Tuesday, March 11. 2008

If you like PDF...GeoPDF Continues to Add New Features

GeoPDF from TerraGo Technologies has been around for a few years and the ability to capture a window of geospatial information from your desktop GIS system and export it to PDF provides not only data compression but an easy way to share data with people who have the Adobe Reader. Now, TerraGo is going further with the free GeoPDF Reader by offering:

• The ability to view data in a variety of projections
• Right click to link a MBR to a Google Map
• Import ShapeFiles
• Output from GeoPDF to KML

Another fairly slick addition to the Map2PDF Professional version is the ability to assemble a "mapbook." This utility can combine a series of GeoPDF's into a single, seamless file.

And if you haven't heard about it, the USGS has put all 55,000 USGS quad maps online (USGS Store) for free download in GeoPDF format.

GE Energy Continues Product Suite Development on Oracle but Sticking by SmallWorld

At last year’s GITA conference, GE Energy announced plans to develop a suite of products on the Oracle Spatial platform. This past January, they released the first application on Oracle for electric distribution and at the conference announced another for gas distribution. The company believes that while many larger utilities may not be quite ready to migrate from an existing SmallWorld configuration, these recent product announcements on Oracle are a first step toward offering a suite of business applications.

GE maintains that it will continue to support SmallWorld and MAGIC indefinitely. They believe that customers will still use it for a customized GIS solution. GE also offers and “office suite” of applications on SmallWorld technology and will build its suite of applications on Oracle in parallel.

GE recently purchased Fichtner IT Consulting, a German engineering company that has a software solution built on Oracle. GE believes that Fichtner will support “mining” of data assets as customers move into the Oracle environment

Intergraph Offers “SmartGrid” Approach for Dynamic Utility Networks

A little over a year after Intergraph was taken private by three private equity firms Intergraph is building success in their Utility & Communication (U&C) division, a group just recently re-organized within the company. Although the company admits that it has taken some time to align their product technology with their vertical market sectors, it believes that customers are now embracing their direction. Sales in the U&C division reached $76 million in 2007 and projected to go higher this year. Strong growth in Europe is bolstering sales and partnering with large systems integrators like Siemens, Capgemini and Bearing Point allows Intergraph to provide targeted solutions with core technology.

Intergraph has offered a steady path for existing FRAMME customers to move to G/Technology and has moved five to six clients within the last year. Currently they have about 200 customers on G/Technology, which provides the foundation for several modules including water, gas, communications and electric and specific applications in outage management. According to the company, their SmartGrid technology is a means to “integrate communications networks with the power grid in order to create an electricity-communications superhighway capable of monitoring its own health at all times, alerting officials immediately when problems arise and automatically taking corrective action.”

Intergraph relies heavily on Oracle Spatial for data management but does not currently use any of Oracle’s network models feeling that their experience in the utility industry offers a better solution. The company has also begun to offer integration with Business Objects.

Podcast: Apple iPhone SDK and Yahoo! Fire Eagle Open Doors to LBS Apps

This past week two of the many tech players with a toe in the geospatial waters, Apple and Yahoo, announced new developer offerings that will add to the twists and turns location based services have taken on the road to maturity. One of the services of the iPhone SDK is Core Location, meaning developers can develop native applications that take advantage of the pseudo-location abilities. We'll have a look at the iPhone SDK and Fire Eagle from a geospatial perspective plus explore what the real reason is for wanting navigation on your mobile device.

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Quote of the Week

"Computer-aided Surgery: Assessing the Accuracy of a Navigation System"

- Title of a paper from ORTHOPEDICS reprinted at OrthoSuperSite that deals with orthopedic surgery. Does this give people confidence?

How Google Ate our Town

Yes, that's the title of the article in Time. "The Google[Maps/Earth]-enabling of Nanaimo's fire service, launched just weeks ago, is the latest venture in a British Columbia town that has been dubbed the capital of Google Earth." The write-up (no mention of Jason Birch) is really a tease to highlight that the entire province's data will appear in Google's maps.

- Time