Thursday, November 20. 2008

Spatial Data Infrastructure & CIP

At the Rocket City Geospatial Conference, the Thursday plenary session focused on the relationship between critical infrastructure protection (CIP) and establishing a common spatial data infrastructure (SDI) both at the national and more local level.

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Doherty on the past, present and future of GIS technology

Mark Doherty has been with Intergraph for 20 years, and has spent a lot of time steeped in technology in general and geospatial technology in particular. This focus allowed him to give a detailed overview of where the technology of GIS has been, where it is now, and where it is going, during his keynote presentation on Thursday morning at the Rocket City Geospatial Conference in Huntsville, AL. He reviewing the history of GIS from its early mainframe days, up through the relatively near future of 3D, cloud computing, and software as a service.

Doherty's conclusion asked, where does all this leave us? "We will have a new era in computing in the maybe not too distant future." Four trends are converging to create a potentially unique opportunity: 1) SOA and standards; 2) cloud computing; 3) orchestration (e.g., taking services and chaining them together in a logical fashion); and 4) thin clients/rich Internet applications (RIA). What might these unique opportunities be? We will have to stay tuned, said Doherty.

Baron demonstrates the future of weather reporting

Bob Baron, president and founder of Baron Services, gave a special presentation at the Rocket City Geospatial Conference on Thursday morning. He started by showing clips of himself and other weathermen from as early as the 1970's, which were wonderfully amusing and sometimes downright silly. He was a TV weatherman during the "grease pen on a chart" days. This experience was the impetus behind the founding of Baron Services, he explained. "In 1984, an F4 tornado came through Huntsville; there was no warning. A police officer down near the golf coarse reported that his car was overturned and that was our first warning. We lost 23 neighbors that day. We had little timely and accurate data that day - we had nice weather graphics but no weather tools. I incorporated my company two months later, and we focused on how we could do better."

Baron took the audience through the history of technology his company has developed and provided to TV stations, ending up with the company's newest product, OMNI. Baron explained OMNI: "We’re actually at the beginning of being able to show people the weather as they would actually see the weather." The company works with more than 200 TV stations around the country, so it's likely that you will see the OMNI system in the next few months.

Marketing a "Yet to Open" University Via Online Maps

The University in question is King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) which will open in Saudi Arabia in September 2009.

To get the word and nature of the campus out, the KAUST has launched, per an e-mail to me from a PR rep "an immersive and cutting edge digital map, highlighting everything from residential flats, lab and research facilities, sustainability features, community services, recreational facilities, flyover video and more."

According to the e-mail, the map "is among the very first Web mashup applications to combine Adobe Flash, Google Maps, custom overlays and English and Arabic text." The other big draw for both the university and the map is a focus on "a sustainable campus and community" via "the six sustainability focus areas (site planning, water conversation, etc.) and segments features by category: University, Residential Districts and Community Services."

The underlying technology includes, per my PR source, his comments included:

- Flash CS3/Actionscript 3 and the AFComponents Umap API (which ties into Google Maps for phase I, and Microsoft Virtual Earth for phase II) – to code, animate, and create the maps functionality
- The Arabic text feature was a custom class built to extend Flash to handle the RTL text
- MapInfo – to create and place the custom tiles
- XML data parsed from a SQL Server database
- Admin tool created in .NET 2.0 (very nice feature!)
- All of the images and renderings were created by HOK and In Kingdom (HOK used 3D Studio Max to create the building renderings and fly overs)

It's quite slick. My only disappointment: when you change from map to satellite view, the scale of the map changes, so you can easily "swap" between the map and imagery view of the same extents.

Spending GIS Day with Boston Linux and Unix User Group

The presentation at the meeting held at MIT last night, on GIS Day, was about OpenStreetMap. No one seemed to know it was GIS Day, nor Geography Awareness Week. I didn't tell them, either. This was perhaps the geekiest bunch I'd shared a lecture hall with in quite a while (and I say that with affection). Many had a laptop open and typed during the entire talk; others had both a laptop and handheld in action. It was a good thing Chris Schmidt of MetaCarta was there; he answered many of the questions the presenter could not. I respect a presenter that says "I don't know."

While I know a bit about OSM, I did learn a few things:

AND shared its map of the Netherlands with OSM. But, apparently, doesn't use OSM's maps (there'd be a licensing issue since OSM is currently under CC Share Alike). Basically, AND provided a "snap shot" of its database for OSM to use, then continued on updating and selling its own version. (press release)

AND also shared maps of India and China, too, but they are were not too populated. They have however prompted more on the ground work in those two countries by the OSM faithful.

OSM is working on a new license that will mesh better with European ones.

OSM participation in the U.S. is still quite low, but growing.

It's still a good bit of work to capture and tag data - but it can be done with a simple GPS and a pad of paper. Alternatively, folks use digital cameras, voice recorders and other tools to capture then tag attributes onto points, lines and polygons.

As usual, the locals pointed out errors in the local map and the presenter made it clear it was their job to fix the map!

Two hot topics were trap streets (the "fake streets" used to protect mapmakers against theft) and data updates (both how to "do them" and how to keep ones version of OSM up-to-date.

Skyhook Plans for Future: Support real estate, ads

This via VentureBeat:

For example, Skyhook Wireless, a company that provides so-called LBS technology to partners, will soon be assisting a major real estate company in incorporating location-aware features into their platform. Skyhook will also be debuting a location-based advertising platform next year, that will allow third parties to utilize the company’s positioning technology and deliver highly-targeted, location-specific ads.