Wednesday, November 19. 2008

Spatial Data Management session

Three interesting speakers gave presentations during this session on Wednesday at the Rocket City Geospatial Conference. Each addressed a different topic under the loose category of spatial data management.

Joel Lawhead of NVision talked about Oracle Spatial, Oracle Locator and ESRI. NVision is a company with 44 employees that does GIS-related projects. He said, "Oracle [usage] is steadily on the rise." When the company was founded in 2002, they did no Oracle work, but now about 40% of their projects involve Oracle, and the company has hired an Oracle specialist. He described a variety of projects the company has helped with – one for the Department of the Interior's Mineral Management Service, and one for the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD). The last application he mentioned was one that was built just for fun – a tracking application for the TV program, "Deadliest Catch." It shows boats going out to supply the fishing boats that are trying to land that deadliest catch.

Damon Dougherty of Bentley Systems talked about the "geospatial federated approach" to spatial data management. According to Dougherty, the federated approach combines the traditional spatial search of GIS with the unstructured text search style of a search engine like Google. The example he gave was highway projects in New Hampshire. The federated search allows you to look for the GIS data as well as the graphic data and business data. As Dougherty put it, it's all about "finding information in chaos."

Bruce Westcott of Intergraph is known in the industry as being the "metadata guy." He talked about the fact that we need to move past the "withered business case" for building metadata into databases. He described that business case as one built on good will and desire to do the right thing: "You should produce metadata because other people might want to use it." That business case, for the most part, has not been successful, especially in cases where an internal mandate or business case isn't present. Westcott suggested that reexamining the legal tradition in the US of accessing government-produced data for free would be appropriate. Government entities would be given an incentive to include metadata if there was the possibility of generating revenue by providing access to the data.

Posted by Nora Parker in Rocket City Geospatial at 16:52 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

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the surest way to make even less accessible than it already is will be to add a cost to the access equation...if it costs something to find a product I don't know I want until i see it, what incentive is there to look when so much is available for nothing?

a better idea would be to reduce the metadata to a few simple items, who (made it), what (it is), where (duh), when (UTC, to the millisecond please), and why...and then you can start adding all the rest of the bureaucratic irrelevancies.

#1 Archie Belaney on 2008-11-19 18:11 (Reply)

Sorry, Archie, but I ain't goin' there. I'm a veteran of the "fee or free" gabs, and they lead to a dead end in the context of US laws and practices. What my talk was focused on (well, an attempt) was breaking out of the paradigm of metadata as a "race to the bottom:" minimalist content purely for discovery purposes. Of more interest to me is how rich and robust metadata can support high value geoprocessing workflows. Wouldn't you RATHER produce metadata that would actually help me use your data more efficiently. Wouldn't I rather have applications that could ingest your metadata and use it in my analysis or other application?

#1.1 Bruce Westcott on 2008-11-19 23:54 (Reply)

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In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Archie Belaney on 2008-11-19 18:11   #1.1: Bruce Westcott on 2008-11-19 23:54
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