Categories
GIS Thoughts

The 25th ESRI User Conference preview

I traveling out to San Diego on Saturday to attend the ESRI UC this year flying via phoenix – remember the great days when BA had a direct 777 service !! If you visiting just one GIS show in a year this would be it, although clearly focused on everything Arc it is the place to touch base with most of the industry.

This year my interests are in the upcoming 9.2 release which we need at the OS to solve some pretty major issues we have, where ArcWeb is going and what will Jack have to say about the changing consumer GI market post google maps.

I hope relations between ESRI and Oracle have improved somewhat since last year where Oracle Spatial was noticeably rarely mentioned ! Many large enterpise users of GIS like Ordnance Survey are customers of both companies and we need this stuff to work together.

I have a lot of time for the engineers at ESRI who all seem really committed to what they do, and its great to see so many of them with their own blogs – I’m looking forward to catching up with some of them at the bloggers meet on Wednesday.

Watch out next week for daily postings from San Diego.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS

Google Moon

Ok enough of google earth, how about Google Moon, a mini site put up by google to celebrate the Apollo 11 mission of July 1969. Make sure you zoom in to the maximum level, to see the lunar geology..

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS Thoughts

GML – Keep it simple stupid..

I and the OS are great supporters of GML, the Geographic Markup Language, an open standard for XML encoding of geodata. OS MasterMap was the first widely available product to make use of GML and over the past couple of years the industry has developed solutions to fully exploit it.

We knew when we started using GML there were some limitations and our application schema had to extend the then core schema to account for the richness of MasterMap data – this is a great advantage of GML, the ability to extend the schema to meet the needs of a particular user community or supplier is a great advantage, if vendors correctly (and many don’t!) implement their GML parsers it is a very flexible solution.

This flexibility however has also been GML’s downfall to this point, many perceive GML to be very complex, verbose and unfriendly – and I must admit to having a little sympathy for this view, as would anybody who has looked through the GML 3 documentation all 800 pages of it !

But key to the solution here is the L in GML, the fact that GML is a Language, means when can select just enough of the language to communicate what we need to and ignore the rest.
For a French speaker, although English is a very complex language, you need only a subset of it to communicate while on holiday, likewise to communicate simple geodata you need only a subset of GML. The idea of simple subsets of GML or profiles has been bouncing around for at least a year, so it is very good news to see that the OGC has published a candidate specification and is asking for public responses.

I can’t see geodata web services taking off without profiles becoming adopted.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.