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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

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.

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.

I was part of a panel today at the The Mobility Summit an event organised by the European Technology Forum and Cnet Networks. The panel discussed the emergence of more precisely the lack of emergence of Location Based Services as a section of the mobile data industry.

The point I argued, as I have before, is that as long as LBS applications are more difficult to access, and provide no more information, than asking a passer-by in the street they will fail to become mainstream. This is really disappointing as all the necessary components are in place to deliver really useful mobile portals customised to met the needs of the use based on their location.

Imagine switching on your mobile phone and been presented with, the local weather, traffic conditions, train departures from the closest station and your nearest ATM etc, all without having to click through many complex menus, pressing keys multiple times etc.

From the users perspective, the complexity of currently using LBS is a real issue, although as Sean Phelan from multimap.com pointed out, cost is a big problem… would multimap, streetmap, google maps etc have had the success they have had so far, if they users had been charged 25p a go !

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