Thursday, November 20. 2008

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.

Wednesday, November 19. 2008

BIM/GIS Integration

The focus in this session was the increasing need to integrate building information models and GIS. The first speaker, Don Murray of Safe Software, talked about the need to address 3D BIM data as a new data type. "From our standpoint, BIM to GIS is just another kind of spatial data transform – [our job is to get users] to be able to move it around to where they want it – we had vector and then raster, and now we have this 3D BIM stuff," he said.

Keith Cooke of ESRI and Steve Milroy of Microsoft gave the next presentation as a tag-team. The duo discussed how ESRI's products integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth. Essentially, you can think of ArcGIS as doing the analytical "heavy lifting" on the back end, and Virtual Earth as a 2D- and 3D-based visualization tool to help make decisions. Milroy offered the example of a plume model in downtown San Francisco.

David Kingsbury of Autodesk made some bold statements about the 3D revolution. He said, "We are right now on the verge of a whole new paradigm of using spatial data. … In the next 5-7 years, we will think of everything in a 3D context, in an object context. … It's a requirement that CAD, BIM, GIS, visualization and collaboration come together now." He also addressed how the GIS industry is relating to this change: "There's a big of a firestorm among the vendors right now rushing to [prepared for] this switch to 3D."

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.

Dangermond Acknowledges GIS Professionals on GIS Day

It's always special to be with somebody on their birthday. Being with Jack Dangermond on the 10th anniversary of GIS Day (which falls during Geography Awareness Week) is in that same category. During his keynote presentation at the Rocket City Geospatial Conference in Huntsville, AL on Wednesday, Dangermond (president of ESRI) made special mention of the occasion. His central theme was honoring GIS professionals and what they do in the context of making the world a better, and more sustainable, place.

While cataloging numerous applications (planning, transportation, land information systems, public safety and law enforcement, managing natural disasters, natural resource management, social issues, and human health), Dangermond discussed mapping foreclosure patterns. He ran an animation that clearly showed the pattern of higher numbers of foreclosures two hours away from major metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. "It isn't the downtown areas, or even the near suburbs, but way out – the consistent pattern of increased gas prices caused the foreclosures. … Geography tells that story. … GIS is about telling stories."

Dangermond highlighted the following trends.

• Growth in the number and sophistication of "Fusion Centers" (centers built around the country to support emergency management)
• Increasing popularity of mashups, which will bring the notion of GIS to "virtually everyone"
• Increasing integration of imagery
• More support for mobile applications (LBS)
• Geobrowsers are becoming the norm
• Content (not just data) will become an integral part of GIS, and it will be delivered by services.

Dangermond delivered what can only be described as a pep talk for GIS professionals. "Climate and global warming - loss of biodiversity … there is no 'bailout' for this increasingly challenging situation. … [But] GIS is doing good - it's a counter-balance to some of the negative things that are happening in our society and our world," said Dangermond. "Our world needs a new approach … I don't think it will work out without deliberate and conscious thought about how to do things … to chart a better future. Right now we are certainly doomed. I travel a lot, I see it, and it's not a good future. On the other hand, what you guys are doing … all those things are making a difference. These [applications you develop] are all improving the world."

Wednesday, December 19. 2007

Group 1 Centrus division and PB MapInfo

Yesterday I spoke w/ Berkley Charlton, who is a director of product management at MapInfo Pitney Bowes Software. Apologies to Berk if I got his title wrong - he admitted he's still working on figuring out exactly what his new title should be. He's a long-time business GIS type, and he remembers meeting me first in 1994 when he was with Strategic Mapping and I was working at Business Geographics magazine.

Our chat helped me understand how the Centrus division of Group 1 (Group 1 was acquired by Pitney Bowes in 2004, and Pitney Bowes acquired MapInfo this year,) fits in to MapInfo. The Centrus division, headquartered in Boulder, CO, and about 50 people strong, was commonly referred to as the "business geographics" group. According to Berk, Group 1 and MapInfo have been brought together as one entity, called Pitney Bowes Software. The Centrus Division of Group 1 Software was integrated into MapInfo immediately after the Pitney Bowes acquisition of MapInfo, and it was announced in the fall that Group1 and MapInfo would be merging operations. Said Charlton, "Really the only noticeable area of overlap was with the Centrus group in Group 1 and MapInfo."

The Centrus division has built and managed a geo-suite of products that are operational in nature (e.g. they handle millions of similar transactions in what can best be thought of as back room processing) including GeoStan, Spatial Plus and GeoTAX. An example of an industry that makes extensive use of these products is insurance underwriting, for example. The point-in-polygon and polygon-in-polygon capabilities available in these tools help insurers decide whether and how to insure properties. MapInfo also works extensively with the insurance industry, but Charlton characterized their applications as "analytical," and would help with actuarial activities (e.g. setting up the rules by which insurance policies would be written).

According to Charlton, the challenged have been fairly minimal in terms of how the Centrus group is adapting to the merger. "We need to focus on the operational aspects of the market - we need to make sure these kinds of transactions don't become viewed as a commodity," he said.