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.”

Christy’s Nobel Moment

We had many comments to our coverage of Dr. John Christy’s keynote at the first Rocket City Geospatial Conference. His stance on global climate change as part of the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stirred much discussion. Though many of you did not get to hear his presentation, you can learn about some of his thoughts and reasoning about the human impact on climate through an editorial that he published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday entitled, "My Nobel Moment."

MapQuest for the Dead

Dead lost? Or just looking for the dead? It can be a problem in a cemetery where over 80,000 people are buried. At our Rocket City Geospatial Conference last week, Huntsville’s GIS Department sought to rectify this problem for relatives looking to find gravesites at Maple Hill Cemetery, one of the oldest in Alabama. Spanning over 100 acres, the cemetery opened in 1822. Information from each gravesite was originally recorded on scrolls in the form of a rough sketch that mapped block, lot and space number. The city’s GIS department pulled this information into a CAD system to create a digital cemetery layout (See photo at right; click for larger image). From there shape files were generated in which attribution can be attached. But according to Amy Keenum, the GIS analyst, developing the database was a nightmare! Data was first entered into an Access database and then into a SQL database for networking to the remainder of the city’s GIS. Now, a web-based solution, designed using active server pages and GeoMedia Web Map, allows visitors to the cemetery’s website to search by name, burial block and space. Now looking for specific cemetery plots is no longer such a grave experience.

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When the presentation is a demo…

I’m still decompressing after three long days in Huntsville for Directions Media’s Rocket City Geospatial Conference. I’ve been reflecting on the presentations I saw there, several of which were basically demos. I found myself antsy as presenters went through the marketing/positioning slides that always preceded the demo. As the bullet points flashed and different parts of the system/software faimly/app were mentioned a little voice in my head kept screaming “What does it look like?” Strange thing: I already knew as I’d seen almost all of the software before!

So, that’s my question: If the “sexy” part of the presentation is the demo, how should a presenter best position it? Here are three options:

1) Some slides first, then the demo, then more slides
2) Demo first, then slides
3) Slides first, then demo

I think the vast majority of presentations I’ve seen at conferences (and webcasts from vendors) have used #3: slides first, then demo. Sometimes I feel like I’m being held captive since I want to see the “good part” but need to sit through the prep. I noted that at the FOSS4G demo theatre there was a “no powerpoint rule” and you had to show actual software. I also have to say that I never managed to see a presentation there, so I’m not sure how it went.

Still, I like the idea of being able to weave all that marketing/positioning into a live demo. My gut feeling is that good software should be able to “show” what pain it lessens, or what problem it solves. It’d be like hiding the vegetables in the spaghetti sauce, as some parents do. I suspect the audience would not even know they were eating their veggies!