James Fee GIS Blog

The long holiday weekend means that we are heading out to visit relatives in western Colorado.

Seems like the perfect excuse to have an open thread. See you guys next week.

We’ve just rolled out the latest update to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) Repopulation Google Maps application.  Thanks to Matt Priour figuring out how to add the Street View imagery to our New Orleans Repopulation Map, you can now not only see where people are coming back to The Crescent City, but the rebuilding efforts from the street level.

Repopulation Indicators for New Orleans

The map is powerful because you can look at the address counts by block between June 2005 and June 2008 and see how many people are returning to New Orleans.  Of course you can pan over to the Lower Ninth Ward and see neighborhoods that are struggling to recover, but overall much of the city has recovered substantially.  What is unique about this map is the source of the data.  Getting accurate counts of the population of New Orleans has been difficult, but as this Wired article mentions, “Junk Mail to the Rescue”. Now the Google Street View imagery has been very good at helping see the reasons why changes have occurred after Katrina.  The aerial imagery of New Orleans was taken on March 2006, near the low point of the recovery.  If all you ever use to see the recovery of New Orleans is the Google Maps or Google Earth satellite imagery, you are many of the changes that have occurred more than two years since those images were taken.  Even the Google Street View imagery is a year old which can distort realities on the ground.  The USPS repopulation data is updated monthly so it is actually the most relevant data in this mashup application.

While some areas are still struggling to recover...

...rebuilding in New Orleans continues

What the Valassis data is great at documenting the recovery at a macro level, and the Google Street View data helps you analyze the results on a macro level.  Being able to visualize the recovery this way gives you a great appreciation for how much work has been accomplished and how much more there has to be done.  Unfortunately there was no “Marshal Plan” for the recovery, but progress has been made and hopefully tools such as this Repopulation Map will help further the rebuilding of New Orleans.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with Denice Warren Ross, deputy co-director of the nonprofit Greater New Orleans Community Data Center and Joy Bonaguro on this project.  Their vision of how they wanted this data presented to the community was to make it as simple as possible to use.  The ability to take data created in ESRI ArcGIS Desktop and serve it from Amazon’s S3 and integrate it with Google’s simple visualization tools (Google Maps and Google Street View) created a map that tells quite a story and is so much more useful than the PDF maps that existed before Katrina.

Also, one thing to keep in mind is August 29th is the 3 year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans.  The GNOCDC’s Katrina Index is a great way to see the progress of the recovery of New Orleans, three years later.

Hurricane Gustov continues to head toward the Gulf Coast so everyone please be careful in its path.

ESRI and Microsoft announced that Virtual Earth would be available through the ArcGIS Online Premium Service a couple weeks ago and today Microsoft took that announcement one step further.

Starting today you can license Virtual Earth UltraCam (proprietary) aerial photography without having to license the Virtual Earth platform. This is great for offline use, wrapping your own client or creating an interface that allows for deeper zooming than the VE platform does today. You can purchase the photography through 2 vendors - Mapmart and i-Cubed.

Of course ESRI users will probably prefer to use the ArcGIS Online service (given how easy it will be to integrate into your existing projects), but now everyone has the same access and the freedom to use any software (Photoshop, Illustrator, gvSIG, MapInfo, AutoCAD, etc) they wish.

The only caveat is that this is the UltraCam imagery, not everything so you may not have anything available if you live outside of 200+ cities that have coverage.  Of course if you do have it available, then there isn’t anything better as UltraCam blows away everything else.  Microsoft’s purchase of Vexcel has really been very smart for them and this is what you can do when you own the data.  I can buy UltraCam imagery for Tempe, AZ for about $4,000 from MapMart.

You can't afford one yourself, but you can use the data captured from it.

Catching up a little from last week, I missed the news that AGX Build 500 was released. This release isn’t the Build 600 that some have been looking for, but does add the ability to work with the new updated ArcGIS Online, including the premium services (Microsoft Virtual Earth). The update is available from ESRI’s servers.

CityGML has officially become an OGC Standard.  This is great news for those of us who are tying to work with and exchange 3D models of buildings and cities.  I’m still a CityGML newbie, but the more I look at the standard and learn about it, the more I’m excited about what we’ll be able to do in the future with BIM and GIS.  Moving data back and forth between BIM and GIS is almost impossible today, but hopefully this is a huge step forward.  You can view the standard at this link (after accepting that wacky OGC license).

Yesterday Adrian Holovaty announced three new cities on EveryBlock.  While I am very happy that they are growing, I’m still nervous that Phoenix might not be added anytime soon.  If Craigslist is any gauge, Phoenix will be added some time between Erie, PA and Cedar Rapids, IA.

For those who aren’t familiar with EveryBlock, you want to read this article in the Chicago Tribune from a couple days ago.

Adena blogged about a county mapping site from Morris County, New Jersey (OK, I’ll admit right now I was born in Morristown, NJ; the county seat of Morris County).  I had not seen the website before, but this comment from Adena got me curious:

It’s a quite complex app, the kind I’ve not seen implemented in Flash. It must be pretty slick; it was named site of the day by Adobe earlier this year. Do be warned: you may need to read the help to use the site!

Go to the website yourself and take a look.  I don’t want to take away anything from the people who implemented it because it is very impressive, but is this the kind of GIS web map site that should be the public face of a county?  My current county has a horrible MapGuide mapping site (you know the classic ActiveX plugin MapGuide thing?) that is difficult for even me to use.  Most county websites (no matter if they use ESRI, Autodesk, open source, other*) are very difficult to use, take forever to load, run very slow, require plugins, require reading a manual and frustrate the heck out of me.

Shouldn’t a country web mapping site be simple and easy to use?  I would assume the average user of a county website doesn’t have an engineering degree so why not aim these sites at the user level?  And we need to be held acountable for accepting them (I’ve been using the Maricopa mapping site for as long as I can remember and I’m pretty sure I’ve never complained to the county, just on this blog).  So right now I’m going to contact my county and let them know their website isn’t useful and you should do the same.

Won't someone please think of the GeoMonkey?

* Manifold

I watched the BarCamp.mil from afar and from what I’ve heard it sounded like it was a great event. Andrew Turner says that open source got quite a bit of play.

In the open-source world, a government supported promotion of its use would have dramatic effects. Looking at the current state of commercial company support for projects such as Apache, Linux, Gnome, OSGeo and more demonstrate that there is clear benefit to be gained. If the government then pushes open-source there would a huge upsurge in the support of projects and communities.

I don’t think there has to be 100% open source, but utilitzing it where it makes sense benefits the taxpayer.

ESRI today was the guest blogger on the Google Geo Developers blog.  Sterling did a pretty good job of outlining the ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for Google Maps and how it can be utilized.  I’m still waiting for my 9.3 to show up (long story) to actually start implementing ArcGIS Server 9.3 so I have to live through these posts for now.

Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle has left beta and is available to everyone.  I don’t think there has been a killer app yet built using Fire Eagle, but the service has the potential to link LBS applications together.  I think Yahoo! some really good spatial services (can’t forget about GeoPlanet) and I’d love to see them become more serious about them than their past would reflect.

Reminds me of the old USPS motto, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat fire nor gloom of night stays these couriers Googlers from their appointed rounds”.

View Larger Map

Update (2008-08-21): It looks like Google has just pulled down the Street View images of the fire.

I’ve always thought of GeoServer as a great way to get introduced to open source web mapping servers because its Admin page was much easer to use than MapServer.  It looks like at 2.0, the Admin page will get even better as the GeoServer team announced that the new UI is in the 2.0 alpha release.  I can’t wait to see how this develops until the “final” 2.0 release.

Matt Priour noticed that there was no search function on the ArcGIS Engine Resource Page.

server & desktop are the only centers cool enough to get a search box

Looks like he is right. But all is not lost as the ESRI Resource Center pages have been indexed by Google so you can just use the Google Search to find what you need.

Warning PR: Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008

I was getting worried I’d have to use SQL Server 2005 on a project starting up, but this means 2008 will be the focus.

Yesterday the Lt. Governor of Louisiana, Mitch Landrieu, wrote up why Google Street View is so important to New Orleans and its recovery on the Google Blog.

In this time of recovery and rebuilding, it is important that we share real images of life in Louisiana and on the Gulf Coast. As you explore the streets of New Orleans, you will discover a city marked by extremes. You will see some areas spared the worst of Katrina’s fury which have quickly recovered, and you will find other neighborhoods that remain flattened by the floodwaters that broke the levees. You will see that our residents call both FEMA trailers and antebellum mansions home.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved on a couple projects with the New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC).  Their idea is to bring “paper” and PDF maps to the internet so the community (both local and national).  Together with Matt Priour (who has done some amazing work with the Google Maps API) we’ve been moving their data from their “classic” pre-Katrina mapping to a more interactive experience.  The push is on this month to get more mapping online and the release of the Street View for NOLA should bring more opportunities to both tell the story of the recovery and help those who are living there gain access to city services.

I encourage everyone to download the The New Orleans Index Anniversary Edition: Three Years After Katrina available on the front page of the GNOCDC website.  It will help put into perspective the recovery which is still going on 3 years after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast.  As the Google Street View shows (look at the Lower Ninth Ward for perspective), New Orleans is still fighting hard.

View Larger Map

Sean Gorman has a very thought provocative piece on his blog this morning. The Professional vs. the Amateur: Thoughts on the ESRI UC should be read by everyone. I’ve notice that our tribe mentality has really caused great divisions in those of us trying to bring spatial information to the Internet. I’ve learned something in the years I’ve been blogging here, I am just an amateur at just about everything I do. Sure I have a GISP, but that doesn’t mean that I’m any better at moving to the GeoWeb than anyone else (heck I’m probably less able to do that than others). Because of this I’ve been more open to Neogeographers (those on the ground, not locked up in a University writing about it) and I’ve learned so much in the last couple years.

Any time there is something disruptive as the GeoWeb/Web 2.0/Where 2.0/GeoCloud you end up with people circling the wagons in a failed attempt to control what is happening. Closed source, open source, free as in beer, GISP, geotagger, whatever are just labels we put on ourselves, products or philosophy to limit our growth and the growth of others. Don’t make me break out the hippy girl picture again and ask why can’t we all get along?

Now you've done it, let us all sit in the field and hold hands

The moment they start letting people put messages in Street View is the moment it becomes worthless.  How are we supposed to use this stuff if Google allows their employees to put messages in the pictures?  I mean where does this stop?  Does Google allow Ford Motor Company or Apple Computer to send their employees out to get their pictures taken with Mustang Convertibles and iPhones because they paid Google?  I can only guess that Street View is a joke and those who really want to build a business should use Pictometry instead.

Work for Google, put messages in Street View

WeoGeo and Safe Software team up a couple weeks ago and now we get word that Mapufacture has joined FortiusOne.  Details will be coming in the next week or two, but it doesn’t take a GeoScientist (I’ve learned you can put the prefix “Geo” in front of anything and sound smart) to see that this space is getting very interesting.  The vision is getting tighter which can only mean good things for everyone.  Andrew Turner has written up a good explanation about what this means for both companies and for the GeoWeb at large.

The GeoWeb is coming right toward us!

Mikel Maron has some more about it on his blog as well.

Well the bus came and Connor is now at Kindergarten.  He was very excited, but he did admit to me just before the bus came that his stomach hurt.  I guess even little guys get nervous.  I can’t wait to hear how it went, he was very excited about starting school.

Connor watching the bus approach the bus stop.

Gabbo, Gabbo, Gabbo!

Seriously though, have fun guys.  I couldn’t think of a better place to spend August than San Diego.  It does look like I’ll finally be able to go back to the UC since the next couple conferences are in July.  Monday, while everyone is getting the vision of ArcGIS, my little guy will be sitting in his first day of Kindergarten and I wouldn’t miss that for anything.

SDCC Photo by: Gary J. Wood

Brian Flood has blogged about his latest project, Arc2Earth Cloud Services.  A2ECS (what is one more acronym among friends?) is yet another service that will be competing for our GIS dollar.  We’ve seen the WeoGeo/Safe announcement, ESRI is thinking about hosted services and now Brian brings his cutting edge A2E services forward.  Competition will only drive costs down and Brian Timony’s hope that companies will compete for his work is probably upon us.  We can assume what ESRI’s hosted services will look like given our history with their products, the WeoGeo/Safe details are still forthcoming, but Brian Flood gets into detail about what his product is offering and how.

A2ECS will provide an online space to allow users host their maps and layers online and provide RESTful access for queries, editing and spatial analysis.  Nothing very complicated in that, nice simple URLs to work with.  I also think using AtomPub to synchronize data back and forth is very proactive.  Despite what some would have to believe, FTP access is just a complete PITA and I’m happy to see APP front and center.  Once others start offering such feeds you’ll be able to better leverage the promise of GeoWeb (as opposed to W*S and FTP access).

As for the A2ECS processing Brian states that he “will provide the 20% of functionality that is used 80% of the time.”  The worry I have had for many years is when companies promise to duplicate ArcInfo or similar products online.  If I have a need for complex analytical processing, I’ll probably already have access to that tool, but if I want just answer questions spatially A2ECS is probably the better tool.

Now Brian isn’t close to releasing this tool so the the details about how this will actually work are still left open.  Eventually a marketplace will develop that will allow users to take data, pay for it (if needed), process it and then resell it (if needed) and making sure everyone in the chain gets “their cut”.  A perfect example of this is our buddy Mr Minton and his EVS-Islands.  He wanted to sell a product he created using the DigitalGlobe imagery, but DigitalGlobe was unable to honor his request.  The idea that he could use worldwide imagery and create a derivative product AND sell it AS WELL AS allowing for the image provider to be paid for the use of their product is one that needs to be addressed now.  I suppose that is what WeoGeo is trying to accomplish, but companies need to offer up their data so that people can take the data and process it and then sell it making sure everyone makes money on the deal.  We are just beginning to see the start of something here.

ESRI has posted the results from the 2008 ESRI Q&A and most of it isn’t news, but a couple things caught my eye… [Read more →]