May 09, 2008
Spatial Sustain—Is the geospatial data collection space still ripe for innovation?
All Points Blog—Global Wildlife Disease News Map Version 2
Even though I read the title with "news" in it several times, I kept thinking this was a map of spread. The other disappointment is that all news is tagged with point markers color coded to geographic level. Different colored "tears" mean: Place, County, Administrative Unit, Country, Continent. While I know creating meaningful polygons is a challenge, I found this confusing. I'd prefer they not symbolize for geographic level and let users explore that when they mouse over, more like MetaCarta's GeoSearch News.
Details of how the app works are here. In the works: search by date range, user generated filters (queries I guess), more historic data, extraction of text.
Colliers Atlas Blog—Edward Tufte Notes & Reflections - Part V
This post is part 5 of 5 of my notes and reactions to Edward Tufte 's one-day course Presenting Data and Information.
WHO CAN BENEFIT FROM TUFTE’S RECOMMENDATIONS?
Imagine a business environment where critical information is communicated clearly and unambiguously. Where desires, expectations, and project timelines are understood by all. Perhaps this is outside the reach of Edward Tufte’s scope, but I see this as the inevitable culmination of an even application of his proposals; Assume your audience is as smart as you are. Eliminate unnecessary information. Be clear. Be concise. Be truthful.
Clients will appreciate concise to-the-point presentations. They’ll be relieved to avoid another canned PowerPoint template production or a bloated marketing package filled with fluff.
A PLACE FOR SIMPLICITY?
What about the people who just don’t get it? To assume that everyone is as smart as you are, necessarily means talking over the heads of some. (It also means talking below the heads of others.)
Tufte assumes that you’ll only be presenting to decision makers who must be smart to have attained such a high position. This is an assumption that Tufte, who teaches and writes for an intelligent audience, can afford to make. But what about those of us in the business world? Can we afford to present for an intelligent audience? I would say yes... and no.
Yes... we must present intelligently. Decision-makers are, by and large, a smart bunch. To build or maintain wealth takes smarts. A dull person with wealth has smart advisers who are the people you’ll likely be talking to anyway.
...and no. Sometimes a simple graphic, slide or map really is all that’s called for. Sometimes people really do want to focus on style alone.
(Photo: star5112)
mateusz.loskot.net—PostGIS provider for FDO update
During last weeks, a lot of fresh bits have been contributed to the PostGIS provider for FDO Open Source. The great part of this work was committed by Bruno Scott and his colleagues. Bruno has recently joined the FDO development team. I’d like to express my deep gratitude to Bruno for his fantastic help in improving the PostGIS provider. The provider has got better shape and stability.
Recently, I’ve failed my duties in the provider development, so motivated by the load of Bruno’s work I found some gaps in time to submit a few fixes too :-)
All Points Blog—Microsoft Offer Citizen Services Platform Free to Municipal Govs; Soon VE templates
For now it comes with:
E-Councilor template—A Windows Live Agent that allows messenger communication with a virtual government worker to ask questions.
Web TV template— Allows government and citizen video hosting in Web 2.0 style.
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 templates— A set of 40 templates to customize scenarios that address site and system administration needs.
Local government communications template— Sample portal with intranet and extranet templates.
Role-based My Site template— Designed for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the My Site functionality.
Agenda Management template— Allows organizations to streamline processes.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM templates for municipal governments— Vertical templates, including reference data models, predefined work flows and role-based user experiences.
The interesting part: "a possible template incorporating Virtual Earth to give people localized, neighborhood-oriented services or access to information based on their geographical position."
- GCN
All Points Blog—Google Maps Organizes More of Google's (not the world's) Information
Vector One—“Is the geospatial data collection space still ripe for innovation?”
Colliers Atlas Blog—Edward Tufte Notes & Reflections - Part IV
This post is part 4 of 5 of my notes and reactions to Edward Tufte 's one-day course Presenting Data and Information.
STEPS TO A SUCCESSFUL PRESENTATION
1. Work on your content. Spend the bulk of your time on the data and your synthesis of that data.
2. Practice. Practice. Practice. In front of a friend. In front of a video recorder. In front of a mirror
3. Show up early ALWAYS.
4. Instead of a slide show, your presentation revolves around a technical report. It can be an 11x17 paper folded in half. This is your key document and it isn’t an outline. It’s an intelligent document that stands up on its own.
5. Give your audience time to read the report. Your meeting is thus a guided Q & A with the document as its centerpiece.
This method front-loads a high resolution data dump right at the start. Nothing is dumbed down. Everyone has the same data.
6. Finish early. People love that.
A common question: What if people are reading my report instead of listening to me talk?
The answer: So what? It’s your report, isn’t it? You’re probably more eloquent in the report than you are in person anyway.
Tufte says: Overestimate the intelligence of your audience.
Your passion is conveyed by tone and body language. If you’re not excited about what you’re presenting, don’t present it.
(Photo: star5112)
Dave Bouwman—Prepping for Where 2.0...
So my company is sending me out to Where 2.0 - I've never been and expect it will be quite different from many of the other GIS conferences I've been to - more MacBooks and soul patches I'm guessing.
I'm particularly excited about the pre-conference workshops, as it will be a chance to get the low down on some technologies I have not worked with in the past. I'm hitting the Geo-ify your Web Site session in the morning (Mapstraction) and the The Open Geo-Stack: OpenLayers, GeoServer, PostGIS session in the afternoon.
In prep for the workshops I thought I'd get PostGIS (with ArcSDE 9.3 beta) installed on my notebook - ideally I'd like to roll into the session with a little background so I can ask relevant questions!
Installing Postgresql + PostGIS + ArcSDE 9.3 (beta)
Overall, not exactly the smoothest installation I've ever done. No step was particularly difficult, there were just points where I had to do some head scratching, Googling and then "just do it". I have to give ESRI credit as the ArcSDE installer was smooth as silk, and they included Postgresql 8.2 on their media. However, having not used PostGIS before, exactly how this fits into the mix was a little unclear. I will say that if you have used ArcSDE in the past, and just want to get rolling without paying for a database - the install is really pretty easy.
As noted, I installed PostgreSql 8.2 directly from the 9.3 beta media - this is super simple. I then downloaded the PostGIS Installer for PostgreSql 8.2. Again this was pretty easy, after you locate and download it. As per the ArcSDE instructions, I then ran the ESRI post installer, authorized ArcSDE and all looked good.
I could immediately connect to the sde database as the sde user, and used ArcCatalog to load a shapefile into PostGIS. Smooth.
But how do I know that this is actually using "PostGIS"? Would this data be accessible to non-ESRI clients?
Enter uDig. This was a quick and painless install, and uDig was installed.
When I browsed to my local PostGIS server, things were not looking good.
Where was my data? Clearly something is not lining up here. When I tried to connect to ArcSDE via uDig (after I located the jar files) it could not connect. Not sure if this is related to using the beta 9.3 jar files, or something else.
Anyhow, I decided I should try loading the same data via the command line post gis tools. Here I ran into a bit of a wall. The documentation for the PostGIS tools is not bad, but certainly aimed at the unix sys admin type of person. The basic process is to convert your shapefile into a Sql file, and then run that in Postgresql. Seems simple. A quick little batch file ought to work this right out. The sql file was created just fine, but it failed to load.
Sorting this out really meant it was time to do a little learning about Postgresql. After sorting out schemas, and learning that the most likely encoding of my shapefile was "LATIN1" I was able to load my data and "see" it in uDig.
Actual loading the layer into uDig never completed. The application just sort of hung stating that the "Project command" was executing. This was just a map of all the counties in the US, so not sure what the issue was, but I'm pretty sure it was my fault.
I then tried to connect via ArcCatalog to see if I could "see" this layer... and not too surprisingly I could not.
Summary
Thus far I've simply come to realize that I have a lot to learn. I need to grok a lot more about Postgresql and PostGIS to start, and then add ArcSDE into the mix. I'm sure that if I read more of the ESRI documentation I'll find some answers, but at this point it's unclear to me if they will be supporting direct access to PostGIS data, or if they will be supporting the PostGIS spatial format for data stored in traditional ArcSDE schemas (i.e. with all the GDB_ and SDE_ tables). I also learned that I've been sheltered from the reality of "data" for many years!
I'll continue this series as I make progress getting things sorted out.
davebouwman.net weblog - copyright 2005-2008 - licensed under a Creative Commons License.
OpenLayers Blog—New and Improved Examples
With a bunch of work from Tim, and a little bit of serverside admin cleanup on my part, I’m proud to announce that as of today, the OpenLayers Examples are a lot nicer.
Improvements include:
- Shiny UI for browsing the examples, including keyword search
- Improved consistency of display of examples
- Changing the examples on the live server to depend on a singlefile build — no longer need to wait multiple minutes just to see a single example.
I’d like to thank the original doc team workers from the FOSS4G sprint team led by Josh Livni to get the titles/descriptions for most of these in place, Tim for his work on creating the nicer UI and getting me to update the server to point to it by default, and all OpenLayers contributors for making the number of features we have so easy to demonstrate!
Jeff Hobbs' Intergraph and GIS Technology Blog—Few New GeoMedia 6.1 Movies on Youtube
I’ve pushed all of the AVIs that were shown at the GeoMedia 6.1 product launch on to YouTube.com. I’ve been working on an internal wiki (not GeoMedia related) for work lately. So I haven’t been updating the blog much. However I still do want to get writing about what I found out at the 6.1 product launch. Additionally, I’m hoping to have more information after attending Intergraph 2008. So keep reading 
Jeff Hobbs' Intergraph and GIS Technology Blog—A New Book I Just Received
I just received a book in the mail today from ESRI Press titled “Thinking About GIS - Geographic Information System Planning for Managers - Third Edition” by Roger Tomlinson. I like to keep an eye on what ESRI Press has since they have such a broad selection. Anyhow, began scanning the book and really think it has a lot to offer - especially for a technical GIS Manager (like many of the readers of my blog). Thought I’d pass along the link. Overall, it looks to be a fantastic resource for those people that are looking to start their first GIS program or migrate from one system to another (think MGE to GeoMedia).
Jeff Hobbs' Intergraph and GIS Technology Blog—Heading to Intergraph 2008
Just found out my travel for Intergraph 2008 has been approved! So, I’ll be heading out to Las Vegas, NV probably on Monday, June 1. Who else is going? Maybe some folks want to get together for drinks one night?
Reply and let me know!
The Earth Is Square—Knowledge Planet, Using WWJava
Well, instead of me getting information out of JavaOne.. someone sent information to Slashgeo instead. but anyway, one of the many things that is coming out of JavaOne is Knowledge Planet's use of WWJava. Knowledge planet allows the visualizing of massive amounts of textual data on a virtual globe.
At the time of map generation, the planet’s topology is determined by the content of the knowledge base. The peaks of the virtual landscape indicate abundant coverage on a particular topic, whereas valleys represent sparsely populated parts of the information space.
You can try the Knowledge Planet demo here.
May 08, 2008
The Earth Is Square—WWJava Being Used on Cell Phones?
Ok, I am starting to get tid-bit information out of the people at JavaOne. It came out at last year's JavaOne that using JavaFX, you could get WWJava running on a cell phone in 10 minutes. Now here is a quote from Tom Gaskins that brings other tantalizing information up.
WWJ showed up in several surprising places... Ken (Russel) said they showed it behind the scenes running on a cell phone, although he couldn't give more info than that other than to say it's using the very first of the new Nvidia 3D chips for such devices.
James Fee GIS Blog—Developing in a Virtual Environment
I’ve asked the question on Twitter, but I’d like to get a more broad idea of what people think about developing applications inside a virtual environment. Results were pretty much on both extremes, either people love it, or people told me I need to get a new IT staff. We do have virtual servers running already, but the reality of actually developing inside a “virtual workstation” might be totally different. The upside of having different virtual environments available to me to use and not have any spillover into my “real” operating system seems greater than the downside of performance (especially on my laptop). But what do you guys think?
I sure as heck don’t want to end up like Arnold
Ed Parsons—Free Wifi in London map
A nice Free Wifi Access map from the Londonist, locating free public wifi sites, moderated at the moment pehaps it would be more useful if it allowed users to maintain the database.
Still a long way from the original consume the net database.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Vector One—Canada Set to Decide on MDA Deal: So What is the ‘Net Benefit?’
Live Maps / Virtual Earth Blog—Why my new phone isn't an iPhone
A few months back I asked VE blog readers for some advice on my next mobile. After investigating a bunch of phones I finally settled on the AT&T Tilt and have been using it for a month or so and totally loving it. Overall its a fantastic smartphone, and for a geohacker its the ultimate all in one dream gadget.
Before I get to what it was that sold me on the Tilt I should answer the question of why no iPhone for me. There are a bunch of rabid iPhone users right here in my workgroup at Microsoft and we have 2 Macs at home so certainly no shortage of evangelists in my life selling me on the iPhone. I was willing to live with the slower network access on the iPhone due to lack of 3G (even though it seemed unthinkable on a 500 dollar phone!) And I was OK with relying on a bluetooth connected GPS for my mapping needs (more on that in a moment - I couldn't have been more wrong on this one). But in the end it came down to the fact that i couldn't stomach buying such a closed, locked down computing device. A world where a single entity controls what apps you can and can't run isn't one our industry should be working towards. If I build an application I should be able to give it to you and you should be able to use it. I have no interest in developing on any platform, desktop, mobile or otherwise, that offers anything less than that. I'm trying to imagine the reaction if another software vendor had tried to float this 1998 thinking as a developer platform strategy ;-) In the end, lots of sizzle and flash (no, not that flash)in the UI and an excellent web browsing experience shielded by a velvet rope designed to control what applications the consumer has access to just wasn't for me. If you read on you'll see that I run a bunch of apps on my phone and it'll become clear why the iPhone just wouldn't do it for me.
Why the Tilt?
If you look back at my wishlist you see that on the surface the Tilt is a pretty good fit; superfast internet access (plus WiFi. the the AT&T 3G net is so fast I hardly use it though**), runs Slingplayer, keyboard, unlocked GPS, easy to develop for, etc... But as with any piece of consumer electronics, its how you feel after living with it for a week that really matters. The Tilt hasn't disappointed; the build is amazingly good (slide the keyboard open to understand what i mean), its plenty fast and has lots of memory (256 megs, up to 32 gigs expansion via microSD)... My only gripe is that the installed browser is severely lacking in features which I took care of with Opera. Battery life is acceptable, but if you are running WiFi, GPS, etc... a lot, you'll need to get it on the charger each night.
** while I hardly use WiFi to surf the net, I HAVE been using this app to turn my phone into a wifi Access Point. Totally sick! It uses the phones 3G connection to send/receive to the internet, and becomes a low power wifi router so anyone nearby can connect to the net using standard wifi via their Laptop.
What about Maps and GPS?
Killer! I had no idea how much having a built in GPS would change my life, until i lived with it. With my last phone i used an external GPS via bluetooth and found that when i needed it, i had often not brought it along. one more thing to remember to carry. as a result, over time I found I hardly ever used it. I've used the GPS on the Tilt more in 4 weeks than I have in the previous 2 years. when its always there, you start using it in ways you never would otherwise. one very nerdy example - i was at a music festival 2 weeks ago where parking was basically a giant open field, without lights or section marks. I snapped a waypoint each day when going in, then used the Tilt's GPS to guide me back to our car each night.
I mentioned above that the Tilt with its unlocked GPS is a perfect for building your own applications. If you're so inclined, I suggest getting started with the open source GPSTracker on Codeplex; very well written C# code that is easy to modify. I added KML export and a couple of minor features in 30 minutes! It will work with any WinMo device that has a GPS be it built in or Bluetooth.
And finally, if you have a WinMo or Blackberry and you haven't installed Live Search Mobile, do it now, thank me later. Voice command, directions, GPS navigation, maps, aerial imagery, movie times, gas prices, Business Search... and the forthcoming release packs my favorite feature which I'm not allowed to tell you about just yet.
SlashGeo—Microsoft Sued Over Terraserver
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
SlashGeo—FAA Aeronautical Charts In WorldWind Coming Soon
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
import cartography—OWSLib 0.3
Hey, sometimes you can't avoid the OGC's service architecture. OWSLib makes W*S suck less (apologies to Bob Ippolito) while you and I find our way back to the Web from the land of SDI. OWSLib 0.3 adds preliminary support for coverage services, contributed by Dominic Lowe of the British Atmospheric Data Centre, a colleague of Bryan Lawrence.
Bull's rambles—World Wind Java at Javaone 2008
import cartography—Shapely Debs
I'm a big fan of the Debian GIS Project and pleased to see that Shapely is getting some of its attention. Meanwhile, I'm still building GEOS 3.0 from source (with Kai's hexagonit.recipe.cmmi) because Hardy is still at GEOS 2.2.3.
The Earth Is Square—FAA Aeronautical Charts Coming Soon
WorldWind forum member nlneilson and FEF are working to bring the FAA Aeronautical Charts to the masses. It is getting closer to becoming live, the data just needs to be processed and put online. Here is a sample of how it will look in WorldWind (screen shots are from WWJava).
Dallas-Ft Worth
FAA West
Live Maps / Virtual Earth Blog—Accessing MultiMap in the UK. Plus a comparison of UK mapping sites.
Marie Thirlwall, Product Manager for Microsoft in the UK, sent me some information about MultiMap and how starting today (hopefully by the time you are reading this) UK visitors to MSN.com who are looking for maps and directions will be served by MultiMap. Folks who visit maps.live.com will continue to get the same mapping experience they enjoy today. Choice is good! By the way, check out this review comparing 7 mapping/trip planners in the UK in which MultiMap received top marks-
The hugely customizable routes were the only ones to match our sat-nav and offered lots of information, including weather conditions and public transport options. The satellite and standard map facilities impressed, and route calculation was super-fast.
Back to the announcement at hand, here are all the details from Marie:
We recently announced the integration of Multimap into Live Search in the UK and will start to route users directly to the Multimap service from MSN UK and Live.com from 9th May.
This release is part of our longer term consumer strategy to have one mapping and local search site in the UK, integrating the best of both Multimap and Virtual Earth (Live Search Maps) technologies. The management and development teams of Microsoft and Multimap are working collaboratively, with a common vision bringing localized products to market faster. Given that Multimap resonates successfully with UK consumers serving over 45% of the UK mapping audience, building on this brand is the right strategic direction.
We recognize, however, that we must continue to offer users a choice of services while we complete the integration of all Virtual Earth features into the Multimap site. We are therefore maintaining the Live Search Maps UK site and users can still access this at http://maps.live.com to use favourite features such as Windows Live Collections and 3D maps. Powerful VE Aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery has been integrated into the Multimap site to give consumers the broadest array of map styles on the market today.
Additionally, we are going to provide prominent signposting to Live Search Maps UK from the Multimap site for those who are redirected there. All Live Search and MSN UK mapping traffic through ‘Maps’ links will be redirected to www.multimap.com but any shared Collections links will not.
Developers and businesses that have invested in the Virtual Earth technology are unaffected by the redirection of our Live Search Maps and MSN mapping traffic to Multimap. We will continue to support both technology platforms and expect to offer an expanded set of opportunities and features over time.
We thank our users for the feedback and passion they have shared so far as we continue to evolve our local and mapping sites in the UK. We encourage you to try out these sites for yourselves.
Off the Map - Official Blog of FortiusOne—Top Picks at Where 2.0 and an Emerging Open Data Sharing Theme
As we’ve been gearing up to Launch the GeoCommons’ Finder! at Where 2.0 there has been a chance to talk to several of the other folks presenting. Many are exciting concepts and I’m looking forward to seeing the presentations. A few we are particularly eager for:
Monday will have some solid tutorial and look forward to sitting in on Steve, Mikel and Andrew’s presentation on how to “Geo-ify Your Web Site”. All three have been very successful and clever with democratizing geospatial technology to the masses, and it will be fun to see what is next for bringing more geo to more web pages. For the second session I’m looking forward to seeing the Open Geo-Stack and seeing the latest from Chris Holmes and company.
Tuesday will be an interesting mix of big players, start ups and academics. On the big player tip seeing the differentiation between the Google and Microsoft presentations will be fun. Both are going to be talking about where the GeoWeb is going and look forward to looking for the similarities and differences.
In the start up category Adrien Holovaty’s presentation on Everyblock should be top notch. The implementation for Everyblock definitely pushes the limits of data aggregation and what can be done with an opengeo stack. His thoughts on where it goes next will be a great starting point for the conference. Also the afternoon pairing of Everyscape and Earthmine, a presentation apart, will make for an interesting contrast on how the two immersive 3D streetscape companies compare.
From the titles it looks like Everyscape will differentiate based on their ability to provide 3D navigable interiors of building while Earthmine looks to be focusing on indexing data in these 3D environments. Both are very cool, but the bigger question is will Google and Microsoft duplicate or acquire. Could be a great opportunity or a quickly crowded space.
In the academic category I’m very up for seeing Paul Torrens’ latest. We were both geography grad students at the same time in related fields and it has been great seeing his work evolve. It is definitely cutting edge and illustrative of where the potential of geospatial technologies is headed. Encourage all to make sure they are in the room for this one.
Wednesday has a little less glitz but still many interesting presentations on tap. Specifically I’ll be all ears for Jonathan Lowe’s presentation on his work with the geo aspects of Freebase and David Troy’s ideas for OpenLocation.org. Both are approaching the open data issue but from opposite ends of the spectrum.
Jonathan will be looking at how to enable geo aspects of the massive amount of structured data in Freebase, while David will be looking at how to effectively harness small ephemeral location data leveraging mobile technologies. I had a chance to talk with both in the last few days and each is looking at leveraging open data to more effectively share it with the community, but from opposite tails of the data distribution.
Continuing the data theme there is another interesting pairing of talks with Lior Ron of Google and Juan Gonzalez of PlanetEye, both talking about the indexing of geo-content. Lior gave a great presentation on Google’s approach at Location Intelligence and look forward to seeing what PlanetEye’s new approach is to indexing KML and more.
From a very selfish perspective I’m hoping to see a trend emerging at the conference driving more open data and more sharing of that open data. Hopefully this will enable the need for data federation/sharing and consensus among the community on how best to go about it.
SlashGeo—Satellite images available for Disasters in both Canada and Myanmar
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
Spatial Sustain—Mapping the Aftermath in Myanmar
oegeo—Virtual Earth Custom Tile Layers in 3D mode — not anymore.
The Microsoft Virtual Earth API lets you add your own tile layer to your VE Map. My colleague StevenO wrote about preparing a suitable TileCache setup. This used to work in both 2D and 3D map modes. Recently, Microsoft introduced the latest version of the API, 6.1, along with a major data upgrade and a new version of the 3D control. A step forward in many respects, but the tile layers will not show up in 3D mode anymore. Let’s investigate. UPDATED 080508 11pm, see below
Let me start out by saying that I did not get the tile layers to display again in the new 3D control, so my preliminary conclusion is that this is a bug (read: feature) in the new VE version. But let me at least reiterate what I’ve tried. I’m also touching on some more general VE API topics that crossed my path.
First, I decided to define as many of the optional parameters for the VETileSourceSpecification as possible. Almost all are optional; only TileSource and ID are required and set in the constructor. I defined the Bounds property, first as a simple VELatLongRectangle (supplying only the top left and bottom right coordinates), that made no difference whatsoever.
As a sidenote: having a GIS background, I can’t really get used to the way a bounding box, or a simple VELatLong point for that matter, are defined. I am used to defining bounding boxes by supplying their bottom-left and top-right points, but the VE API turns that all around and has you supply the top-left and bottom-right points. Those points, in turn, are defined as lat-long instead of long-lat. Does MS do this just to annoy us, or what?
The VELatLongRectangle can also be defined using four points, which is relevant for 3D mode, as you might not be looking straight down and the bounding box of your viewport might not be a rectangle at all. So I tried to define the full rectangle for the Bounds property as well, with no discernible effect:
var bounds = [new VELatLongRectangle(new VELatLong(57,3),new VELatLong(50,7),new VELatLong(57,7),new VELatLong(50,3))];
Zoom Levels
Next up is the MinZoom and MaxZoom properties. When not set, the tile layer will just show up in every zoom level, which is considered to be a possible performance issue. I don’t really see why, as the tiles will be generated by a tile caching mechanism in any decent implementation. I can see that you want to restrict the visibility of your tile layer to certain zoom levels for aesthetic reasons, however.
In 3D mode, zooming is continuous, so I was wondering what the GetZoomLevel() method would return. The SDK documentation states: ‘This method may not give the same value in 3D mode as in 2D mode.’, without elaborating. It must have something to do with the viewport bounding box in 3D being determined by three variables (heading, pitch and distance to the earth) instead of just one in 2D (just the distance). In any case, you can’t expect the zoom level to remain constant when switching between 2D and 3D modes. It does however provide you with an indication of scale to base layer visibility on. Also note that in 3D mode, the GetZoomLevel() returns a single value, whereas the control internally seems to use a more dynamic approach to zoom levels. Notice that when you tilt your view, tiles that are closer to the ‘camera’ location are rendered with more detail than tiles that are nearer the horizon.
To get back on track; still no luck displaying our tile layers in 3D mode. Let’s see what options are left. There are a couple more properties in the VETileSourceSpecification: NumServers, Opacity and ZIndex. Experimenting with those did not yield any results though. ZIndex looked somewhat promising, but whereas changing values does affect layer ordering in 2D, in 3D we still see no custom layers.
API versions
The last thing I tried was reverting to an older API version. The test page I was using only worked with versions 5 and 6, although older versions down to 3 are still supported. IIRC, the custom tile layer functionality was implemented in version 4, but there could be other backward compatibility issues that I don’t want to investigate right now. Anyway, switching to v6 and v5 did not yield any results in what I was actually trying to achieve: to get the custom tile layers to show up.
I asked Johannes Kebeck about this issue, following the VE Technical Briefing that was held this morning. For those just starting in VE API development, as well as for developers already somewhat experienced, sessions with Johannes are a really good introduction. Keep an eye on his blog or the MS Events site for future events. If and when Johannes gets back to me, I’ll update this post.
UPDATE
After having looked into the issue with Johannes Kebeck, we pinpointed the problem: the tile store was served up from a nonstandard port, 8080. Microsoft confirms that fetching tiles from a port other than 80 is disabled in the 3D control, for security reasons. We chose the nonstandard port in order to be able to serve both the VE web application and the tilecache from our VE appliance. Because TileCache prefers an Apache environment and VE an IIS server environment, different port numbers seemed the easy way to accomplish this.
The GEO-Jobe Blog—Southeast Watershed Forum Announces New Online Mapping Service
From the Southeast Wathershed Forum Newsletter
This month the Southeast Watershed Forum launches a new and valuable resource for land and water protection. The Community Resource Mapper provides a free, user-friendly, on-line mapping service that will help communities integrate natural resource protection into their land use planning efforts.
Visitors to the site can create maps at a county, watershed or state level, that compare impaired streams, impervious surface, protected lands, wetlands, State Wildlife Action Plans and much more. The Mapper is unique in that it blends private data with a variety of public data sources and allows the integration of multiple resource layers for a custom view of your community. Much of this resource data is overlooked in the local comprehensive planning process.
GIS Lounge—ArcNews Survey
Ron Lake - Galdos Systems Inc—Looking ahead to GeoWeb 2009
While GeoWeb 2008 is not yet here, you might be interested to know that the thinking and planning has already started for GeoWeb 2009. The good news is that it will again be in Vancouver, and likely in mid July. Stay tuned to this blog for additional information.
As we have already noted, GeoWeb 2009 will focus on the Cityscape – its construction, its maintenance, simulation, and evolution. These are of course all key GeoWeb themes – building and sharing geospatial information across diverse organizations for their mutual benefit. GeoWeb 2009 will also retain core concerns like 3D measurement (imaging, lidar etc), security and defense, and environmental protection.
One special component planned for GeoWeb 2009 will be an academic track within the main conference focused on 3D Modeling and Measurement. This will not be a separate conference, but a special track with peer reviewed papers managed by a separate, academic program committee. This will run as part of the main conference and users will be able to move freely from one track to another. Unlike the main conference which consists mainly of presentations, panel sessions and technical workshops, the academic track will be published as conference proceedings and some of the papers from this track may be published in leading academic journals.
Taking this route will enable GeoWeb 2009 to be a little larger without losing the intimacy and networking opportunities that have made the conference so successful. It will also allow presentation of more technical research than would fit comfortably within the main conference. Hopefully it will also stimulate interaction between the vendor/government driven main conference and the academic/research driven interests of the 3D Modeling and Measurement track.
Dr. Thomas Kolbe of the Technical University of Berlin, a world leader in cityGML, in particular, and city modeling in general, has agreed to chair the program committee for the academic track.
I view this as a very exciting development. If you are working for an academic or research institution and would like to get involved – I strongly suggest you attend GeoWeb 2008 and start thinking now about how to contribute for GeoWeb 2009 Cityscapes.
Spatial Sustain—NCAR Adds Supercomputer to Study Climate Change
All Points Blog—Final Day for Canadian Gov on MDA Sale to Alliant
Alliant had 30 days to respond and convince official otherwise. Today's the end of that period and it looks like the decision will stand. Alliant announces year end earnings today. It's expected charges related to the failed purchase will be applied to Q4 earnings.
- CBC
SlashGeo—NASA Shows Knowledge Planet at JavaOne Conference
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
All Points Blog—Consumer Reports Gives Garmin 3 of Top Five Satnavs
Rounding out the top five scoring units were the Garmin Nuvi 760 ($600), Garmin Nuvi 660 ($500), TomTom Go 920T, ($650), Garmin Nuvi 350 ($350), and Magellan Maestro 4250 ($400).
- Kansas City InfoZine
Fuzzy Tolerance—Keys to DIY Graphic Design
Dumb Little Man has a great post titled 7 Keys to DIY Graphic Design on No Budget.
Some highlights:
- Be minimalistic. In particular, don’t over-write. I find I do that a lot. For someone with the social skills of a turnip, I often find myself writing long, florid passages that show off my writing chops but don’t really help communicate anything. I’ve dubbed that “ego writing”, and it describes the first pass at most everything I write. I often compose a whole page of email prose, re-read it, and replace it with a couple of well-worded sentences.
- Grab some free stock graphics. In particular, try stock.xchg and the Open Clipart Library. There are also search engines geared directly toward free graphics, including everystockphoto and PicFindr. There’s no sense reinventing the wheel.
- Grab some free fonts at places like urbanfonts and better fonts. Times New Roman is not your friend. And only use one or two fonts - any more becomes distracting.
- If you dress like I do, you need help with color coordination. Dumb Little Man recommends EasyRGB, and I’ve also used colormatch and COLOURlovers.
It’s a great post, and it also recommends Inkscape for graphics editing, which I highly endorse.
I have come to appreciate graphic design and interface usability design a lot more than I used to. Through critical analysis of some of my older work, I concluded (a) any yo-yo can put stuff on the Internet, (b) almost all of those yo-yos do it poorly, and (c) I was one of those yo-yos. A brilliant application of programming skills or GIS savy won’t save an ugly application or a poorly designed interface.
As much as the hacker in me detests the idea, design is at least as important as functionality. It’s a good idea for every developer to take a hard look at her or his work periodically in terms of graphics and interface design and see what can be improved. Your current users will thank you, and you may pick up some new users along the way.
OpenGeoData—San Francisco parties
We have some great mapping parties coming up in the bay area around Where 2.0 and WhereCamp. On the Saturday 10th we’re kindly hosted by metaweb, starting at 10:30am at Hawthorne St in the City. Big thanks to Jamie Taylor.
On the 16th Yahoo! are hosting us in Sunnyvale (Classroom 7 in Bldg E) from 10:30am. Big thanks to Tyler Bell.
So please do come along. For more information see this wiki page.
Of course there are many, many other parties happening all over the world and you can find them on the current events page.
All Points Blog—The OEMing of LBS
The Motorola MOTORAZR 2 V9m phone equipped with AAA Mobile, gives users turn-by-turn audio navigation and visual route maps. Powered by Networks in Motion, the AAA Mobile application is available on several GPS-enabled cell phones and smartphones via Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Alltel.
So, Motorola wants its name on a cool phone with a cool app. AAA wants its name on the app. NIM wants to be the technology provider. Oh, and NIM white labels deCarta's services. This is going way beyond the days of Intel inside!
All Points Blog—Terraserver.com Sues Microsoft over TerraServer-usa.com
In short:
Microsoft's TerraServer-USA satellite imagery project has been slapped with a trademark lawsuit from a small North Carolina company with a confusingly similar name.
Terraserver.com filed the suit on Friday in North Carolina federal court, seeking monetary damages and asking that Microsoft be stopped from using the TerraServer name.
Like the MapQuest/NavQuest suit (big guy sues little guy), I hope this one (little guy sues big guy) goes nowhere. The sad part, as Robert McMillan, who wrote the story suggested to me while we discussed the matter, Microsoft could just shut down Terraserver-usa.com, which would be a shame.
SlashGeo—China to Deploy Secure GPS by 2010
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
Google Earth Blog—Many Visualizations of Myanmar Disaster for Google Earth
I've been updating my original post with a list of visualizations on the Myanmar disaster for Google Earth showing Cyclone Nargis's path, weather data, and the resulting flooding from satellite photos. Google and other organizations have released all kinds of data in the aftermath of the storm to help people realize the extent of the disaster.
Google has a link for places to send support to Myanmar in their time of need.
Spatial Sustain—Red River Basin Mapping Project Launched
All Points Blog—Ben Bernanke: Geographer
SOUNDING more like a cartographer than a central banker, Ben Bernanke this week showed off the Federal Reserve’s latest gizmo for tracking America’s property bust: maps that colour-code price declines, foreclosures and other gauges of housing distress for every county. His goal was to show that falling prices meant more foreclosures, and to urge lenders to write down the principal on troubled loans where the house is worth less than the value of the mortgage. His maps—where hotter colours imply more trouble—also make a starker point. The pain of America’s housing bust varies enormously by region. Hardest hit have been the “bubble states”—California, Nevada and Florida, and parts of the industrial Midwest. The biggest uncertainty hanging over the economy is how red will things get.
SlashGeo—Google Maps and Google Earth Sightseeing
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.
lost in spatial—Happy Birthday, King of the Freetards
I just had a long chat on the ‘phone with Tyler Mitchell, King of the Freetardsexecutive director of OSGeo, who is in the UK at the moment (Cadcorp are sponsors of GDAL/OGR).
Somehow-or-other it came out that today is Tyler’s birthday. Spare a thought for him having to spend it at Heathrow airport, and then on a looooooong flight home (hopefully with his bags).
Many happy returns Tyler.
Between the Poles—Where 2.0
Where 2.0 will be taking place May 12-14 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. This is a major geospatial event of the year. There are sessions by many of the important folks in the geospatial
industry
including many open source geospatial sessions. I would encourage you to try to make it.
Autodesk and Google are diamond sponsors this year. Several of us from Autodesk will be presenting at the event.
Monday, 05/12/2008
1:30pm - 5:00pm Creating Web 2.0 Applications on an Open Source Geospatial Platform
Location: Salon F
Jeremiah Mcknelly, Chris Claydon, Geoff Zeiss
The tutorial is aimed at developers and others who are interested in the business and technical aspects of developing software on a Web 2.0 open source geospatial platform. No background in web development is required. The workshop will include both business and hands-on technical aspects of developing web mapping applications.
Tuesday, 05/13/2008
Convergence of Architectural and Engineering Design and Location Technology: Implications for eGovernment
11:40am Location: Salon A-F
Geoff Zeiss
The convergence of architectural and engineering design, location, and 3D simulation technologies is being driven by productivity and efficiency in the construction industry. But convergence will also enable governments to create a simulated urban environment that will have important implications for citizen involvement, urban planning, emergency planning, and first response.
Wednesday, 05/14/2008
Digital Cities
2:30pm Location: Salon A-F
Doug Eberhard
Where the world will conceptualize and realize more sustainable cities through the convergence of digital modeling, simulation, visualization, web services and human collaboration. In our local cities and global economies today, we continue to see increased demand and democratization for richer visual information and communication moving from analog to digital, 2D to 3D, to 4D and beyond. For people and organizations involved in the planning, design, construction and operations lifecycle of our cities, there is an even greater demand for interoperable “digital city” models with the right levels of detail and accuracy needed to make collective, trusted and timely decisions about existing and proposed conditions.
Very Spatial—GISCafe ads video coverage at conferences
Vector One—NSDI Implementation - Australia
Urban Mapping—Urban Mapping Neighborhood Boundary Database Coverage Reaches 40,000
Umibot’s been overclocking the past few weeks, and for good reason. Today Urban Mapping passed a new milestone and is thrilled to announce boundary data for more than 40,000 neighborhoods in the US. In addition, UMI continues to increase coverage across Canada and European countries, bringing our global coverage to more than 50,000 neighborhoods across 2,000+ cities and 15+ countries. Users of our enterprise and web services delivery can tap into this collective pool of rich local knowledge. A new shiny map of the Continental US displaying coverage:
Some more great things in store over the next several weeks (including an announcement at Where2.0 next week), so ensure you are RSS-compliant!
Vector One—Myanmar: Forecasting Worked, Mitigation - Response Failed Again
MapQuest Devblog—Map It! - Building a MapQuest Mac OS X Dashboard Widget - Part 7 - Address Book Integration
There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. - Carson McCullers
In Part 1 I showed you how to get started with the MapQuest Advantage API by getting a developer key. In Part 2 I put that key to use by providing access to a basic map in the Map It! widget. Part 3 showed you how to incorporate basic geocoding. In Part 4 I discussed more advanced geocoding topics - including handling multiple matches and specifying geocode search options. Part 5 discussed adding widget options including the default zoom level, specifying point of interest icons, and the default map type. Part 6 discussed how to add direction capabilities to the widget. In this final installment I'll talk about how easy it is to integrate address searching with the Mac OS X Address Book application.
Address Book Searching
The Mac OS X Address Book application is bundled with the OS X operating system, providing a way for users to organize their contacts and associated information including their addresses. Also included with Mac OS X is an Address Book widget, which provides access to the Address Book database from a widget. I've explored the Address Book widget code, and extracted the AddressBookPlugIn. Plug-ins are native code that can be used to access operating system levels features from a widget's JavaScript interface.
Listing 1 demonstrates how I've modified the address parsing method. If an address is entered that does not match one of the pre-defined formats I will assume that it's a name to retrieve from the Address Book. The address book is searched for the name with the best match. Then the street, city, state, and zip code are retrieved from the best match. The retrieved address is then parsed as discussed in Part 3!
Listing 1 - Retrieving From the Address Book
function onAddressSearch(event)
{
// user hit a return?
if(event.keyCode == 13) {
if(!$(address).value.blank()) {
var street = "";
var city = "";
var state = "";
var zip = "";
var country = "";
$(lblErrorMsg).innerText = "";
$(multMatches).style.visibility = "hidden";
$(lblMultMatch).style.visibility = "hidden";
var splitAddr = $(address).value.split(',');
// if we only get 2 elements assume address, zip
if(splitAddr.length == 2) {
street = splitAddr[0];
zip = splitAddr[1];
// for three elements assume address, city, state
} else if(splitAddr.length == 3) {
street = splitAddr[0];
city = splitAddr[1];
state = splitAddr[2];
// for 4 elements assume address, city, state, zip
} else if(splitAddr.length == 4) {
street = splitAddr[0];
city = splitAddr[1];
state = splitAddr[2];
zip = splitAddr[3];
// for 5 elements assume address, city, state, zip, country
} else if(splitAddr.length == 5) {
street = splitAddr[0];
city = splitAddr[1];
state = splitAddr[2];
zip = splitAddr[3];
country = splitAddr[4];
} else {
// otherwise assume it's a name to look up in the Address Book
AddressBookPlugin.searchForStringWithBestMatch($(address).value);
// retrieve the values from the address book
street = AddressBookPlugin.displayedValueAtIndex(7);
city = AddressBookPlugin.displayedValueAtIndex(8)
state = AddressBookPlugin.displayedValueAtIndex(9);
zip = AddressBookPlugin.displayedValueAtIndex(10);
}
var result = widget.system('java -classpath .:mq.jar GetLocations
-street "' + street + '" -city "' + city + '" -state "' + state +
'" -zip "' + zip + '" -country "' +country + '"',null).outputString;
// any errors?
if(result == "ERROR") {
$(lblErrorMsg).innerText = "Error! Unknown Address Format!";
// address not found?
} else if (result == "NOT FOUND") {
$(lblErrorMsg).innerText = "Address Was Not Found!";
} else {
// split on return - a line is printed for each individual result
var eachresult = result.split('\n');
// just one result returned? - then just plot the point -
// there are two extra returns so 3 really means 1 item
if(eachresult.length == 3) {
// get the coordinates from the returned string
var coords = eachresult[0].split('|');
// create a new point based on the coordinates
newCenter = new MQLatLng(parseFloat(coords[0]),parseFloat(coords[1]));
//create a new icon object
myIcon = new MQMapIcon();
// set the icon image: icon file location, width, height, recalc infowindow offset,
// is it a PNG image?
if(defIcon == "pin") {
myIcon.setImage("images/pinpoint_red.gif",32,32,true,false);
} else if(defIcon == "star") {
myIcon.setImage("images/starsmall_red",18,18,true,false);
} else if(defIcon == "x") {
myIcon.setImage("images/xspot.gif",17,17,true,false);
}
// create a point
myPoint = new MQPoi(newCenter);
// set the custom icon
myPoint.setIcon(myIcon);
// recenter the map on the point,
// the second parameter specifies the zoom level
myMap.setCenter(newCenter,defZoom);
// add the point as a Point of Interest
myMap.addPoi(myPoint);
} else {
// clear out existing items
$(multMatches).options.length = 0;
for(var i=0; i < eachresult.length; i++) {
// parse each returned location
var location = eachresult[i].split('|');
// 7 items on the result line?
if(location.length == 7) {
var locationtext = location[2] + "," + location[3] + "," + location[4] + "," + location[5] + "," + location[6];
var objNewOption = document.createElement("OPTION");
$(multMatches).options.add(objNewOption);
// add the location text
objNewOption.text = locationtext;
// add the coordinates as a | separate string to the value...
objNewOption.value = location[0] + '|' + location[1];
}
}
// show the label and combo box...
$(multMatches).style.visibility = "visible";
$(lblMultMatch).style.visibility = "visible";
}
}
}
}
}
Conclusion
For your reference, here are some references for the MapQuest Platform:
- MapQuest Developer Network
- MapQuest JavaScript API Developer Guide
- MapQuest JavaScript API Reference
- MapQuest JavaScript TileMap Reference
- MapQuest Java API Developer Guide
- MapQuest Java Reference
- MapQuest Technical Resource Center
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs
Very Spatial—Time to update the links
Spatial Sustain—Climate Sensor Returned to Satellite
Dan Shoutis—On sharing geospatial data
Whenever geospatial data sharing comes up there's a pretty strong tendency to gloss over the fact that "sharing data" is actually a two-parter:
- There is the sort of sharing you do with co-workers or associates: getting your data with them in, to borrow a phrase from the GPL, the "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
- Then there is publishing GIS data (internally or externally) once it's "finalized."
Status quo for simple sharing: Zip your data up, making sure not to leave off any of the many files it is spread across, put a password on the zip file (the attachment will be stripped if it contains a personal geodatabase mdb visible to the spam filter), change the extension to something not '.zip', attach and pray. Gosh forbid you are sending anything larger than a few megabytes, or working with whole map documents at once. (Did you remember to include every related layer in that zip file with relative paths in the mxd?)
As for map data publishing, there is an embarrassment of options, none of them really mature (or rather, dominant) yet. Most require some programming in order to set up a publisher side, and on the consumer side you'll need to jump through some awkward conversion hoops as soon as you want to do something more involved than look at a pretty picture in IE or Google Earth. If you are like me, and you prefer or need to get your hands dirty, you breath a deep sigh of relief when there are plain old shapefiles or GeoTiffs available for download over HTTP.
Then there's discovering published data in the first place.... with a few exceptions, if you don't know in advance that it exists and have a good idea of where to look for it, it might as well not exist.
I like the idea of a SQLite data format, at least as a "preferred working format" for vector data. As a full relational database in a file, it supports the rich data model that was shoehorned into GML, but in a format designed especially for working with relational data and a full set of mature tools and libraries. And it doesn't have the drawbacks of being flaky and proprietary the way personal geodatabases are. What would be sweeten the pot for its use as a working data format, besides vendor support in the tools everyone uses: basic versioning or a 'track changes' equivalent. Way, way better would be supporting distributed branches and merging the way us programmers get to treat source code!
(Consider if the folks working on the WDPA had the GIS equivalent of git or darcs to do their jobs: branches for published versions where error corrections can still be made; the ability to accept or reject edits via email from anyone; local experts with their own working copies; larger datasets that contain other information on protected areas from other sources, but which can still automatically merge in the latest WDPA changes...)
That is the direction I think things will eventually move, but it might take a very long time. Don't hold your breath.
Footnote: I've put a reasonable amount of thought into these topics; without saying too much, they are extremely relevant to the product I am building. (ETA: inside of a couple of months!) (It's not decentralized version control for GIS, either: alack and alas.)
The Map Room—Painting on Maps
Spatial Galaxy—Desktop GIS - the book - Now in Beta
The book is now available in beta. Excerpts from two of the chapters are available online.
What’s a beta book? Well in this case it’s a lot like software—feature complete and ready for you to give it a spin.
The announcement from the Pragmatic Bookshelf:
The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Desktop GIS
“From Google Maps to iPhone apps, geographic data and visualization is quickly becoming a standard part of life. Desktop GIS shows you how to assemble and use an Open Source GIS toolkit. You’ll find strategies for choosing a platform, selecting the right tools, integration, managing change, and getting support. You’ll get a good introduction to using the many tools available so you can visualize, digitize, and analyze your own mapping data.”
The Map Room—Cyclone Nargis
Ed Parsons—Google Earth and GI Science
I have just returned from the beautiful town of Girona in Spain, where I was speaking at the AGILE 2008 Conference, a meeting of the key Geographic Information research laboratories in Europe, which was expertly organised by SIGTE the GIS Lab at the University of Girona.
As is increasingly the case at conferences I attend, researchers are using both Google Maps and Google Earth as mechanisms to communicate their results in an appealing way. I hope to be able to highlight some interesting examples over the next few days, but there seems to be a clear pattern emerging where spatial analysis may be carried out using programs developed by researchers or by using powerful analytic tool sets like ArcGIS or ArcGIS Server, but presented using Google Earth.
The products of the research are often rendered via KML for display, but what is perhaps still missing in some cases is for the results to be really published, i.e. for the KML files to be posted on a web server somewhere along with details of the research for others to discover.
Interestingly there was very little discussion of the neo/paleo-geography debate, which is great, I hope we have moved onto to a position where the users of “professional” high end tools such as those produced by ESRI see a natural final publishing step of creating KML output of their work, certainly with the tools now available in the next version of ArcGIS and the OGC adoption of KML this should be simple one.
Of course as you would expect there are limitations with the current generation of virtual globes, Google Earth included, for some aspects of GI Science. Notably in more complex handling of temporal and sub surface features, and in cartographic output more functionality is needed.
Some of these limitations reflect the largely mass-market focus of Google Earth, but such feedback is always useful to hear, todays research requirement could well be tomorrows mass-market standard feature, and it is wise never to underestimate how sophisticated users may become.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
