It looks like the powers that be at the ESRI Developer Summit have decided a .NET ESRI/Microsoft SIG is a good idea after all. Fears (possibly all mine) that the DevSummit was changing and wouldn’t be able community anymore are tempered somewhat by this announcement. So if you work the ESRI/Microsoft angle to develop GIS applications, you can now share this fact with your brothers and sisters in code. Viva Palm Springs!
A late edition to the ESRI Developer Summit is the GeoDesign Idea Lab. This is going to be a set of lightning talks by developers showcasing how they’ve been using the concept of GeoDesign in their applications. I’ll be moderating the session with Eric Wittner of ESRI. If you’ve been telling everyone you’ve “been doing GeoDesign for years”, now is you chance to get up and show everyone how your stuff is teh sexay.
Most of what we’ve seen out of this GeoDesign has been with researchers and university types talking about concepts. Now is the time to show how developers have been in the trenches integrating disparate disciplines and bringing the results to the decision makers and the public.
Email your Lightning Talk (10 minutes maximum) abstract to geodesign_devsum@esri.com to be considered. I’ll be blogging the session in detail so this could be a great opportunity to get your GeoDesign chops out in the open. Plus since it is going on at the same time as the Business Partner Conference expect some of the marketing geeks to drop by and see what is up.
GeoDesign Idea Lab Part 1
GeoDesign Idea Lab Part 2
T.S. Elliott was doing GeoDesign before anyone else!
Google’s Public Data Explorer continues their push to integrate their simply awesome visualization APIs with searchable datasets. Think big though:
If you’re a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us.
Why is it companies want to be so disruptive when all you want to do is make maps? Says John Herlihy of Google
“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant.”
Bam, game over. We’ll be working our GIS magic on Androids and iPhones. I know, I know… We’ve heard this all before from Messrs. McNealy, Ellison, but now that Google is saying it (again?) we’d be get our act together or we’ll be irrelevant. Heck old Larry bought himself a trophy on the backs of those making desktop irrelevant.
OK, so what does this talk really mean. We all know damn well we’ll be using our desktops to perform GIS analysis for years to come. Consuming data is what Google is talking about. Unlike Sun or Oracle, isn’t focused on content creation, but enabling people to discover and use it. The operative word is mining for data. Google is talking about the world (who most of the time is searching for information on their mobile devices) performing a search and then visualizing that information. Yep, you are thinking what I’m thinking, that is GIS in a nutshell, visualizing information. Content creation will still be performed on desktops around the world, but it will remain a niche marketplace. The “magic” we’ve been taking about will happen on mobile clients.
So right, ESRI is “cloud ready”. Everyone is either developing a cloud plan of action or executing it. We want to host our data with providers who scale as the need arises. We want to pay monthly (or hourly) for these services and not have those annoying maintenance agreements. But wait, where are we down Google’s path of mobile nirvana?
We’ve got some efforts into web visualization from Geocommons (who is probably at the forefront of web browser vizualization), but alas their client is flash based so it isn’t really designed for mobile apps. You can bet your last Amazon gift certificate that they’ve been working damn hard on one. ESRI has also moved into this space with two feed. Their Map a Map service is right up that Geocommons alley. I keep waiting for the the announcement that they’ll link Make a Map to their ArcGIS Online service and bam, ESRI users have a way to visualize their data online. But like Geocommons, their client is Flash (see a trend here) and isn’t usable on most mobile clients. Change is coming though. We’ll see their effort at the ESRI Developer Summit realized with their ArcGIS for iPhone API. Right to the front of the line goes ESRI with consuming geo-content on mobile devices.
Of course there are hundreds of others competing in this space. Cloudmade (I think this month they are mobile), SimpleGeo, Twitter (with their GeoAPI), and countless others.
Yea so go about your business. Desktop Geo isn’t going anywhere. But clearly if you don’t provide mobile versions of your web apps you are going to be as irrelevant as every stupid MapGuide 6.5 Active X junk mapping site out there. All yawls standardizing on ESRI’s Flex API better be planning because Google is spot on, we’ll be visiting your website working with your data on our mobile devices. Good data not accessible on mobile is going to be devalued completely.
It’s dead Jim!
OK, so the news is grim. Platial is now essentially finished, at least how we knew it before. They’ve turned off their service and now everything is essentially a download link. This means if you’ve been using Platial (or at least used them in a previous life) and want to get your data, you need to act now. Platial has “donated” your data to Geocommons where it now resides under a creative commons license. If you want to keep track of Platial user “poopypants” contributions, thankfully Geocommons has archived it.
Ay, ay, ay, no me gusta KML
I found it interesting that Di-Ann followed up with this:
If you’re looking for a new map widget, Google MyMaps offers one. It is not two-way, meaning your users cannot YET contribute but it is a very easy way to map and share maps.
The Google is supreme in this space. And users have embraced Google’s My Maps over other competing services. Google has innovated so quickly in this space and that you can perform simple spatial queries shows that their speed of innovation is going to take out a ton more start ups. Why share your data with someone’s free data portal when you can do the same with Google’s My Maps, visualize with their APIs and oh by the way, indexed by Google’s spiders.
I went back and searched though my blog to see if I ever posted on Platial before. I found it interesting in that I never mentioned them before. It wasn’t because I didn’t know who they were or because I had never seen them. I guess they just didn’t go far enough down the “professional GIS” hold that I’ve got myself into. I wonder if that was the same for many others. Platial covered quite a scope and in the end maybe their efforts were spread too thin, money dried up and well Google sat on them.
Selling ads on top of spatial data does not make a workable business model. I think that either you are too niche and can’t get enough eyeballs or you are too far down the food chain and the real revenue is going to Google, Apple and Microsoft. The pyramid scheme ensures that the last person gets nothing and those developing these websites are funneling so much back up the food chain that they can’t survive.
So… depressing isn’t it? Nah, it is just how the world works. Those who started early sometimes never make it to the finish line. Consider yourself lucky that you don’t have millions to lend to these companies. 
On a serious note though, what Platial was trying to do, share your data with widget, is a live and well. You see thousands of Google My Maps on so many websites without even thinking about it anymore. Heck, when Platial started, did you think it would be possible embedding an ESRI map on your blog?
Well I’m sure you’ve all heard the news. ESRI is now an Amazon Independent Software Vendor.
This means of course that we’ll see some ArcGIS Server in the Amazon Cloud very soon. In fact if you are an ESRI ELA user, you can take advantage of this right now using one of the pre-built AWS AMIs. Licensing still hasn’t been outlined by ESRI, which is probably why the ELA is required, but it seems like we could be close to hourly ArcGIS Server instances by next year. The AMI isn’t anything special, just a Windows Server AMI with ArcGIS Server at this point.
The WeoGeo booth was right next to Amazon (or maybe Amazon was right next to WeoGeo, hmmm) and there seemed to be some traffic and lots of questions. Answers weren’t that concrete from what I heard and Amazon looked rushed into being there, but it did appear people made an effort to seek them out and talk about GIS in AWS. At this point ESRI and Amazon is so early in the public relationship that we’ll have to wait for the BPC/DevSummit or most likely the International UC to get the real details.
OK so ESRI in the cloud didn’t knock your socks off, the inevitability of the whole thing at this point seemed to make many feel like it was anticlimactic. Tough world we live in.
Jack’s plenary talk was as always razor sharp on what ESRI is doing for their Federal customers and as always sets the stage for the year. As I alluded to early, the phrase “Cloud Ready” is something we’ll be hearing a ton about with ArcGIS 10. This means a couple things, first off it integrates with other cloud services with the REST API (something many have already been doing for years), second they’ve got this Amazon AWS AMI which you can license to run a full ArcGIS Server (without any scaling of course) in Amazon’s cloud and third I think it means that ESRI’s web services are going to essentially make even private or internal clouds “GIS Ready” (that’s my term in the spirit of Cloud Ready).
I think the Plenary was well received by the crowd, but they seemed quiet. I’d probably feel the same way if Mother Nature dumped a ton of snow on me for a couple weeks. Some interesting take-aways from the talk is ESRI’s focus on private clouds, which I think aligns very well with the FedUC crowd. Their focus on mobile was very apparent and I think at this point every reference to a Windows Mobile device has been removed from Jack’s slides and replaced with an iPhone. ESRI’s focus on web services means that they can transition to mobile devices with their mobile APIs (Ah, here is the iPhone API ready to work).
Jack focused on the large picture architecture of ArcGIS 10 and then it came for others on the ESRI team to come out and demo. We saw a good overview of ESRI’s ArcGIS Online map services. This world Topo map ESRI has been working on is really special. The cartography just catches your eye and that it goes down to 1:1000k 1:1k (off by a little scale factor there) scale in large cities really makes me want to use it instead of street map services. ArcGIS Explorer Online is a really slick Silverlight app that seems to emulate much of the ArcGIS Explorer (except 3D of course), which might be a good general GIS web services browser for ESRI users. They keep hiding the URL so so I can’t share it, but it was something like http://explorerweb.arcgis.com or similar. We’ll see it soon enough I guess.
Then the most surreal part of the whole FedUC occurred. John Calkins ran over his overview of ArcGIS Desktop 10 as he always does. If you’ve never seen John give this talk, you can view one here. John as always did a really good job and some of the refinement of ArcGIS Desktop 10 is simply amazing. The editing environment, threaded geoprocessing and symbology improvements really puts ArcGIS Desktop way beyond anything any other GIS vendor is doing. But what caught me off guard was the crowd’s reaction to it. As I said earlier, the crowd seemed tired and not into things, but during the Desktop demo I heard some things that really amazed me.
“Why isn’t this demo in Flash (or Silverlight)?”
“Why isn’t he using an iPhone to do this?”
“Do people still use ArcMap?”
Here was a crowd that I thought would eat Desktop alive because they spend all day in it and many just didn’t care anymore. (Note: I don’t have super hearing so I could only listen to those in front or behind me) Could we finally be at a big shift in mentality where we are breaking out of these large legacy desktop clients and toward lightweight mobile and web clients for analysis? Are users finally listening to our “web is where the magic happens” talks and taking it to heart? Not sure, but it was interesting.
Now before everyone declares desktop GIS dead, lets be realistic here. Content creation tools are still not developed on mobile devices or web clients to the point were you can get the accuracy you need so for many users Desktop is still a required element and will probably be for decades to come. But I do think that average users of GIS, even those institutionalized in the federal service, are ready for this mobile, crowdsourcing future that we are just about to enjoy.
Yep, Jack talked quite a bit about VGI (Volunteered Geographic Information) which of course is a term used to describe crowdsourcing/neogeogrpahy/participatory GIS or whatever else is the term of the hour. Dave Smith did a really good job of summarizing crowdsouricng and ESRI on his blog so I’d like to point you there from some reading. ESRI has put thought into ArcGIS’ place in VGI and how users will want to get information in and out. I think as ArcGIS 10 progresses we’ll see much more on this and how ESRI users can edit things such as OpenStreetMap directly from their ArcMap clients. I think the International UC should show us much more detail on how this is going to all work.
We at WeoGeo of course were on the floor showing what we are doing with ArcGIS and the cloud but so were many others. Amazon was there of course as I said. GeoEye was but DigitalGlobe wasn’t. NAVTEQ and DeLorme were, but TeleAtlas wasn’t. I saw friends at VoyagerGIS and Arc2Earth (who was at the New Light Technologies booth) were there showing their latest products. Ran into Stu Rich at PenBayMedia showing off some of their very impressive building interior modeling and of course everyone else from SAIC to lone GIS professionals who stopped by to say hello.
So as always the FedUC kicks off the ESRI year. We’ll see much more at the BPC and DevSummit next month, but the message is simple. ArcGIS 10 will interact with “the cloud” no matter what that term means to you. The more I see with ArcGIS 10, the more I can see why they named it 10 rather than 9.4. It really is a break from what ESRI was doing in the past on both the Desktop and the Server. ArcGIS 10 should arrive early Summer (not to jinx anything of course), probably before the International UC so we can all give it a test run before we show up in San Diego.
I hadn’t been to a FedUC in more years than I can recall. It was really great to see how much this conference has grown and how many more people are interested in geospatial technology as well as how people have embraced the concept of web services, web clients and mobile GIS as more than just a display tool. Should be a very exciting year.
Well I’m leaving warm sunny Arizona for some crazy reason to head off to the 2010 ESRI Federal User Conference in “balmy” Washington D.C. I haven’t been to the FedUC in more years than I care to share, but I’m excited to go this year. I’ll of course be hanging at the WeoGeo booth most of the day showing the cool ArcGIS Desktop integration we’ve been working on and going to as many talks as I can squeeze in.
I’m also going to see what is going on with this #geoglobaldomination stuff the Mid-Atlantic folks seem so keen on repeating every tweet. As with most things, east coasters seem to make a big deal about everything so this is their chance to impress me. Heck, they even schedule #geoglobaldomination, so it must be good.
“Shall we play a game?”
When you see the word metadata I’m sure you begin to sweat. You get that lump in your throat and suppressed memories bubble to the surface (none of which are good).
Now it isn’t hard to think about why, metadata as we’ve been exposed to is just not human readable and thus barely human usable. Working in the government sector as a consultant exposed me to the worst two words that any DoD consultant can be exposed to; “metadata required”.
We deal with four letter acronyms all the time right? FGDC Even the website is built on Plone which of course feels more like Ivy League research project than the traditional SharePoint website we’d all expect from a government website. One should be scared navigating it and trying to find information. Anyway what about metadata as we’ve been utilizing it (FGDC or ISO) is just so painful?
So FGDC or ISO metadata is complex, but there could be good reasons for this. They both try and address every conceivable possibility that might need describing in geo-data. If both were primarily designed for allowing servers to talk with each other, I’m not sure any of us would have any problem with it (nor would we really be looking for it). But servers rarely read and write metadata on their own without human interaction. Thus the reality of the situation is we poor humans have to ingest and parse metadata regularly.
<XML>Yikes</XML>Well this brings me to what I see as the biggest problem with metadata. It is almost always in XML format. Now don’t get me wrong, XML does have its purpose. In fact I could list probably thousands of times that XML is the right answer. Sometimes it works and works well, other times you end up with a whole bunch of brackets and text that blends together. With a good eye you can parse out what you need, but there is so much noise there that it almost feels like a “Where’s Waldo” exercise. But XML does do a good job of organizing data for machines, but it doesn’t do it in ways that are easily readable.
So some person sends you a dataset for a project you are working on. There are some questions you want answered before you commit to using the dataset:
The problem with metadata today is those questions are hard to parse out of metadata. If you know what to search for you might be able to find it relatively quickly, but the simple fact is that if I want to see the those answers above for a dataset, they should be exposed to me first.
One way people have tried to make FGDC metadata (and ISO to some extent) more readable is through the use of style sheets. Many ESRI users are exposed to this inside their ArcCatalog. That drop-down list that lets you choose different ways of viewing the metadata is a style sheet selector. This means that you can take that ugly XML metadata and parse it out in ways that are easier to read. I’ve not seen much in the way of usability improvements on this front. At WeoGeo we offer human readable metadata on our dataset information pages. Others are doing it as well, but there is really no standard as to how this should be organized.
Honestly you really shouldn’t care. You should care though about getting information describing the data you are working with. I think most of the issue with both metadata standards is that they are just too hard to input data into and too hard to get out the relevant information. Committee designed standards such as these always end up being way too much for real world use. We need to make sure we get the who, what, when, where, how and why of the dataset and to do this we need to look at the geo-data creation tools and how they help us input metadata. Data creators should have an easy time filling out those 6 things about their data. The issues are in the weeds of the metadata standards. But out on the fringes of the metadata requires, creation tools (such ArcCatalog) can help us manage things. Databases should be tracking who created the data (their name/address/etc), when it was last modified, any look up tables, aliases for field names, links to additional information and anything else that is being used for that dataset. Not having to track all that down gives the creator of the data enough focus to make the who, what, when, where, how and why so much better than they would if they had to enter everything.
And on the display end of things, I’d like to see UI experts work at creating better human readable metadata style sheets that hide the details that you don’t need to see at first glance and expose what we as uses of data need at first glance. It is easy enough to expand the details “below the fold” of a metadata page.
It is up to all of us. We are stuck with the metadata standards so changing them at this point isn’t feasible. At WeoGeo we’re committed to working on bringing complex/detailed FGDC/ISO metadata to users in easy to digest methods. What I’d like to hear though is from others trying to crack this same nut and see if we can collaborate on this more and in this age of NSDIs still have usable metadata for people to make decisions.
Yes FINALLY! I can’t tell you how frustrating it has been for me since the day Google Maps arrived. I always wanted to hold down the shift key (like every other modern mapping API) and draw a box to zoom in. With Google you had to use your mouse wheel and really who has a mouse wheel anymore with our notebooks and touch mice. Something had to be done.
Enter Google Maps Labs. You should now see that little green beaker in the upper right hand corner of your Google Maps screen.
Clicking on that icon you are presented with some new features:
A two of note:
Now this was the one I was most excited about until I saw its implementation.
See that little square below the zoom bar? You are supposed to click on that if you want to zoom in. You can’t do what is completely obvious to everyone, hold down the shift key. I wouldn’t mind if they had both, but not adding the shift key to enable is totally baffling. But even worse, you can’t use the escape key to get out of the Drag ‘n’ Zoom. You have to move your mouse all the way back over to the left and turn it off.
I don’t agree with what Google calls this because I’m sure there is “Aerial Imagery” in their “Satellite” images, but they’ve got 50 Billion in cash and I’m under water on my mortgage. So what do I know? Anyway this is the Google oblique imagery we’ve read about. It is only available in some small areas, but we can now see them outside of the Google Maps API. When you zoom to an area that has supported oblique imagery, you’ll see the new oblique aerials button that turns it on. You can use the Drag ‘n’ Zoom to quickly get into an area you wish.
The rest aren’t in my opinion that newsworthy but address probably small needs of users. I think this is a good way for Google to get some new features into Maps quicker than their normal release schedule. I just wish they’d get on board with existing UI and naming conventions.
via GigaOM
Play this below to set the mood:
Way back in 2005, at the ESRI International User Conference, there was a .NET SIG that essentially started something great. In that room there were some great folks (Scott Morehouse, Art Haddad, Brian Golden, Rob Elkins, Jithen Singh, Brian Flood, Dave Bouwman, and others) who talked about where we should take the developer community at ESRI. In my opinion the biggest thing to come out of that meeting was what became the Developer Summit.
I’m sure most ESRI developers feel the same as I do in saying that the DevSummit is probably the biggest thing to come out of ESRI in the last 10 years. It has grown to be probably the must attend event for many ESRI users. At at the DevSummit, the .NET SIG (as well as the other ones) became sort of a place to reconnect. It didn’t matter if you were web or desktop development, used Desktop or Server or worked in C# or VB.net; you could talk about what the .NET community was doing at ESRI and how ESRI could continue improving it.
Well looking at the 2010 ESRI Developer Summit Agenda I can see the SIGs have been dropped. I asked a couple contacts at ESRI if this was just an oversight on the website and they confirmed that the SIGs are no longer part of the program. I guess the idea is that you’d rather “Meet the Teams” to talk about what you are doing directly with them. Of course most folks probably won’t bother because they’ll be meeting the teams at the ESRI Islands and talking with them all week.
What I think I’ll miss is the strategic talk about how ESRI can improve their developer community. I thought this feedback was valuable to ESRI, but I guess these days it is better captured through contact us forms than face to face discussion. Part of what makes the Developer Summit so great is that it isn’t like any other ESRI event and I’m afraid that this is just the start of it losing its “woodstock” feel. Of course maybe change is inevitable but I can’t help but note it sucks.
Like most people (I assume), I was doing a little GIS project SuperBowl morning. Needing some data, the first place I thought of going what the new [Data.gov] site to download some data. After doing a quick and simple search, I got the dataset I wanted ready to download. But as with every government data repository before it, it is broken. Posted datasets download links are many times 404:
It just isn’t the download, but the metadata as well. I know, some datasets still work and who knows, maybe this one will again one day. But for [Data.gov] to be valuable it needs to ping the data sources to let the users know that they are down (and for web services what percentage they are down). Also it wouldn’t hurt to let the owner of the data know that their datasets are no longer linked correctly in the Data.gov website. Otherwise we’ll just get link rot and that can kill a project.
If projects are going to be built on data discovered with Data.gov, much more has to be done to ensure that this data is available consistently, not when people get around to updating broken links. If things don’t change it is another waste of taxpayer money and we’d just have been better off sticking with the previous government data boondoggle.
One of the biggest issues with the U.S. Census and probably the one that wastes the most money is trying to count those who are hard to count. My personal fix would be to use sampling to solve the problem, but for now the task of the Census takers is to try and count everyone. My attention was brought to a project called “Census Hard to Count 2010” which maps the “hard to count” population nationwide (based on the Census Bureau’s analysis) to help local and national organizations target their outreach efforts for the 2010 Census and customize messages to communities at risk of being undercounted.
It features interactive maps at the state, metro, county, and tract level, along with detailed statistics for each area. You can search in various ways, and also add overlays showing Congressional districts, ZIP Codes, tract-level maps of 2000 Census mail return rates, and recent foreclosure risk. There’s a FAQ that goes into details about the data and their methodology.
Clearly larger states have a bigger problem with hard to count populations but Alaska, Hawaii and New Mexico probably point out that there are socioeconomic factors as well. Â Using the demographic layers available in the web app shows that this problem is very difficult to pinpoint and my hat is off to those trying to crack it.
The UI from the Census Hard to Count 2010 Application
Good news from the gdal-announce email list:
The GDAL/OGR Project is pleased to announce the release of GDAL/OGR 1.7.0.
Yep, you can stop there and get your GDAL/OGR on. Â Or maybe you want to know what is new, copied directly from Frank’s email:
I did a little highlighting up there to list what I think is noteworthy at least for me. Â You can either build it yourself or keep an eye out for an update of FWTools.
The Leningrad Cowboys will play us off, have a great weekend folks!
One thing that has become crystal clear is the preferred method of having a mapping application on the iPhone and by extension the new iPad is to create a native iPhone/iPad app. Â That said, the noise sometimes causes people to miss some great web mapping app (as native web apps). Â I’ve looked into using SVG and even OpenLayers in the past for mapping in the iPhone, but who is rolling their own web apps out there to accomplish what until 2 years ago required a browser on a laptop or desktop? Â I know there will most likely be a session at the ESRI DevSummit using OpenLayers, but is there a framework people are working with?
Can anyone find me some mobile web mapping applications to love?
Despite some speed humps, many cities and governments are going full speed ahead with opening their data.  One of the biggest is the City of Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue (note the copy and paste spelling of catalog, those wacky Canadians).  Well they’ve launched a new update that simplifies the process of navigating the data.  Every time I stop by I see more and more data available in more formats.  I think the city should be commended for their embracing open data sharing with citizens.
The other open data update is the data.gov.uk website.  The search is less than useful as you can’t perform advanced searches.  Sean Gorman did a quick look and didn’t find any specific geo datasets, but I’m sure we’ll start seeing them.  One thing that didn’t surprise me was the presence of SPARQL.  Why data.gov.uk would put such an annoying query language front and center is beyond me.  But with Sir  Tim Berners-Lee as and advisor I can only imagine that he pushed hard for its placement.  (note I’m not a big fan of RDF so take that as you will).  Still it is good to see the UK start working hard at sharing public data with everyone.
I wasn’t in Britain for the announcement of data.gov.uk, but I can only imagine it went something like this….
One big change from the 2009 ESRI DevSummit is that users will now vote on which presentations they wish to see at the 2010 DevSummit. Â Go here to pick which ones you think would be valuable to the community. Â Normally I wouldn’t promote a talk myself (and I’m not giving one this year), but I think “Ruby-fu: Using ArcGIS Server with Rails” by Dave Bouwman is something people should be voting for. Â Ruby is here to stay and there are many of us working on projects that use Rails at the backend. Â ESRI of course already has a wonderful API to use with Rails so there is no excuse not to look at a quicker, more robust framework.
Oh, Ruby!
So yea I’m a little late with this as I’ve been really busy this week. Still I wanted to get out the word (assuming that you pay zero attention elsewhere) that Safe has released FME 2010. Now I’ve got no scientific data to back this up, but I’ve imagined that they were done with FME 2010 for a couple weeks now, but had to wait until the new year arrived before they could release it officially. I of course can understand given they probably had everything printed up beforehand and who wants to be they guy telling the accountants that they have to reprint all their material because they wanted to release in 2009.
Or maybe not…
OK so some really great things in 2010 that I’m looking forward to using in production is the improved metadata support and of course the engine that drives WeoGeo, FME Server. Â Oh Canada!
We hope you enjoy the beer, oh, like I mean the ETL, eh.
USGS Shake Map for Haiti
Update Monday Jan 18th: Another update in an attempt to keep the links valid.
Update Friday Jan 15th: The team has gone back and updated some of the mapping links so check them out at the bottom of this post. Â Dead links have been removed and new ones added. Â Keep in mind much of this is fluid so sorry if the links don’t work when you try them out.
On Tuesday, January 12 a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck about 10 miles southwest of the capital of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The earthquake was the worst in the region in more than 200 years. With many poor residents living in tin-roof shacks that sit precariously on steep ravines and with much of the construction in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in the country of  questionable quality, the expectation was that the quake caused major damage to buildings and significant loss of life, according to The New York Times.
Many companies are using this disaster to showcase their products and I think we need to try and share this open data outside of these silos. Â Content below is organized by section:
ArcGIS 9.4 is now going to be ArcGIS 10. Jack announced this in a podcast today. Â I didn’t hear much new than we’ve hard before about 9.4 so it appears it is a name change right now. Â I’m wondering if there isn’t more out there we don’t know about yet that will make it into the ArcGIS 10 release, but Jack says the name change is the smallest thing about this ArcGIS 10 release. Â I guess we’ll learn at the FedUC and the Business Partner/DevSummit and it is still scheduled to release before the User Conference.
ArcGIS 10 in '10
I’m sure many of you have been following #geodesign on Twitter, but I thought I’d add some of my deeper thoughts.  First off, yes everyone in attendance realizes that we’ve all been doing this since the beginning of time.  GeoDesign wasn’t invented by anyone in particular, that was clear to everyone.
So I guess the next question what is GeoDesign and why do we need to even define it, especially if we’ve been doing this for years anyway? Â Since we’ve all be already been doing this for years shouldn’t this be easy to define since we already have an understanding of it? Â A Wikipedia entry has been started and I’d encourage everyone to take a look at it and refine it based upon your experiences.
I think a couple things helped bring so many people together from so many different disciplines. Â With Architects, Planners, Engineers, Technologists, Researchers, Professors, Graduate Students and “other”; there was academia, government and private industry. Â The one person in our industry that has the pull to get this done is of course Jack Dangermond. Â He was also gracious enough to allow the organizers to use the new ESRI Q Building which was perfectly set up for a conference of this size.
Adena Schutzberg and Matt Ball both did a great job diving deep into the conference and it would be a good idea to read up on what was discussed and what needs to be done to move forward. Â What I’m going to talk about is what I think came out of the Summit and what should be the next steps.
First off, there was a little push-back that was acknowledged at the Summit which seemed to revolve around the fact that some small group of people seemed to think they could take ownership of something everyone has been doing for years, GeoDesign. Â I was also a little on edge about what might have come out from this Summit, but in the end it was unfounded. The group of folks from Michael Goodchild to Carl Steinitz all where very pragmatic about GeoDesign, how we involve more in the process of design (how crowdsourcing can be involved), to even deeper issues such as how we must fundamentally change how we as humans impact our environment.
Many showed examples of GeoDesign projects that they are currently work on to ones that were completed decades ago. Â Also despite the Summit occurring on ESRI’s campus, there were many examples showed that included non-ESRI technology such as GRASS, Google Earth and SketchUp. Â Jack also stood up on stage and hoped next year the organizers could include other software platforms and technologies that weren’t on stage this year.
So this brings up what to do next. Â Where do we go from here. Â Jack asked everyone in attendance if they thought we should move forward with the GeoDesign concept and everyone agreed we should. Â The details on how were to do so was what we discussed Friday morning. Â There will be a GeoDesign Summit next year. Â Tom Fisher the Dean for the College of Design at University of Minnesota offered to host it there. Â Given the warm weather though many though Redlands would be a great location to hold it again (Mid 70s in January is hard to beat). Â Jack said that if the committee wanted to hold it at ESRI again he would offer up the facilities again. Â Jack also said he wanted to unbrand the summit from ESRI and have it stand alone. Â To do this the Summit will be moving off of the ESRI servers on to its own and engage other potential stakeholders.
Since there was so much content created and organized there was a discussion on how to best disseminate the data out to everyone. Â This was probably the most contensious discussion. Â On one had you have those who wanted to write books (grey hairs) and on the other there were those who wanted to set up a wiki and get more community involvement. Â In the end it appears we will have both, a GeoDesign book you can get signed by your favorite GeoDesigner and a wiki the community can showcase their ideas and collaborate.
One problem is how to get this information out to the community at large. Â Organizations such as the APA have the tools in place (and not ESRI branded) to facilitate getting the word out to their members. Â Since there were many researchers present, there was also questions about how we can get funding in place from NSF or possibly even the World Bank since better planning and design is critical to helping reverse the destruction of the planet.
So bottom line? Â I admit I’m not one with too much patience for “University think” and there was plenty at the first GeoDesign Summit. Â But at the same time there was so much practicality shown that it isn’t hard to want to get Design and GIS more interconnected. Â One group that I think was underrepresented at the Summit was Technologists (I can’t say Architects or Designers because in this crowd that means something else). Â The gap between “GeoDesigners” and the public needs to be bridged with our work and our expertise. Â Making sure that this is represented in this GeoDesign initiative is important and we are those who need to make sure this is grounded in reality and not locked up in University research.
So lets see what happens. Â Will there be continued push back to “GeoDesign” from the geospatial community or will people want to be involved on the ground floor defining and encouraging GeoDesign? Â I think we all realize powerful things happen when there is a marriage of design and GIS.
James Fee - jfee@weogeo.com
James works for WeoGeo helping people organize, share and monetize their geo-content.
