Month: July 2005

As I was in “the valley” today, on my way home from visiting Fujitsu in Sunnyvale I thought I would drop into the Apple campus in nearby Cupertino. I am please to confirm it still exisits despite Microsoft not having it on the imagery layer in MSN virtual earth. I have the t-shirt to prove it!

The imagery used by microsoft appears to come from the USGS, and if one wanted a concrete example of problems on “free” geodata this is it. The imagery although available at cost of duplication is over 15 years old! compare that to the commerical imagery used by Google and supplied by DigitalGlobe. – You pay your money (or not) and take the choice..

Written and submitted from the BA lounge, San Francisco Airport, using the t-mobile wifi network.

I have left San Diego, and flown up to San Jose to meet up with the people at Fujitsu Siemens the people who build the tablet PC’s the OS field staff use.

As always, enjoyed the ESRI conference, the whole web services message seems to be coming together now and it was good to see OGC standards prominent.

My initial opinion around the new arcexplorer is changing, although I’m sure the prototype demostrated on mainstage makes great use of ‘Smoke and Mirrors”, a thin client consuming Arc Web services makes a very useful tool.

Imagine a tool as easy to use as google earth with the capabilty to carry out complex geoprocessing if that is what you need..

Missed the blogger’s event, “Dicks” was so busy and I was late – so ending up going to the padres game. Next time guys

Written and submitted from the Plaza Suites Hotel, San Jose, using the hotels broadband network.

Had a couple of meetings today, then met up with some old Autodesk friends and wnet along to a few presentations yesterday.

I was taken aback by the amount of new stuff especially in ArcSDE and database support in 9.2. As i said yesterday I was surprised how little emphasis was given in the plenary to quite major changes in Geodatabases. The SQL interface and the use of an OGC simple features schema in Oracle is really big news, and today I saw demonstrated access to spatial data in a geodatabase from sql*plus.

More details also emerged of the file based geodatabase (which breaks the volume limit of the access based personal geodatabase allowing the storage of up to 2Tb. If that was not interesting enough the schema’s supported are the same as normal SDE including imagery..

So for me, beyond the eye-candy of the google earth like arcexploer, the hidden message of the conference this year is the rise of the geodatabase