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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.
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.
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.
I heard one of the best talks by a self-professed "policy wonk" every given…and it was about GIS too. Sandra Lucas of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency gave a cogent argument for getting only the right tools (not the most tools) into the hands of field emergency management workers. A beltway veteran of 23 years, Lucas provided some insights into being the liaison between politicians and first responders. Her remarks could be boiled down to a caution…watch out for "bright shiny objects, i.e. BSO’s. Sometimes the tools with the most wiz-bang are not the best for the first responder who needs only the tool that gets them information that’s fast and good. A big fan of GIS but not a technologist herself, Lucas was forceful in stating…"right tool, right job."
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.”
