by the names. The Google Maps, Bing Maps and the rest are all just links to the ArcGIS REST API. That is how The National Map should be exposed. “Here are the services, use them and create your own maps”. Might be a better way to handle it because the future looks bloated.

Of course we can’t completely blame the USGS for this, ESRI’s JavaScript and Flex API sample viewers have a similar abomination. Clearly GIS Analysts shouldn’t be designing user interfaces. Are we really going to use this thing for every web map API?

I mean we all love to throw complex concepts under a widget icon of a box with gears on it. Me? I can never remember if I’m supposed to use the compass or the globe to zoom in or out.

The one saving grace is that one day Google will just enable all this in their web map viewer making everything else irrelevant.

Microsoft finally has added draggable routes to their Bing Maps service. ‘Bout time guys since Google has had it for over 2 years. That said I’ve been using Bing Maps more lately because I don’t trust the Google Maps layers (great API, horrible data).

Is anyone going to host a Bing Maps Party?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ&w=560&h=315]

So the news at the DevSummit was that you could install both ArcGIS 9.4 alongside ArcGIS 9.3.1. I’m not part of the beta for 9.4, but reports are that ESRI has not enabled this yet for the latest 9.4 beta release. If you want to install 9.4 on a computer running ArcGIS 9.3.1, you are being prompted to uninstall 9.3.1 before continuing. Has anyone yet been able to run 9.4 and 9.3.1 at the same time?

Now this could be a limitation of the current beta and not actually any retreat by ESRI on being able to run two versions of ArcGIS on the same machine. Either way it make it really hard to beta test the 9.4 release as you can’t compare it to older versions.

Note: If you post any specific 9.4 Beta information (such as quoting forums posts on the Beta forums), expect ESRI to personally contact you. They appear to be monitoring this blog post. You’ve been warned.

Phillip Holmstrand continues to improve his batchgeocoding.com website. He’s added bulk reverse geocoding using Google’s geocoder. Google’s advantage over Yahoo is it also includes an “accuracy” field so you can get feedback on your geocodes. Plus Google has rooftop geocoding in many cities making it much more accurate than Yahoo or TIGER/Line based geocoders.

Its Alright?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJiYZ6QIAtY&w=560&h=315]

I’ll be doing the same thing tonight as most of you. Using my iPhone while my son goes trick-or-treating.

If you are lucky enough to live in a “hip city” (or at least one that Zillow thinks is interesting), you can use their Trick-or-Treat Housing Index to find the best places to beg to sweets.

Programmable web has a timely post on what MapQuest has been doing.

MapQuest continues to add services to its developer network. Have they caught up with the geo-tools available from Google and Yahoo?

Most recently the mapping pioneer released a geocoding web service and static maps. In fact, many recent posts on its developer blog have included multiple announcements, testament to how much the company has been releasing.

Some cool new stuff for sure. My only issue is that I can’t find Legend City using its geocoder.

No Legend City in these parts….