I went to see an allergist today, needed to find out what substance is causing my itchy red eyes during springtime. It wouldn’t be a reason for posting but before the doctor asked me about the reason for my visit, he asked me what “GIS” means in my job title.
In Austria the term “GIS” is, among regular people, often associated with a certain agency who collects a very unpopular fee here.
So just to avoid any upcoming antipathy while sitting in front of the doctor, I started explaining what “GIS” is: “No, I’m not working for that GIS-agency charging you fees.” was my opening statement. Have that in mind when visiting this country and you intend telling people your work is related to “GIS”.
Well, nowadays it’s actually pretty easy to explain what GIS, geographic information systems, are:
“I work with spatial information and create maps.”
There was still this questioning look – “It’s like Google Earth.”
“Ah.”
Turned out that the doctor is a big Google Earth fan and I ended up giving a 12 minute presentation on imagery resolutions, explaining how the data is collected, the weirdness of European geodata policies and the revolutionary aspect of allowing free access to geodata in Google Earth. He really was fascinated and I started thinking that maybe this guy is stuck in the wrong job.
After our Google Earth chat, it took the doctor like 20 seconds to explain that the blooming birch tree is causing my itchy red eyes and to hand a prescription over.
Yesterday we found out about the NUTS region codes update at EUROSTAT. Today I had the chance to dig a little deeper and try to find a workaround for non-matching regional data. So far we’ve got an updated EUROSTAT which looks, in combination with non-updated GISCO geographic data something like this:
The map illustrates the coverage of available regional data in Europe. For testing I’ve chosen an unproblematic regional indicator which is usually available for entire Europe: population 2004 on NUTS3 level.
A verbal description of all region code changes can be found in this document. The map above visualizes most changes (because change = no data available any more).
It used to be possible to cover EU27 (with a few region code tweaks even Romania and Bulgaria), EFTA and candidate countries. Seriously, that’s not my understanding of a successful data update.
However, all overview maps I’ve seen so far (well, only those in the *new directory* of the NUTS documentation) are already updated to NUTS 2006 codes. So there is hope that GISCO updates the downloadable data soon.
Update
The definitive geographical dataset with the new NUTS 2006 boundaries is presently under development. We expect that the data will be ready for downloading before the end of May.
What’s TIGER in the US, is GISCO in Europe. Not quite as detailed and up to date but at least free to use under following conditions:
a) the data will not be used for commercial purposes;
b) the source will be acknowledged. A copyright notice, as specified below, will have to be visible on any printed or electronic publication using the data downloaded from this page.
The available geodata is aimed to use in combination with other EUROSTAT products (which are also available for free on their website) in the first place. The scale is too small for detailed map production and on most layers the date is indicated with 199x.
If the left hand of EUROSTAT would know what the right hand is doing, everybody who is interested could now start creating statistical maps and analysis across Europe by simply downloading all necessary data. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as it seems to be: the left hand changed the statistical units in Europe (NUTS), while the other hand didn’t. So what we now have is a statistical database using new region codes and a geographic database using old region codes. Needless to say that a lot of GIS out there, working with EUROSTAT data, are now somewhat screwed because geographic and statistical data doesn’t match anymore. A workaround until updated geodata is available is not using the NUTS3 level, NUTS2 (and larger) data seems less problematic. Not the best solution if you’re in the field of regional analysis of course.
Just one more detail on today’s EUROSTAT confusion:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/nuts/changes_1999_en.html
http://ec.europa.eu/comm/eurostat/ramon/nuts/changes_1999_en.html
Apparently the www-directory was copied. One copy was updated. Now which one of both sites holds the correct information? All bookmarks lead to the old one, no hint (or redirect??) that the entire site has moved and was updated…
Update
Regarding interoperability and openness, the downloadable geodata comes as ESRI Personal Geodatabase 9.2, not sure how many GIS applications can cope with that file format. Whereas provided metadata is excellent, well, GISCO already had excellent metadata in 2001.
…your day starts with digging through hundreds barely documented shape-files (still the state of the art geodata transfer format!). In fact, the only metainformation available is something like “updated January 2007″ but no hint about attribute data or layer information.
It just makes me wonder how INSPIRE will convince people working for public administration to fill out and update metadata profiles when they don’t even see the need to document filename abbreviations in the year 2008?
Can’t help, but some abbreviations aren’t very well chosen:
African Association of Remote Sensing of the Environment (AARSE)
Anyways, for people working in the remote sensing field, their conference – AARSE 2008, October 27-31 2008 in Accra, Ghana – seems interesting to me. Africa is a continent where EO technologies really can help countries to meet the very basic needs of the population. Besides creating fancy high-res imagery where people can pinpoint their parked cars…
The Russian developer Alexey “Holyfoot” Botchkov improved MySQL’s built-in GIS functions in order to use precise operations instead of MBR-based operations. Binary packages of a MySQL release containing his work are available for public testing here (FTP).
According to the GIS Functions wiki entry following MySQL GIS functions have been added to the MySQL 5.1.23 beta GIS release:
- BUFFER
- DIFFERENCE
- DISTANCE
- INTERSECTION
- SYM_DIFFERENCE
- UNION
I haven’t had the chance to test it yet, but I remember being very excited when I first read about the MySQL spatial extension a couple of years ago, followed by disappointment because of the MBR limits. Finally I decided to go with PostgreSQL/PostGIS back then.
However, if this functions make it into the official release it would be a good tool for proper storage and inclusion of geospatial data in (lightweighted) mapping applications like map mashups, compared to file based XML (KML) storage for instance. MySQL is supported by every other shared hosting plan, so the install base would be quite considerable I guess. [via heise]
Geograffiti has a hilarious set of photos taken at this year’s INTERGEO in Leipzig, featuring his 2 little friends and some INTERGEO celebrities. Well done coverage! At least more amusing than the usual marketing blahh…
Stefan Geens from Ogle Earth points out the possibly most important change in Google Earth’s EULA:
For a business entity user, the Software may be used by you and your employees for internal use…
First of all, this is excellent news for GIS professionals. Ok, but what exactly does “internal use” mean? Our IT staff is now allowed to install Google Earth by default on any business PC and Laptop. I’d assume our employees can then legally use Google Earth for preparing business trips for instance.
But how far does “internal use” go when it comes to enterprise GIS support?
Available tools like Arc2Earth make GIS result presentation in Google Earth very easy and convenient. Instead of setting up map servers, where employees explore GIS results in web browsers, an internal enterprise information strategy could shift to Google Earth as client and KML as data storage (cf. Brian Timoneys smart KML S3 solution). Would that be considered as “internal use” by Google?
Imagine the GIS department of the city of Vienna serving their data as KML to Google Earth clients on 12.000 internal workstations across the city administration. Basically it’s internal use, but I’d assume such an “internal use” would probably upset Google.
Clearly, I’m now allowed to run Google Earth on my business PC, but, as GIS professional, I’m still not sure if I can consider it as possible way to go for “internal” data dissemination strategies.
Who needs ArcGIS Network Analyst and TeleAtlas Multinet when you can ask Google Maps with a few lines of JavaScript?
The new Google Maps feature adds drag&drop to routing: adjust start, end or any point on the route as you like and Google Maps recalculates your route on the fly.
Apart from the amazing usability, I think for small and middle sized companies who are dealing with the traveling salesman problem, the Google Maps routing API is in the meantime quite an interesting option to licensing and maintaining full GIS routing applications and the databases behind.
Siemens Enterprise Communications got contracted to build the new NATO geographic information system, based on Oracle and ESRI products. Quite an ambitious project, but what makes me even more wonder is that I’ve never heard of Siemens acting on such a geo industry scale before. [via heise]