Category: GIS

Now back from the GITA show I am reflecting on one of the few events, which caused much excitement at the show – or actually did not occur at the show. Much of the GIS press both print and online flew into a rage on Wednesday on the announcement in a number of blogs of the release of the next version of AutoCAD, yes you guessed it AutoCAD 2006. Why the fuss – well these guys had been working to a press embargo for the official launch, which was to have been today!!

This was particularly embarrassing for my ex-employer Autodesk as the bloggers had been given permission from marketing to “leak” information and included notable AEC figures such as Lynn Allen Autodesk’s Technical Evangelist.

Red faces all round but it is interesting that Autodesk’s marketeers are recognising the importance of the blogging community as a influencer in addition to the traditional press.

A strong set of presentations today from Autodesk, ESRI and Oracle all touched on the hot topic of the moment, interoperability what does it mean and where do you do it ?

The Autodesk (and I guess MapInfo, Intergraph, LaserScan etc) view as expressed by my old friend Geoff Zeiss was that this is a database issue using an open but proprietary interface on top of spatially enabled RDMS (e.g. Oracle) multiple users using different vendors are able read data from a single repository. Geoff to his credit pointed out that it is still not possible to have consistent write access or manage anything like a long transaction between vendors.

The ESRI view is that there is a place for this database level interoperability in some cases but more often than not interoperability would be at the application level both to other GI based applications and other corporate enterprise applications such as CRM or ERP. This I think is a development of the previous ESRI message which was solely focused at application level integration.

What I found most interesting however was David Maguires ability not to mention Oracle once during his presentation but mentioned IBM websphere and DB2 on numerous occasions – is there more to this I wonder ?

Written and submitted from my hotel room using the in-room high speed internet connection

A good presentation by Peter Batty of Ten Sails which introduced the concept of Sentient Computing, I guess an extension of using Geographic Information to provide context to other systems. For example the flow of a patient moving through a hospital along with their records could be tracked, if the two were separated an alarm would be activated. Another example could be the reconfiguration of a meeting room to suit the needs of its occupants. These application rely on accurate short range location determination technology based on things like RFID tags but as Peter pointed out the technology is not there yet.

My worry is that when the technology becomes mature as it has with mainstream LBS application developers will still take the conservative user activated view of services, so that rather that automatically offering services tailored for you based on your location you must ask for them through some clunky interface.

Written and submitted from my hotel room using the in-room high speed internet connection