Maps and Legends

Looking to games for GIS tech.

2006-05-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a small snippet in Wired about the City of New York using the video game Second Life to do urban planning. They have placed maps of the park in the game and are looking for the vast community to come up with redesign ideas for the park.

Google Earth (yeah had to mention it...) is built on the same techniques used in most 3D game engines. One of these days we'll realize in the business world that all of those hours I spent playing Quake3 were for the common good of my company :) Ok, so maybe that's taking it a bit far.

Just wanted to remind everyone that there are tools out there that you may not have even thought about, but it's there waiting for new exploitation.

Google Maps API

2006-04-19T12:50:00.000-07:00

I've signed up for my own Google API key. I've spent a few minutes researching the "mash-ups" that are out there and I must say I'm impressed with the added quality that the Google Maps interface gives to even the simplest or dare I say lowliest (see www.gawker.com) of applications. I don't see how ESRI is going to be able to directly compete with this particular portion of the GIS market without somehow offering a vast improvement over the Google Data (I don't see that being an easy feat) or by providing the same sorts of "free" services to the web-mapping realm. Someone will have to pay at sometime, but so long as google is providing so much data and service at no cost I don't see how the ESRI webservices model will survive as it stands. I hate being a naysayer, but I think GIS professionals the world over are beginning to take note of the power that Google is providing at little to no cost to the end user.

This all being said, help me understand what it is in this whole mash of things that I am overlooking or simply don't understand.

A Calgon Day

2006-04-18T15:22:00.000-07:00

On days like this where I find myself switching from Java J2EE to .NET Web Services to JavaScript debugging woes to Database Maintenance Tasks to delivering specs for a new ArcGIS Server, well, on days like this I wish I were a little brighter, a little less forgetful, and a lot more energetic. In the span of one day I have found myself programming in Java, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, DHTML, Visio (yes for me that's just as difficult as any language), PL/SQL, and DHTML. I'm spent...

On the bright side I learned a little more about Atlas today. When this all comes together and the standards are in place and the wizards are finished, web programming really will be as efficient and fun as desktop application writing. Ok, so I'm living somewhere in the clouds right now.

Entropy of Mapping

2006-04-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

As time passes it is always increasing. It's the only scientific phenomenom that has a direction in time, essentially the universal clock. Somehow today I find myself pondering entropy, you may ask yourself, "How could this possibly relate to GIS or mapping." I'm really not sure I am capable of answering that question at this point in time, but I am certain that there is something to be said of the relationship between our attempts at ordering and categorizing our world and the natural rival idea of entropy.

Perhaps the idea that our geospatial snapshots are somehow capturing the essence of space as it will never truly be again. GIS will one day be the great keeper of all things resource driven. How much of our earth needs to be alloted for things like timber production, food production, comfortable living space, etc. How does entropy effect these things? Well in a practical sense it really does more than most of us realize, perhaps a better way of thinking of it though would be an enourmous mass and energy balance. These geographically related chemical and physical models seem at times to be futuristic pipedreams. I assure you they are not. Geospatial modelling will be a much bigger topic than cloning, mapping the genome, etc. in the very near future. What do you think?

Easter Weekend

2006-04-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

Nothing new in my little corner of the world. Working Good Friday and ready for the weekend. Thinking about working on my Identify Tool this weekend. Happy Easter.

When Maps Became Important to Me

2006-04-06T07:25:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from a funeral. An emotional 1 ½ day rollercoaster that turned from grieving to celebration and back numerous times brought me back to the realities of why we are here and what we should try to do with our time here. My Aunt Sylvia lived life with a passion and energy that most of us can only envy. Reliving memories with my cousins at the funeral brought back some very important experiences in my life.

I was just six years old and couldn’t remember going much further than to the other side of the Missouri River Bridge in Hannibal a few times to Illinois. So when I was told we were packing for a two week family vacation to California and Oregon, a gold rush of dreams filled my head. I could already see myself surfing in the Pacific, killing buffalo on the Plains, and making peace with every Indian I met along my way.

It was June 1978. We packed into a 1975 cargo style van (albeit it was by my standards “pimped” 70’s style) and after some hours of repacking the vestiges for the eight of us into a van that could barely hold that many people without luggage, we were on our way and reality began to set in. After the first 100 miles of Kansas on I-70 my six-year-old mind began to feel the drain of the Plains. My mother in her wisdom handed me the trusty Rand McNally’s and told me to help keep up with our location and planned stops. Thus began a long love affair with the representation of bigger, grander spaces on smaller spaces of paper and later in digital form. I kept up with everything my growing mind could grasp and learned to read maps in that one trip. I could still show you within a few miles the location of our car problem, our first night sleeping under the stars, the parking lot where my teenage brother threatened to leave the troupe, the casino I got my mom in trouble because I snuck in and put a nickel in a slot, and that wild beach in Northern California that had us spend the night with a group of hippies in a VW Micro and a motorcycle gang (some of the nicest folks we met the whole trip.) Someday I will write down all of my memories from this early adventure, but for now I hope you get some idea.

I loved my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Joe. They lived life like it was worth living and they gave me much more than I could ever have given them. You will be missed by us all…

Matt

So on the more recent trip, the children didn’t need to worry about mapping the car did it for us. I was still glued to the screen for large portions of the trip, but I wondered if I would have had the same interest as a young boy. Part of the great fun of maps and all encyclopedic knowledge is being able to share it with those around. It amazes me that with the wonders of technology that we have surrounding our everyday lives now that so many children I see seem almost immune to the mystery. They’ve grown up on video games and it just doesn’t seem as awe-inspiring to them. This is all probably just a sign that I’m getting old and I just don’t appreciate fully the way in which they view our world. I hope that’s the case.

Research and Analysis Afternoon

2006-03-31T13:47:00.000-08:00

It's Friday after 3:00 so I'm spending just a few moments checking out what's new in the digital world. I wound up going from GISuser.com to A9.com's mapping site (when is someone finally going to merge Wikipedia like openness, Google's browser efficiency, and an the idea of photo sharing in a spatial domain? A9 has block view photos for certain cities and if they allowed photo uploads you would now be able to see block views of my own street, possible with me in a pic or two. Oh well, maybe it was for the best for now.

The other thing I'm doing, and the reason I decided to post (just in case something breaks) is downloading IE7.0 beta. I'll let everyone know how that goes.

What do you think about the georeferencing of pics? Did you even know that microsoft had a great project relating to that at one time, I used it a little. Ever hear of WWMX? It was ambitious and a pretty good application but just didn't make it for one reason or another. Probably got pulled into something bigger.

Peace out... Installing IE 7 and my browser is closing.

2006 ESRI Developer's Conference

2006-03-29T10:57:00.000-08:00

As most of you know the inaugural ESRI Developer’s Conference took place this last Friday and Saturday (March 17th and 18th). I sit here 5 days later still trying to form the multitude of sessions, new contacts, new Arc info (as you might say), and various other memories into some semblance of a coherent overview of “take away” items from the conference. I find myself a little lifted each time I think of the general energy level surrounding the opening morning plenary on Friday and the buzz of people around the ESRI DC Community Center. Over 700 developers and ESRI staff (I never was sure if the staff was included in the attendance figures) filed into the largest hall at the Palm Springs Convention Center to hear Scott Morehouse kick things off. Brian Golden, head of EDN, introduced Jack Dangermond who gave a short introduction for Mr. Morehouse, ESRI’s director of research and development, and a very “buzz-worthy” presentation about the direction of the ESRI platform with the 9.2 release and beyond followed.

Within the first hour of the opening session I was itching to get back to Birmingham and find that extra research time of my own to look into all of the great new features in 9.2. Morehouse took the approach of championing the geodatabase model, pushing for coarse-grained development approaches and service oriented architectures, and finishing with a promise that ESRI is committed to enhanced support and documentation with new releases. Some of this seemed like fluff and hidden agendas; however, as they pulled out all guns (demos) I assume the majority of the conference attendees were impressed, I know I was. At least 3 things that had been on my mind for the last few months were answered in just one quick demo. I mean quick, I don’t know if they were trying to just keep the wow factor high or if there was a little need for slight of hand in this demo, but in under a minute each demo was navigated through flawlessly. Back to the three things, enhanced ArcGIS Server editing, seamless panning and zooming, and incorporation of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And Xml) for more client-side processing of tasks within the browser.

When I was first hired at my current position, I had asked about Google Maps and seamless panning, I was told Google was a bit of a four letter word around ESRI. So I guess we were expecting seamless panning and zooming as a necessary public relations response to Google and other web mapping technologies. One thing I still find funny is that these same features are not included in the Beta release of 9.2 desktop that we received. I think we all tend to make the assumption that if no one has complained about something then it is quite possibly best left alone. That’s how companies grow stagnant and eventually atrophy. Just because GIS professional’s the world over have never en masse asked for this feature in ArcMap does not mean it’s not a great idea. With today’s machines, the overhead of caching a few extra frames around the border of the drawn map area is little in comparison to the enhanced user experience with seamless panning. (Just my two cents)

The demos at the plenary session proved to me that the editing ideas I had been shaping in my head were already reality on the desktops of some at ESRI. This was a welcome relief to know that this particular “wheel” heavy in Javascript and custom GIS Server parameter arguments would not have to be re-invented.

There were a number of fashionable words flying around the developer’s conference from “coarse-grained objects” to “SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)” but the one that caught my attention most from the start was AJAX. Developing the majority of the time in the web server realm, I have come to appreciate the nuances and needs of the disconnected application as it were. I have a strong appreciation for the need to balance processing between both client and server. AJAX is not a panacea and it is not really anything new. It’s just a way of taking a lot of the old javascript tricks that have been developed in the last decade and packaging them in a standard form. Hooray AJAX!

The overall strategy for ArcGIS Server 9.2 is to have much more out-of-the-box functionality and for that I give a belated round of applause to ESRI.Nearly two pages into my “overview” and I’ve barely covered just a portion of the 8:30 to 10:00 a.m. opening session.