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ESRI GIS Google Earth virtual earth

Time comes to Google Earth

Just finished the plenary presentations at this years AGI conference, which actually nicely coincided with the latest revision of both Virtual Earth, Google Earth and the imminent release of ArcGIS explorer. For me the most interesting demo was the new Google Earth to be released tonight which brings a basic temporal capability, Michael Jones demonstrated animation of a GPS track over a period of time – a whole new way to use KML data !!

For me it also interesting to see the beginnings of the convergence between the GYM approach to Geographic Information and the “Established” GIS community – there is still some way to go, but ArcGIS Explorer is a great start.

I’ll upload my presentation later in the week if you are interested…

Written and submitted from the AGI Conference , London, using my Vodafone 3G network card.

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ESRI GIS

ArcGIS Explorer – the iceberg of GIS

James notes in his Blog the continued interest in the soon to be released ArcGIS explorer… seldom in the GIS world has a software package generated this much interest before launch. Part of this interest is no doubt fuelled by the relatively private beta program until now.. I guess in contrast to the initially similar Google Earth.

ArcGIS Explorer

For ESRI this is a different type of software product, Google have always been a “server” company, with massive amounts of server and bandwidth at their disposal and an operation well used to developing server based applications.

Although ArcGIS explorer looks and installs like a conventional desktop application, it is really a client for the large ArcGIS 9.2 server farm than ESRI have been building, and it is the development of this that controls the release cycle for the client.

Like an Iceberg, ArcGIS Explorer is the visible 5% of an application stack that remains below the surface, in the new Geography 2.0 world of GIS applications your GIS is only as good at the server which hosts it and the data which drives it.

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AGI GIS Thoughts

AGI Conference… Make or Break ?

AGI Conference

Less than a week to go the the UK’s main GIS Show and full marks to the AGI, for putting together what I think is one of the most interesting conference agenda’s in years.. If this years range of topics and speakers is not enough to get “bums on seats”, it is hard to see what else the conference organisers could have done to produce a conference to meet the needs of the GI industry in the UK.

But there is the challenge.. the UK industry is mature and dominated by a small number of large vendors, the OS and ESRI(UK) really stand out, and most users are fully aware of what is going on in the industry from the web and personal contacts – yes the industry really is that small in the UK. The AGI also represents a wide range of opinions and interests, so its often difficult to see a clear direction in its activities.

The AGI should be commended for inviting the “new” players this year, in the form of Google and Microsoft, but there is also something of a “organisation gap” as many of innovators who are very active in the UK, the likes of Steve Coast and Mikel Maron, are not traditional GIS people so it is good to see the “non-GIS” approach to using GI represented by Tom Steinberg of mySociety.

For the AGI however success will not come from positive comments, the “Bums of seats” is an important element here, as the conference and exhibition has become the major revenue stream for the AGI.

So.. if you have not decided on attending yet, its not too late – remember if you don’t go this year there might not be a conference or even an AGI next year !!

Written and submitted from the Bruntsfield Hotel, Edinburgh, using my Vodafone 3G network card.

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GIS opensource Thoughts

UK Mash-up event

Mash up eventI blogged a few months ago in response to Charles Arthur on the perceived lack of UK mapping mashups. While I did not agree at the time with his position that lack of data was the major problem, I guess we must accept that he is right to note the lower profile of creating mash-ups in the UK compared to the USA.

This is a pity for whatever reason as the mash-up movement represents a potential hot spot for innovation in the Geospatial industry. To discuss the state of UK mashups the AGI, OGC and BCS Geospatial SIG are holding an event at the OS on the 20th October.

The Draft agenda includes the following topics..

  • What geospatial mash-ups are all about?
  • Background on Geospatial Mash-ups
  • Example Mash-up Application
  • Questions and Facilitated Discussion
  • Geospatial Mash-up Tutorial
  • How are we going to make use of geospatial mash-ups in the UK?
  • Enabling Data Sharing in Mash-ups
  • Panel Discussion: What does the future hold for mash-ups – single malt, blended or moonshine?

The event is primarily targeted at the existing GI industry – including those from commercial and non-commercial standpoints, and the expected audience will encompass both those with a strong technical perspective and those with wider strategic vision and market foresight.

We need to recognise that the concept of geospatial mash-ups is increasingly being discussed, but is not widely understood in the traditional GI community in the UK.

This event is designed to bring together the leading experts in the field, and to learn from them how the approach could be more widely applied across the GI industry.

As an industry we may well find this a challenging concept or simply characterise it as “putting pins on a map”, however it might also mark the beginnings of a wider trend where the ownership of information becomes much more distributed in the future…

To register visit this page

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

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Google Earth Thoughts

Combining brands.. BA and GE

Google and BA together

BA and Google combine their offerings in a really interesting way with BA’s latest world offers campaign.

I like that the viewer really gets a sense of “where” destinations actually are, using GE to “fly” between them, something often lost in our geography challenged generation.

Got me thinking however, whose brand is using the others?

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

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GIS Thoughts

Tele Atlas get it..

Tele Atlas clearly get one of the key elements of “web 2.0”, engage with your customer and make them part of your solution. Their beta Map Insight website allows users to identify and correct errors in Tele Atlas data.

This is a win-win solution, the data provider identifies and corrects errors that actually matter to their users and the user develops a stronger relationship with the data provider when they see their correction implemented… thats a important step to develop trust.

There may critics will no doubt argue, be quality control issues with some information, but remember we are dealing with quite specialist information hopefully without the potential for agenda driven distortion as see in wikipedia.

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

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GIS opensource Technology Thoughts

Maps Kidnapped ?

DRG's are free !!

As both James and Jo blogged, the complete series of USGS Quad series DRG maps were taken hostage this week and then released following the payment of $1600 to the Free the Maps website.

Now we are thought the data was free right? – well yes but.. Some states made the data available free to download, some commerical operators charge for media (with some mark-up), most of the data is available on sites like Microsoft Terraserver. However as the site explains..

“..Because there are so many different web sites hosting bits and pieces of this data, it is often difficult to find.

When you do find it, there is often missing data, the files are difficult to download, or the site may use non-standard naming conventions for the files. In addition, there are still a significant number of States that have no DRG’s available for free download.”

So $1600 later all the data has been purchased and will now be uploaded to the Internet Archive. Great job Jared !!!

Unlike Jo (no surprise there then :-)), I don’t think this is the model for future funding for European Mapping agencies whose data is currently protected by copyright… but it may well form the model for exploiting and distributing OS maps as they reach the end of their copyright as the mapping will be of similar age.

The example DRG above is 35 years old, and out of copyright OS mapping is 50 years old.

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

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GIS Google Earth Technology Thoughts virtual earth

A picture is worth a thousand words ?

Not when it comes to Geographic Information I would argue…

Adena very well I think identified the massive interest in imagery demonstrated by the vendors at this years ESRI UC exhibition in her latest directions magazine editorial. Imagery is great as context to other types of spatial information, but on its own I believe it’s value is limited.

There are a lot of innovative ideas in this part of the geodata business driven both by the massive demand of the new generation of geographic exploration services from GYM and now ESRI, and from the fact that for much of North America there is no large scale topographic information otherwise available.

southampton in 3D

While technologies like Pictometry are interesting especially when combined with tools like SocketSet and OpenFlight to produce 3-D city models (thanks to John Allan and Rick Mort of BAE for the Southampton example above) , they can only provide contextual information which need expert human interpretation to generate true information let alone ‘Geospatial intelligence”

Using the example above, without access to other geographic information, can you tell.. where in the city are we ?, what is the name of the street in the foreground,? what is the address of the red building?, who “owns” this property ?

To answer these type of questions and indeed to really carry out any type of spatial analysis you need detailed feature based information and I would argue for a lot of analysis up to date information as-well.

So until more feature based information can be produced (it’s expensive !!) new tools like ArcGIS Server at 9.2 and the increasingly popular OGC WFS standard will be constrained..

Have we have invented the equivalent of the CD player, but are still producing 78-rpm mono gramophone records.

And a semantic Geoweb based on imagery.. forget it !!

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

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GIS OGC Technology Thoughts

edparsons.com.. now with added GeoRSS

Another one of those things I have been meaning to do for ages, was to implement GeoRSS in the feed for edparsons.com. This has been more frustrating that I would have liked, but it now works.

GeoRSS support

Why the frustration, firstly there are three favours of GeoRSS, Simple and GML which you will find documented at the GeoRSS website and the so-called W3C Geo standard which for historic reasons is also widely used.

So I started initially using the GML encoding only to find there are very few readers which work with it, so OK back to the simple version and a little greater success.

So I guess we are still at the walking rather than running stage for GeoRSS, buts its great to see the major traditional GIS vendors as well as GYM beginning to adopt this approach.

This has value way beyond blogging and putting pins on web maps however, I think there is great potential for GML encoded GeoRSS to offer a realistic alternative to the Web Feature Server as a mechanism for supplying changed feature data in a change only update service.

We often talk in terms of users subscribing to a service for updated data, well GeoRSS seems to be designed for just this purpose.

To learn more watch the GeoRSS blog and all credit to Mikel for his GeoRSS google map plug-in which was used to produce the map above.

Categories
GIS

If it wasn’t for those pesky kids

Is Peter Cochrane turning into an “Old Git” ?, he comments in his silicon.com blog this week, that the internet is suffering this summer from all those kids at home downloading mp3, movies and games from bittorrent and generally spreading trojans and malware as they go…

Not sure I have seen any evidence of this, the “pipes” of the internet seem much the same as they were earlier in the year to me, and the solution to poor online security is better education and better written operating systems (roll on vista?).

These “pesky kids” also represent the next generation of customers and most importantly for the IT industry the next generation of IT professionals, a generation of IT literate young people is actually just what we need.

To me this sounds like an indirect attack on net neutrality ?

Written and submitted from the Holiday Inn Southampton, using my Vodafone 3G network card.