This week Adena Schutzberg offers a condensed verison of the presentation she gave last week at the NYS Geospatial Summit, in Skenateles, NY. It focuses on the challenges of finding, accessing and moving Web-based content both geospatial and otherwise, and highlights some technologies and tools addressing those challenges. She also looks into the future and predicts what she expects to see in these areas in the coming months and years.

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The announcements out of Where 2.0 from John Hanke of Google and Jack Dangermond regarding integrating neogeography with professional GIS (perhaps not the best terms, but I'm confident readers understand) are quite a lot to digest. (Video available here.) But that's ok, both companies are resetting their visions with regard to the other, to data and to services and it's certainly time for that.

Here's the substance of the relevant announcements teased out of coverage from Where 2.0, where the two geotechnologists shared the stage yesterday.

- ArcGIS Server 9.3 (available in about 4 weeks, per Dangermond) will make its metadata service "scrapable" into KML and thus findable via Google's geographic search (once known as KML search). Further, ArcGIS Server will be able to publish not only that data as streaming KML (and GeoRSS) but also related services. Dangermond showed finding data from a Portland, Oregon service, visualizing it and then performing analysis, all from Google Earth. Said another way, all data and services served by ArcGIS Server could potentially be findable and usable in any Google mashup. Further, the resultant KML can be used in app that supports the OGC standard.

That's the premise of Patrick Marshall's article in GCN. He sites high GIS use based on an April survey but offers no figures on interoperability problems. He does however cite specific interoperability problems due to how geocoding is done.

In an April GCN survey, two-thirds of respondents said their agencies already use GIS applications, and most said they expected to use more geospatial data in the next five years. Surprisingly, 67 percent of respondents also reported that their organizations were already using location-based services for tracking vehicles or other assets.

Although hundreds of geospatial applications are blossoming at the federal, state and local levels, they have been developed in large part independently, without common standards.

As a result, an application developed by one organization often can’t digest and work with data collected by another.

There's an exploration of HSIP and its limited availability to all levels of government due to licensing restrictions and query challenges. More interesting is how Sam Bacharach of OGC explains how its standards work, but are not always used.

However, just because most software supports OGC interfaces doesn’t mean that a consultant or vendor will use them. “They know [their own interfaces] better, and it’s to their competitive advantage to keep you tied up with their proprietary interfaces,” Bacharach said.
So he said he advises implementers to insist that any application be customized to use standard interfaces.