Ed Parsons, former Ordnance Survey CTO, joined Google as Geospatial Technologist for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). A brilliant move and Ed is surely a tremendous asset to Google.
It’s important for Google to have someone with his visions on board and bring traditional geospatial industry and neogeography closer together.
Congratulations!
Since end of January one of the largest projects I’m currently involved in is online and open for public access. We decided as first step to publish it silently before the official announcement and receive more user feedback as well as reserve some extra time for fine tuning.
It’s a national atlas (ÖROK-Atlas online is the official name) containing socio-economic information, mainly focused on the Austrian territory but providing a European perspective as well. The entire application is based on 100% Open Source software like MapServer, PostGIS, GDAL, Proj4 and other usual geo open source suspects.
You won’t find any fancy AJAX driven user interface or high-res imagery to sneak a peek into your neighbor’s garden. Instead you’ll be able to visualize a comprehensive collection of predefined maps as entry point to a large database of socio-economic data and indicators relevant to regional analysis and spatial planning. An important user group, already involved in the development process, were decision makers and other administration departments (ministries, federal states).
Traditionally the atlas was published annually on paper. It was one of the main challenges of the project to transform those rather complex printed maps (most of them containing multiple socio-economic information layers, multidimensional signatures, etc.) into an online application in terms of retaining the same information content.
We’re still working in the background – the English version isn’t 100% completed yet, data and maps are extending continuously and some bugs need to be fixed – so please be patient if something isn’t working as expected.
Alex and I have started working on an Internet draft for a geo Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme. Basically a geoURI should identify locations by specifying latitude, longitude and (optional) elevation like geo:48.20833,16.37278,171. By adding query arguments, like geo:48.20833,16.37278,171?type=cathedral, it’s possible to extend the identifier and provide more information or call applications where to visualize the location (e.g. a GIS application, Google Earth, etc.). Words and text fragments within HTML documents can be labeled as place (geotagged) for instance: St. Stephen’s Cathedral (Nothing will happen when you click on the link…).
Our intention is to keep the URI as simple as possible and to make information about locations for internet users as easy accessible as writing an email after clicking a ‘mailto:’-link.
However, today a first draft was submitted by us to the IETF and it will be presented to the geopriv working group at the next IETF meeting held in Prague March 18-23.
We are still in the middle of ongoing discussions and too many ideas around possible geoURI-applications, -neighbors, -examples and -services need to be structured and sorted out. But if you are interested you can track the geoURI development and share your opinions with us at geouri.org (feed).
Finally I managed to upload some parts of the most exciting project I did last year to Google Video in order to show it here and on some other places too.
We were asked to prepare a room for an exhibition and decided to produce a short animation film. The challenge was on the one hand to communicate rather complex content – topics about on-going structural changes such as demography, education, economy, labor market, etc. in that particular region – within short presentation time and on the other hand entertain normal exhibition visitors, mainly non-regional scientists.
What we did was basically link abstract scientific information and regional analysis to real-life stories and experiences of real people living in that region.
It was a very intense project, our time frame was very short, though, it was quite interesting to listen to the stories our interview partners had to tell and, above all, I really enjoyed the way we worked on the visualization.
[googlevideo -6277916183992179226]
Better viewed large at the exhibition or with some more (german) information at the official project site at our clients portal.
After reading this post in the morning, I just couldn’t resist but to have a quick look at the long-awaited ArcGIS Explorer. If you have an ESRI global account (or are willing to register) you can download it here.
As mentioned in a few discussions earlier this year, ArcGIS Explorer won’t be a mass market product and is not supposed to compete with Google Earth. So I expected a product that would fit my needs as ArcGIS user and offer new possibilities for data and result dissemination for instance.
Basically it does.
After trying different globe-types offered by ArcGIS online (btw, which software is needed to create nmf files?) I wanted to load some local content.
Since ArcGIS 8 (if I remember correctly) ESRI is promoting its Personal Geodatabase file format for local storage. If you moved over the years from Shapefile to Personal Geodatabase (as we did) you’re now screwed. Apparently ArcGIS Explorer can only access the new File Geodatabases, coming with ArcGIS 9.2, and good old Shapefiles. So if you consider, among other things, ArcGIS Explorer as tool to access locally stored information, you should migrate to ArcGIS 9.2 and File Geodatabases, another ArcGIS island file format, or just stay and be happy with Shapefiles.
Because there is no ArcGIS Server in sight and there won’t be any in near future, I tried WMS. Well, it works. Basically. Sometimes.
Still, the major drawback of ArcGIS Explorer is its overall performance. Once you’ve seen how fast you can move and fly around in Google Earth, it’s hard to go back to a sluggish performance like the one you’re experiencing in ArcGIS Explorer.
It would be interesting to see ArcGIS Explorer in combination with ArcGIS Server together in a local network. I bet it performs somewhat faster.
The concept (e.g. extensible with customized tasks) is great and there is definitely a market for usable professional globe applications (cf. Google Earth’s license agreement), but this software isn’t ready yet. Even ESRI evangelists have to face that fact.
Jared Bendedict succeeded in his Map Ransom mission and made, as promised, all his purchased data available for download at the Libre Map Project. (via James Fee GIS Blog)
Congratulations, great work!
I was thinking if a similar initiative would succeed here too, but I’m afraid that European copycats would need fundings similar to GNPs of some medium insular state, a bunch of excellent attorneys and a lobbyist better than Nick Nayler to buy and finally free the data of its public copyright.
It’s quite clear that collecting high quality geodata is cost intensive and since there is a noticeable political pressure on public authorities, such as most national mapping agencies are, to act like private companies it’s understandable that they don’t want or can’t distribute their core business freely.
The point is, that small European businesses, start-ups or single geo-developers who can’t afford licensing all needed European geodata are forced to test run their services and applications with American geodata, like the one at Libre Map Project, and deal with American spatial issues or to make use of one of the available geo APIs (mostly focusing the US of course).
Is it in the interest of the European Union to direct grass-root innovation from Europe to the US?
What would be the problem of making outdated European public geodata freely available? Most people would be fine with that. I believe it would ease and push innovation (anyone remembering the Lisbon Strategy?) in the geo industry a lot, simply because geo applications heavily depend, already during conceptual work and development, on data – no data, no development.
Maybe this feature is something already implemented in ArcGIS 9.2, don’t know, but I’ld love to create a map template where the author can LOCK certain graphic elements such as logos, frames, bars, references, etc.
We often deal with predefined map layouts which must not be changed. Our life would be easier if we could fix positions, colors or sizes of certain layout elements and let other ArcMap users just edit defined layout areas.
Currently if an ArcMap user loads a map template he gains full control over each layout element, which isn’t always the best idea.
Thanks to planet geospatial I almost was able to attend ESRI’s International User Conference 2006 without even going to San Diego (and experience those nice travel adventures as others did).
Beside all improvements and new features (btw, can’t wait to see this animation thing demoing somewhere) and bug fixes of ArcGIS, one point called my attention: the File-Based Geodatabase.
Since they can be compressed and are cross platform (Linux, Solaris, and Windows), file-based geodatabases are a good choice for data publishing. Like it did with shapefiles, ESRI is providing an open API that will allow anyone to create and use file-based geodatabases.
Is the File-Based Geodatabase going to be the next Shapefile?
Quite an ambitious project considering that, as far as I know, every piece of software dealing with geographic data is able to read (most of them even to write) a Shapefile. I’m not that long in the GIS business world, but I know the Shapefile as de-facto standard for quick geographic data exchange.
A major advantage of Shapefiles (and the Personal Geodatabase) is that you can access and edit attribute data without the need of a GIS client. In case of Shapefiles just fire up Excel (or any other DBF editor), access, read or change the attributes you want and save them back to the file (if you used Excel, be careful).
Will it be possible with File-Based Geodatabases too?
E.g. while working with ArcReader the non-ArcMap user can open Access and update the whole attribute set without any difficulty. A common and highly appreciated workflow in my environment.
However, in times of increasing importance of easily accessible geographic data the Open Geodatabases concept looks promising:
It is no longer necessary to access geodatabases via ESRI software products; the technology and documentation easily support direct access from other products and systems.
I never found the right word which describes my job position best. Nor could I tell the difference between GIS analyst and specialist. After reading Glenn’s listing on GIS job titles I suppose I’m a mixture of a specialist and manager, doing some coordinative tasks to keep GIS running in our company.
It must be the heat wave, otherwise I can’t explain why today I had to accomplish some very unusual, not to say weird, GIS tasks.
One part of our work here is to collect and synchronize data from various regional or federal institutions and produce a national view of certain spatial planning related topics. The bandwidth of responds to our data requests is pretty broad: it reaches from colorful word or excel tables to every digital image format (particularly when it comes to geographic data and maps) you can imagine. GIS compatible data is unfortunately the big exception. The worst, and in the year 2006 still existing, answer you can get is “I send you the data by fax, ok?”.
Adobe Illustrator to ArcMap
During the last days we received some maps done in Adobe Illustrator. For some reasons GIS was ignored and the whole mapping was done exclusively by vector graphic editing. For print-only maps it was ok and we could add the delivered Illustrator files to our graphic outputs. But we needed the data in our Mapserver too.
The workaround I found was to export the features (points and polygons) from Adobe Illustrator to AutoCAD Interchange file (dxf) and then import this AutoCAD files into ArcMap. The import/export allows you to take over the layer information (the graphic elements were organized and grouped into different layers) as attribute like in any other dxf. Completely missing is of course a coordinate system. Once I had all the elements loaded into ArcMap I used the Spatial Adjustment tools to shift the former graphic elements to their right geographic location within my chosen coordinate system. To successfully complete the spatial adjustment you need to know the exact location (e.g. some graphic lines represent a known street network) of at least a few graphic features.
Of course you won’t achieve sub-meter accuracy by this method, but for a first rough import step it was ok. Further spatial adjustments along with other editing steps (such as adding attributes) need to be done on the imported data in order to ensure a certain quality level.
Coordinate system?
Another data set which was meant to be added to the Illustrator data was stored within an Excel table. First I thought great, somebody who understands my needs: the last two columns represented coordinate pairs. Fantastic! I’ll be done in 10 minutes. After the X/Y-import the data just didn’t want to match any coordinate system I knew. Whatever projection parameter I modified, the data just slipped around on my map, always slightly off my existing data (the position of some features was known). It took me the whole morning to figure out what was wrong with the coordinate pairs: every third coordinate pair applied to another coordinate system. I’ve never seen such a data compilation before. After splitting everything up, defining the right coordinate system for each pair and putting them together again I could add this data my maps.
If today’s data struggle wasn’t enough, my PC was behaving sluggish and unmotivated all day long. Must be the heat or a signal to go home now.