Four Drivers for the Geocloud #GWF

Steve Hagan, VP of Development, Server Technology, Oracle, discussed platforms issues for the development of geocloud at the Geospatial World Forum in Hyderabad. He identified four global drivers for geospatial cloud computing:

• Big data - terabytes and petabytes of data
  • Sensors, RFID, LiDAR, etc.
• Big Software
  • Spatially enable all applications: ERP, CRM, BI
• Real time Analytics
  • Big value from fastest response – streams and events
  • Tracking in real time and predicting where people, or payloads will be
  • BI in real time
• Big hardware
  • Cloud platforms
  • Massively parallel data base machines

And scalability is needed to support all of the above.

Directions Magazine Launches “Channels”

Today, we at Directions Magazine offer you a new way of getting news with the launch of "Channels," websites dedicated to specific industries or technologies. Please take a moment to visit the following and give us your feedback by writing to us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address):

• State and Local Government
  • Our channel for municipal and state government applications with a focus on standards, data compilation, and the interaction with federal initiatives, NSGIC and the FDGC.

• Location-based Services and Mobile Computing

  • Our channel for mobile computing and location-enabled applications, from navigation to mobile resource management as well as social networking.

• Location Intelligence and Business Geographics

  • Our channel for enterprise geospatial technology and business analytics with particular emphasis on the retail, real estate, banking, insurance, and transportation sectors.

• Remote Sensing and Geospatial Intelligence/GEOINT

  • Our channel for earth observation and geospatial intelligence, from satellite and airborne platforms to sensor networks, 3D and LiDAR
    
    Our objective is to segment the news so that you’re getting the most up-to-date information on a daily basis that directly pertains to your interest. We hope to build upon these initial four Channels and bring you news on Health, Education, Computing, Energy and more. Stay tuned.

Don’t Let “the cloud” Cloud Your Vision for Location Intelligent Apps

Seems like everyone is jumping on the band wagon with a cloud-based app for location intelligence (LI). Alteryx, PBBI, SpatialKey, Skygone, Esri. But what if we are digging the same whole that we had with desktop mapping? Back in the day, the desktop mappers at Blockbuster Video, Starbucks and Erie Insurance, just to name a few, were backroom, heads down, isolated GIS departments. "Make me a map!" was the cry from the marketing department! "Show me where to build," clamored the real estate VP.

That’s not the vision of the future we need to have now for LI cloud computing apps. We want to pick the app from the cloud and insert it into our cloud-based analytics solution. We’ve spent a decade making "on premise" applications interoperable with other IT solutions like business intelligence software. Let’s not make the mistake with SaaS solutions for location intelligence.

I see several BI solutions trying to make use of Google Maps as their "cloud" data source. And I see many GIS vendors trying to do the same. But what I don’t see are embedded apps from the GIS vendors that can be integrated with SaaS BI solutions.

I suggest reading this article entitled "Cloud will render BI stack irrelevant: SAP" which I don’t entirely agree with given that it’s an SAP point of view. But it will make you realize that cloud-based location intelligent apps need to fit into a cloud stack, not the other way around. "We won’t see customers moving in mass from on-premise to cloud," said Michael Pearson, president of Toronto-based SAP partner Contax Inc." Pearson sees it happening on an application or appliance basis, as it makes business sense to move a specific process or function to the cloud, according to the article.

GIS solution providers tried inserting so much functionality into desktop mapping apps, many of which were really in the domain of BI that it just confused users. What users really wanted were better BI tools that rendered maps so that they could see the spatial correlations of their data. So, should only certain applications move to the cloud and not complete LI solutions that are really just retreaded desktop mapping apps? In the cloud computing era, will history repeat itself for LI? And, what really is an LI stack in the cloud?

MongoDB Powers Foursquare

MongoDB is an open source database, one of several called NoSQL systems (read about that in this post by Paul Ramsey). It’s interesting in geo since it has a geo type and has a new release, 1.6. And, it’s also interesting because it powers Foursquare.

Why do I bring this up? Mostly because I suspect a large proportion of readers have yet to hear about this new class of databases and their role in the social networking space. MongoDB has friends named CouchDB and Cassandra. I can’t say I fully understand how these may play out in our work, but I think readers should know they are out there powering some big implementations.

- InformationWeek

Microsoft SQL Azure: Spatial database management in the cloud

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform and the instance of SQL Server that runs on Azure, i.e. SQL Azure, is geospatial-ready.  SQL Azure is SQL in the cloud with a few restrictions. Microsoft provides a full replication of SQL Server in the cloud and the hassle of being the database administer is completely removed, according to Ed Katibah, SQL Server Spatial’s program manager.

To briefly review, SQL Server Spatial was designed for a developer to leverage geospatial data. There is no embedded mapping application. It has only two datatypes: "Geography" data type that deals with geodetic data, and the "Geometry" data type that deals with planar data. SQL Spatial is completely OGC compliant and supports simple feature specifications.

New for the next release of SQL Server is the SQL Server Reporting Service that will access SQL Server Spatial functionality such that query and review of spatial data is fully supported. The Reporting Tool is comprised of executable functions and designed simply to provide basic reporting so don’t expect it to be a mapping tool as well.

SQL Azure with spatial functionality will be released this June. A migration tool for moving SQL Server to SQL Azure is available on Microsoft’s Codeplex but see Ed’s blog (SpatialEd) to get more details. Katibah notes that one key feature coming in SQL 11 is a self tuning capability so "stay tuned."