Planet Geospatial

AnyGeo: The Rise of Computer Programming Jobs

Sat, 25 May 2013 14:43:07 +0000

WEll tis is encouraging for you developer geeks and wannabe geeks! ‘You Don’t Have to be a Math Whiz to Learn,’ Says Trainer/Programmer… There are plenty or good jobs to be found on sites like Monster and Craigslist, says Mark … Continue reading →

LiDAR News: 3D Printers for Peace

Sat, 25 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

The contest is a challenge to design things that advance the cause of peace. Continue reading →

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LiDAR News: The Difference Between Radar and LiDAR

Sat, 25 May 2013 12:14:07 +0000

The author is explaining the difference between Radar and LiDAR from the point of view of speed enforcement, but it's the same physics Continue reading →

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Prioleau Advisors: Would someone just buy these guys?

Fri, 24 May 2013 23:54:56 +0000

In January it was Apple (rumors that TechCrunch bunked one day and debunked the next).

A week ago it was Facebook

Today it’s Google.

Would one of you guys just buy Waze and get it over with? Here I am on Bloomberg West talking about the acquisition rumors that continue to float around about someone buying Waze at the currently hot acquisition price (pinkie to mouth here)… ONE BILLION DOLLARS!!!!!

I really have no idea if this is happening or if its all a big hype-fest. The personal messages I get from industry folk run heavily in favor of the hype scenario, but that could be jealously. But the thing I think is an interesting question is “If they were going to be bought, what would they be bought for?”. I think the answer is different for Apple and for Facebook and for Google. And I personally don’t think that the much touted 47M users is really the answer.

I like the idea I try to lay out here for Google: What if Google adds it to their navigation as a crowd sourced traffic app? They could use Google Plus as the social network with “traffic” as a Circle where you don’t care who it is, only if they’re driving on your road. It gets more people to sign in to Google Plus (which Google REALLY seems to want) and exploded the number of active users. I kinda like the idea.

Worth $1B? I’m not sure. But I think it does answer the question of why Google, with all the map stuff they have, would want to buy Waze.

What do you think?

Between the Poles: I-5 bridge classified as Functionally Obsolete in the National Bridge Inventory

Fri, 24 May 2013 21:59:38 +0000

Transportation for America has put the National Bridge Inventory of 604,474 bridges on line with Google Maps so you can zoom to any area in the U.S. and see which bridges are structurally deficient and the daily traffic on them. In this example I've zoomed to the I-5 bridge near Mt Vernon that collapsed this morning.

It is interesting that Google Maps no longer shows the bridge. The bridge is classified as Functionally Obsolete. It was built in 1955 and handles 70,526 cars a day.

Status

Deck 6 (Equal to present minimum criteria)
Superstructure 5 (Somewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place as is)
Substructure 6 (Equal to present minimum criteria)

It is supposed to be inspected every two years. It was last inspected nearly 3 years ago.

"Functionally obsolete" means that the design of a bridge is not suitable for its current use, such as lack of safety shoulders or the inability to handle current traffic volume, speed, size, or weight.

ROK Technologies Blog: Parcel Fabric Training - Summer Dates Announced for July

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:24:00 +0000

ROK is pleased to announce another Parcel Fabric Training in Charleston, SC. To make sure you are getting the most out of parcels on ArcGIS, we will be hosting a training class in conjunction with Panda Consulting in Charleston, SC July 16-18. Frank Conkling, of Panda Consulting, will be instructing the Parcel Fabric class. This comprehensive three day training covers all aspects of the Parcel Fabric, including an intensive examination of the Parcel Fabric structure, the inter-dependencies of the sub-layers, how the Parcel Fabric really works, what you need to do to make the transition and how to integrate the Parcel Fabric into your daily workflow. For a more detailed description, you can download The Parcel Fabric Training pdf here.

For more information, contact us or call 888-898-3404 x 2.

Between the Poles: I-5 bridge collapse: Is private capital the solution for the sad state of American infrastructure ?

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:54:06 +0000

In 2009 Blaine Leonard, of the Utah Department of Transportation and the then President-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), gave the opening keynote at GITA 2009. His talk focussed on the 2009 ASCE Scorecard on American infrastructure and what the stimulus means for addressing some of the infrastructure challenges that the ASCE has successfully attracted public attention to.

Mr. Leonard presented a breakdown of the part of the ARRA spend that the ASCE believes is going to infrastructure, something over $70 billion, and then discussed the short fall for several of the items.

The key takeway I left with is that the stimulus is making a significant dent, but by itself it is insufficient to resolve the problem. Of the $2.2 trillion the ASCE estimates is required to bring American infrastructure up to an acceptable level, meaning B- or C+, the money currently allocated by all levels of government is about 45% of what is necessary.

In 2010 a bipartisan report was released that calls for “a fundamental overhaul of America’s transportation policies and programs. The report estimates a federal shortfall of up to $194 billion a year in infrastructure spending on roads, rail, and air transportation through 2035. Given the poor state of current US transportation infrastructure, as described in the ASCE's Infrastructure Report Card, it is estimated that an investment of $262 billion per year will be required to actually improve the US transportation network. The report cites lack of a vision and underinvestment as compromising US productivity and its ability to compete internationally. The report says that it is time to "rethink existing systems for the 21st century and create an agenda for enacting change."

Deteriorating infrastructure and private capital

Last year President Obama in his State of the Union speech specifically called out infrastructure as requiring significant investment. He said that "our infrastructure used to be the best", and mentioned countries such as Russia, China, South Korea, and several European countries that are ahead of the US in many sectors of infrastructure. He also referred to the American Society of Civil Engineers' Intrastructure Scorecard that assigned a grade of "D" to American infrastructure.

He said that the Administration is proposiing to redouble the rebuilding efforts that were initiated over the past two years and identified attracting private funding as important for this effort.

UK National Infrastructure Plan based on private capital

Last year at the Global Infrastructure Leadership Forum, Geoffrey Spence, who heads up Infrastructure UK, the Treasury body that oversees the UK’s infrastructure plan, gave an overview of the National Infrastructure Plan of the UK. The fact that Geofffrey Spence was a personal economic adviser to Chancellor Alistair Darling during the last banking crisis, gives some indication of how seiously the UK Government is treating infrastructure.

In 2011 the Government released its National Infrastructure Plan, which outlines a plan to invest about £250 billion in the next five yrs and £ 400 billion in the 10 yrs on infrastructure including high speed rail, energy (especially nuclear and wind), aviation, water and wastewater, roads and highways, and high speed broadband. This is a considerably higher spend than in the past and signals a change in focus from social infrastructure such as hospitals and government facilities to economic infrastructure.

The most revolutionary aspect of this plan is the intention that 70% of the funding will come from the private sector.

The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) has said that it supports the vision as expressed in the Plan and that it believes that it would enable the UK to compete in the global economy. It specifically recommended that HM Government assign a senior minister with responsibility for monitoring performance against Plan, create a simple set of performance measures for infrastructure that are independently assessed, and develop a two year pipeline of infrastructure projects to help the private sector to improve efficiency. The ICE also suggested ways to asist the Government to attract private investment.

Geoffrey Spense said that the Government wants full transparency for the infrastructure effort, so that business will know where they should focus its efforts over the next ten years. It intends to maintain an open pipeline of projects for the next several years so that, for example, companies specializing in tunneling will be able to see for all tunneling projects in one place, whether they are for rail, sewers, or nuclear power plants. He said that there is a multi-ministry subcommittee that meets regularly to identify where blockages are occurring between ministries and to work colaboratively to streamline infrastructure projects where multiple ministries are involved.

The challenge of construction productivity

McKinsey says that construction productivity has stagnated or declined in many countries and gave historical construction productivity data for the European Union, Korea, Japan, and the U.S.

McKinsey suggested that governments and infrastructure investors could reduce risks and increase returns by focussing on three areas,

Improving priductivity of existing and new assets

For example, by tuning the regulatory and market structure to improve efficiency and expand capacity.

Making the economic model more attractive to investors

By being smarter about matching capacity expansions to demand and finding additional sources of revenue.

Reducing cost and risk by improving project delivery

By allowing more competition, pushing more risk on to contractors, and encouraging engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies to increase their build capabilities.

Several speakers reiterated that one of the major problem in the infrastructure sector is the lack of data for comparing efficiency of construction and operation across projects.

McKinsey suggested that more private sector involvement in infrastructure projects could result in an estimated 30% improvement in construction productivity over 5-10 years, resulting from the combination of 5-15% reduction in the cost of design and planning, 5-10% in engineeering, 5-10% in materials purchase and sub-contracting, 3-5% in construction, and 3-5% from organizational enablers. They estimate that this would translate into a 20% reduction in overall infrastructure spend.

Faunalia: Faunalia is hiring: QGIS development

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:52:34 +0000

GeoDestinations: Exciting Times in the GIS-T Space

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:59:00 +0000

By: Jonathan Pollack, Senior Vice President

I recently returned from GIS-T in Boise, Idaho. In addition to a great conference, I discovered that Boise is a wonderful city. The conference was very well attended with representation from more than 40 states. I find this conference refreshing, as nearly all attendees are focused on learning from each other, sharing their ideas and, solving the mutual challenges they face in the transportation arena. The GIS-T staff did a great job this year and having the ASIS conference run concurrently was an added bonus; these are exciting times in the GIS-T space.

Tags: GIS-T,Roads and Highways

Category: Transportation

Category: Enterprise GIS

Category: Government

Directions Magazine: The National Broadband Map: Case Study on Open Innovation for National Policy

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:15:39 +0000

The White House issued an Open Data during the first week of May. Last year the FCC detailed how valuable its open data policy had been to the country in a case study of broadband mapping put together by the Woodrow WIlson Center. The executive summary and a video provide an introduction to what the agency learned.

All Points Blog: Update: Israeli Media Outlet: Facebook Finalizing Plans to Acquire Waze

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:33:36 +0000

Bloomberg reports Google and others might be interested, too. --- original post 5/9/13 -- Facebook is in the final stages of a deal to buy Waze per Israeli publication Calcalist (Hebrew only). The Next Web cites Assaf Gilad, describing Facebook is in "advanced talks" to buy Waze... Continue reading

GeoSprocket Community Jive: We Are Still Talking About These Things: Dispatches from the Dawn of Crowdsourcing

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Morris) — Fri, 24 May 2013 02:44:27 +0000

I was just having a conversation with some colleagues about the nuts and bolts of participatory mapping with some local farmers. We were all:

"Man, it totally depends on if you have internet at the site. If you do, just pull up Google Maps or CartoDB and have them digitize right into the iPad. If not it's a huge hassle; you'd have to annotate a PDF and georeference it later."

"Yeah, but either way the stylus is key. Non-technicians always want to use a pen and paper."

This talk of getting a skeumorphic data-entry device in the hands of the common folk reminded me of something from the past. This, specifically:

Even taking as a fact of life that community GIS will always require some mediation by the more technically skilled, Al-Kodmany's Chicago neighbourhood projects are not a little bit extreme. In fact, by the time he describes the community members being given 'coloring the map' participation exercises as a way to actually participate, there is a rather patronizing air about the project. 'Participants were broken into small groups and were given a map and felt-tipped markers,' he writes. Felt so as not to inadvertently poke out their own eyeballs, no doubt.

This from Christopher Miller, writing in 2006 about how participatory GIS (nee "GIS/2") was being hamstrung by academic condescension, cultural barriers and the failure of imagination that is traditional GIS ("GIS/1"). Man, 2006 sounds like a long time ago from here, but we're still spinning our wheels in some ways on this stuff.

Based on Andy Woodruff's Boston-oriented project, last year I built an app to get locals defining the boundaries of neighborhoods in the city of Burlington. When I showed up to the first hearings on city redistricting to present the results, their credibility was questioned by some who hadn't heard of the project, even though it had been announced in every local news outlet as well as digital channels. These were people who showed up to meetings, because that was how you participated. Not learning my lesson, I adapted Azavea's Districtbuilder app for the redistricting process and made it public, hoping "participatory technology" would open a traditionally-closed political world. It turns out that the technology wasn't really the problem.

In his snark-laden, brilliant 2006 paper, Miller goes on to describe this neat little app called Scipionus, built in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the back of a newly-opened Google Maps API. Here's the thing: it let anyone with a web connection report their location and status on a Google Map! Fast-forward three years and Ushahidi comes along. Fast-forward another three years and Google Maps gets collaborative, Crowdmap is everywhere and Twitter becomes a news source. Fast-forward to last month and the most reliable information on a civil war is from a participatory map, and Ushahidi can take in reports from every technology short of smoke signals.

We still don't have good retorts to Miller's challenges. We still haven't made GIS accessible to the public, and I'm not really sure that's a valid goal. More importantly, we seem to be driving deeper into the gulch between Internet-Worshippers and Tech-Hostile Curmudgeons that Miller warned us about. Whether we're community-building, solving disputes or reporting the news, we've got to do a better job building bridges between the public and our maps.

In many cases, "Paticipation" is still a felt-tipped marker jabbed into the eyeball.

LiDAR News: Spatial Media Launches Geospatial Jobs Website

Fri, 24 May 2013 02:17:34 +0000

So if you are looking for a new opportunity or have a position open be sure to visit the GeojobsBIZ site to take advantage of this hot new geospatial jobs website. Continue reading →

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VerySpatial: Geography Bee on NatGeo tonight

Thu, 23 May 2013 22:06:20 +0000

A quick, and last minute, reminder that the 2013 National Geographic Bee finals will be televised tonight. Head over to NatGeo at 7:00PM EDT to watch live or catch one of the replays later.

This year’s 10 finalists are:

Tuvya Bergson-Michelson, California
Pranit Nanda, Colorado
Ricky Uppaluri, Georgia
Conrad Oberhaus, Illinois
Sathwik Karnik, Massachusetts
Neha Middela, Michigan
Neelam Sandhu, New Hampshire
Harish Palani, Oregon
Akhil Rekulapelli, Virginia
Asha Jain, Wisconsin

As we have said before, any of the state and territorial finalists generally know way more than we do and should know that they are amazing for having made it to DC.

Between the Poles: Modeling downtown The Hague to reduce energy consumption

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:00:22 +0000

I've blogged previously about a project by the Los Angeles Community College District, the largest community college district in the U.S., create 3D BIM models of all the buildings on the LACCD campuses. One of the most important motivations for creating these models was that BIM models would faciliate energy performance analyses of LACCD buildings.

Reducing energy usage in The Hague

At the Geospatial World Forum 2013 (GWF 2013) conference in Rotterdam Martinus Vranken and Jene van der Heide of the Dutch Kadasre described a project to model a square kilometer of downtown The Hague with the objective of reducing and stabilizing energy usage and costs for the entire area.

The Dutch Ministry of the Interior has initiated a joint project with the Municipal government of The Hague to reduce and stabiize energy usage and costs in downtown The Hague, including the use of renewable energy. The study area is roughly about a square kilometer of The Hague where the buildings are large and mostly owned by the National and Municipal governments. The Dutch Kadaster has been contracted to provide an information system to assist the Ministry of Interior in developing a business case.

The Kadaster has combined its own data with that from other government agencies

Kadaster

Topography
Ownership and building information
Energy labels
Underground grids electricity, gas and heat
Monuments

Ministry of the Interior and City of The Hague

Energy consumption
Employees
Surfaces suitable for solar panels
3D model

Province of South Holland

Heat pump facilities
Solar probability map
Wind probability map

Ministry of Economic Affairs

Geothermal facilities
Permits for geothermal concessions

The Kadaster has assembled land registry information like ownership, monument status; building information such as year of completion, surface area, energy labels, energy indices; information on underground networks like heat networks, gas and electricity grids; together with government information on heat pump facilities, energy consumption of buildings, and available building facade area suited for solar panels. Combining this information provides a tool that the Ministry is using to develop the busness case for a new form of energy supply that is reliable, clean, and affordable.

The two main challenges have been to translate this information to fit the perspective of the Ministry of the Interior and structuring the information so that it can be reused for similar projects in the future.

The next steps on the project are data collection and processing, defining business case, and tendering and then transition to the new energy supply.

The lessons learned so fare are interesting. First of all, visualization using a geospatial information platform has been vital in developing the business case. This approach has provided important Insight into the energy and heat exchange possibilities between buildings and enabled exploration of the possibilities of solar, wind and geothermal energy. The geospatial approach also provides a platform which the private sector can use as a foundation in preparing bids for the project.

All Points Blog: Alex Trebek Speaks to Lack of Funding for U.S. Geography Education in No Child Left Behind

Thu, 23 May 2013 19:15:52 +0000

Geography has $0 of funding but is one of the nine subjects in "No Child Left Behind." All the other subjects are funded - to some degree. You might know that if you keep up with geography education, but I'm sure most U.S. citizens do not. That point is made not once, but twice in the... Continue reading

All Points Blog: GNIP to Offer Full Geotagged Firehose of Foursquare Data via API

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:42:27 +0000

GNIP already proivdes what it calls the social media API. Today's announcement details a new partnership with Foursquare and the availability of anonymous geotagged checkins via an API. So, you can know how many people checked in at the local bar, just not exactly who. GNIP says this... Continue reading

VerySpatial: Upcoming Hack for Change: National Day of Civic Hacking

Thu, 23 May 2013 17:05:28 +0000

Intel Labs is sponsoring a national civic hacking event June 1 -2, 2013 in order to solve community challenges using publicly-released data. They are calling it the National Day of Civic Hacking, probably because national day of collaborative software coding sounds like work. The event is supported by 20 government agencies including NASA, U.S. Census Bureau, FEMA, NSF and other offices. The event challenges are place specific and are focused on addressing the local needs of each community. According to the Hackforchange about page people, sponsors,organizations, and city, state, federal, government looking to get involved can attend, contribute data, or promote the event in their community.

The concept was created by the same researchers who started wethedata.org to address grand societal data challenges using open source data. These four topics have often been discussed on VerySpatial in regards to geospatial technologies and neogeography including digital access, digital literacy, digital trust, and openness. However, despite the fact that generally over 75% of local data is geospatial and their specific data is very location heavy, the Civic Hackers identified are engineers, technologists, civil servants, designers, artists…. but no geographers, neogeographers, geospatial analysts, or GIS is mentioned. Maybe everyone from the GIS community should get involved so that next year we all get a shout out.

Between the Poles: Executive order makes open and machine readable data the default for the US Federal Government

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:14:58 +0000

The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California, and by the City of Vancouver and other cities. But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. Tim Berners-Lee, in Government Data Design Issues, is a strong advocate of making raw data accessible over the web including supporting standard Web methods, most critically, searching.

An Executive Order has been released by the White House which makes open and machine readable (raw) data the default for government information.

"To promote continued job growth, Government efficiency, and the social good that can be gained from opening Government data to the public, the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable. Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable. In making this the new default state, executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall ensure that they safeguard individual privacy, confidentiality, and national security."

AnyGeo: Imagery of Moore, Oklahoma before and after May 20 tornado

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:04:25 +0000

The Pléiades satellites, operated and built by Astrium have captured images of Moore, Oklahoma, which clearly shows the devastation caused by the massive tornado that swept through the region on May 20, 2013. By comparing today’s image with an image … Continue reading →

Between the Poles: Open modeling standard released for public comment by OGC and OpenMI

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:03:56 +0000

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the OpenMI Association (OpenMI) have released the proposed Open Modelling Interface Version 2 (OpenMI) standard for public comment. This standard defines a standard apporach for independently developed computer models of environmental processes to exchange data as they run.

The original driver for the standard was the European Water Framework Directive and its requirement for an integrated approach to water management. The European Commission co-funded the research and development of a generic model interface, which is the OpenMI.

The immediate goal is to enable the integrated modelling needed to understand Earth system processes.

Environmental modelling is not the only application of integrated modelling. For example, a possible shorter term application will simply be in enabling developers to convert their existing large, and often unmanageable, applications into sets of linkable components. This could change the modelling market from one for complete systems into one for components and services.

The documents being released for comment can be viewed and downloaded. Comments are due by June 1 2013.

LiDAR News: 3D Printing Used to Overcome Birth Defect

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:01:23 +0000

The next day, with special permission from the Food and Drug Administration, they implanted one of these tubes in Kaiba, the first time this has been done. Continue reading →

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All Points Blog: Update: Off Topic: That “Sitting is Killing You” Infographic is SEO Bait

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:46:20 +0000

The original post below was about how infographics are essentially link bait. A variety of organizations produce infographics, then ask for websites and blogs to republish them (with a link to their site). That was the deal back in 2011 when I wrote the post. This week we got a request... Continue reading

All Points Blog: Collborate.org: Crowdsourcing Geodata on World Wind

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:25:02 +0000

Collaborate.org wants to bring geospatial data to the masses, beyond where Google Earth has gone. The company, which launched Wednesday at the Future in Review conference here, is built around a geospatial visualizer, with more than 2 million data layers that can be overlaid on maps,... Continue reading

Between the Poles: Oracle Spatial and Graph to support NURBS

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:14:11 +0000

At the Oracle Spatial and Graph User Meeting, the folks from Oracle outlined some of the things to expect in the next version of Oracle 12c. I was very impressed. All of the below is my interpretation of what will be in Oracle 12c.

Parametric curve support

The really big news for the architecture, engineering and construction community (AEC) who use CAD and BIM applications is that Oracle 12c is expected to support NURBS (non-uniform rational basis spline) a type of parametric curve widely used in the design space. According the Siva Ravada the support will be very general and will be able to handle different ways of representing NURBS. Up to now the only parametric curve supported by Oracle was circular arcs.

To me it looks like Oracle is taking a major step toward being able to store natively and manipulate (in some cases by stroking) the parametrized curves used by CAD and BIM applications. There is a lot of CAD and BIM data out there and being able to store it and manipulate it in Oracle Spatial and Graph is going to be a game changer.

Orthorectification

Oracle is providing support for orthorectification embedded directly in the database. This will have important implications for the industry. Up to now, you had to pull the image out of where ever it was stored, transfer it over the network to someone's application often from an image processing company to orthorectify it, and then transfer it back to store the image or stream it to the end user. With 12c you will be able to orthorectify images in the database. This is in line with Oracle's objective of bringing processing to the data, rather than the data to processing.

Raster algebra

Oracle 12c will also have support for raster algebra, again in the database. For example, you will be able to average in the database12 months of national temperature data stored in monthly raster files.

GDAL and PDAL support

Oracle supports the open source GDAL raster libraries, the industry standard developed by Frank Warmerdam (now with Google) and used by just about everyone for accessing raster images including ESRI. PDAL is a similar type of open source library for point clouds developed by Howard Butler and Michael Gerlek.

Oracle supports three types of 3D data. 3D vectors, point clouds and terrain (surfaces). Oracle 12c will provide full support for 3D geodetic data, lon lat and elevation in meters or feet.

Performance

Oracle has developed a new engine for handling massive point clouds. Dan Geringer showed impressive results for a 2.8 billion point point cloud (286 gigabyte file).

Processing vector geospatial data is reported to be 50 to 100 times faster in 12c than in 11g.

Raster operations have been parallelized which can dramatically reduce the time it takes for these operations.

Engineered Database

Since acquiring Sun, Oracle has become a hardware and software company and is offering integrated hardware and software solutions that offer extremely good performance characteristics. For example, processing LiDAR data benefits from hardware acceleration on engineered machines such as Exadata boxes.

Bundled data

Oracle is planning to bundle vector data from Nokia (Navteq), TomTom and others.

Oracle Spatial and Graph

The name of the product is changing to Oracle Spatial and Graph partly because it has had graph capabilities (network and RDF semantic) already for several years. But probably more importantly because the demand for graph capabilities is accelerating, especially RDF semantic graphs for linked data, text mining, and for social media analytics, according to Xavier Lopez. Even Oracle's NOSQL database (aka BerkeleyDB) is apparently getting graph capabilities.

The Map Guy(de): An elegant MgMap hack

noreply@blogger.com (Jackie Ng) — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:51:28 +0000

Ever wanted to set any of the following properties of a MgMap in your application code, but bemoan the fact that all these properties are read-only in the MgMap class?

DPI
Display Width
Display Height
View Center
View Scale

Here's a neat little hack you can do

If you remember, I previously showed how you can actually replicate mapagent functionality through the MgHttpRequest and MgHttpResponse classes. Armed with this knowledge, the key to changing any of the above properties is to set up the appropriate operation and parameters for an API that's only available in the mapagent: GETDYNAMICMAPOVERLAYIMAGE

GETDYNAMICMAPOVERLAYIMAGE differs from what's in the official API (MgRenderingService::RenderDynamicOverlay()) in that the mapagent version supports these additional parameters:

SETVIEWCENTERX
SETVIEWCENTERY
SETVIEWSCALE
SETDISPLAYDPI
SETDISPLAYWIDTH
SETDISPLAYHEIGHT
SHOWLAYERS
HIDELAYERS
SHOWGROUPS
HIDEGROUPS

These parameters actually modify the state of the MgMap that is to be rendered. Through the use of MgHttpRequest and MgHttpResponse we can indirectly tap into this mapagent API to achieve the same result.

Now the operation itself returns a rendered image obviously, so if we want this to be snappy (as we just want to modify MgMap state and don't really care about the rendered result), you'd want to request something that requires very minimal processing overhead to produce the rendered image. So under these conditions, the ideal parameters to supply to GETDYNAMICMAPOVERLAYIMAGE are:

BEHAVIOR = 1 (Selected features only)
FORMAT=PNG8/JPG (Smallest image format in case we actually do have a rendered selection)

I've attached a PHP code sample that demonstrates this technique.

geoMusings: Open-Source GIS Bootcamp at Salisbury University

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:33:00 +0000

Thanks to LinkedIn, I saw that Dr. Art Lembo of Salisbury (Maryland) University is leading an “Open Source/Enterprise GIS Summer Bootcamp” at the university from June 3 - 7, 2013. All of the salient details, including contact information, can be found here (PDF).

Having seen Dr. Lembo and his team in action for an afternoon at TUGIS, I think this will be a good way for those who have been wanting to take the leap with open-source GIS tools to get some hands-on experience with core tools like QGIS and PostGIS. It’s also a great time of year to be on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The LinkedIn discussion says there are still spaces available but the date is coming up soon so you’ll want to move quickly if you’re interested.

Directions Magazine: Privacy and Personal Geographic Data

Thu, 23 May 2013 06:47:20 +0000

At the Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society conference in Boston, Kirk Goldsberry, who is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, gave a fascinatng presentation with the help of two of his students on the topic of personal geographic data and privacy. Geoff Zeiss provides a recap.

AnyGeo: The GCS Geospatial Big Data Webinar Series

Thu, 23 May 2013 02:25:40 +0000

GCS has announced a new webinar series focused on developing solutions to the challenges of Geospatial Big Data by leveraging the fusion of location analytics, mobile platforms and cloud technologies. The first webinar (June 12, 2013) will feature Montana Site … Continue reading →

LiDAR News: The Kinect 2 – WOW

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:05:11 +0000

Add to that the applications for skeleton mapping and muscle tracking and it is hard to imagine where this will end up in 5 years from now. Continue reading →

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GeoSolutions' Blog: We are hiring!

noreply@blogger.com (Simone Giannecchini) — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:03:27 +0000

GeoSolutions is looking for talented people to fill a couple of positions which would mainly involve designing, implementing testing web-based geospatial applications as well as providing support for the Open Source projects we are involved in.

Here below some additional details:

Support Engineer
This position will mainly focus on having our clients receive the support they need in time and with the quality level they expect from us. The ability to work and communicate clearly in a fast-paced environment is essential since the Support Engineer will be the main point of contact between clients and developers and as such he will be responsible for mediating and coordinating clients' needs. Customers' satisfaction is going to be your mission!

Main Responsibilities are as follows:

Create documentation and trainings
Play the Q&A Engineer role when needed
Monitor quality and SLA levels for support accounts. Manage and improve support procedures as needed
Coordinate with development team to get updates on ongoing as well as planned planned enhancements for the products
Interface with development and support teams from GeoSolutions as well as customers to ensure resolution of all customer calls
Periodically report status and strategic recommendations from clients to GeoSolutions leadership

Qualifications are as follows:

1 year in technical support management, including personnel management
Familiarity with CRM or issue management systems
Working knowledge of GeoServer
Good Knowledge of most important OGC specifications and concepts (WMS, WFS, WCS, coverage, etc...)
Working knowledge of OpenLayers is a plus
Working knowledge of GeoNetwork is a plus

Front End Developer
This position would mainly involve designing and implementing web-based geospatial applications as well as providing support for the Open Source projects we develop.
Qualifications are as follows:

Working knowledge of OpenLayers and GeoExt
Working knowledge of frameworks like JQuery, Ext-JS
Working knowledge of HTML5 and development of mapping webapp for the mobile world
Working knowledge of frameworks like LeafLet, Recline-JS is a plus
Knowledge of web development with Python is a plus
Knowledge of Java (JEE and JSE) is desirable but not necessary
Knowledge of GeoServer is desirable but not necessary
At least 1 year of experience
Being fluent in English, both written and spoken

What we offer

We can offer a variety of contracts but, please, notice that our intention is to establish a long term relationship, although as a temporary solution we do accept freelance consultants.

Working remotely is an option we envisage, although we will give priority to candidate closer to our office.

Please send a detailed resume together with a letter of presentation at jobs_at_geo-solutions.it.

The GeoSolutions team,

Between the Poles: Open source: then and now

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:51:07 +0000

I was asked participate on a panel on open source geospatial organized by Eclipse LocationTech at the Location Intelligence in Washington DC. I decided to look at how software had changed since the early days of open source which I tend to tie to the formation of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in 1999. What I found was that the proprietary and open source software landscape has changed dramatically in the last 13 years. Here are some statistics that provide an indication of just how dramatic the change has been.

Apache Software Foundation

Apache which started off supporting the Apache http server developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) now supports over 100 top level projects.

According to a Netcraft survey of 649,072,682 web sites in April 2013

Over 51% run Apache http server
Almost 20% run Microsoft IIS

Microsoft

In 1998 the infamous Halloween docs were leaked in which Microsoft identifed open source as a threat and discussed ways of combatting it.

April 2013 is the first anniversary of Microsoft Open Technologies, Microsoft's own open source division. Microsoft also has another open source group, Outercurve, where more than 50% of the projects are run by non-Microsoft developers. Microsoft announced that Visual Studio now supports Github.

Browsers

Until several years ago, Internet Explorer was used by over 90% of users. The most recent statistics from W3Schools for April 2013 show marketshare for browsers is dominated by open source browsers, Chrome and Firefox. IE is a poor third now.

Chrome 52.7 % (increasing)
Firefox 27.9 % (decreasing)
IE 12.7% mostly IE8 and IE9 (declining)
Safari 4% (decreasing)
Opera 1.7% (decreasing)

Operating systems on personal devices

Until several years ago, PCs running MS Windows were used by over 90% of users. Now handheld devices such as smart phones lead PCs in annual sales. IDC 1Q2013 statistics for smartphone shipments show that in the last quarter, open source operating systems are dominant

Android 75.0%
iOS 17.3%
Windows Phone 3.2%
Blackberry OS 2.9%
Linux 1.0%
Symbian 0.6%

Software procurement

In many large organizations until recently the procurement playing field was tilted in favour of proprietary cmmercial and against open source software. In 2009 the Department of Defense (DOD), the world's largest IT organization, issued a memorandum that leveled the playing field by stating that “OSS [open source software] meets the definition of commercial computer software”. The memorandum went on to identify some of the benefits of OSS for DOD.

Fewer defects - many eyeballs means fewer defects
Flexibility - easier to customize and adapt
Multiple vendors instead of one - avoids vendor lock-in
Unrestrictive license - simpler to deploy
Cost advantage - when many copies are required
Cost sharing - reduces DOD costs
Prototyping and experimentation - OSS particularly suitable for this

Large IT systems

I blogged earlier about a study by Henrik Ingo that found that the world's largest OSS projects including Linux, KDE, Apache, Eclipse, Perl+CPAN, Mozilla+Addons, Gnome, Drupal and GNU are collaborative community projects governed by non-profit foundations like Apache and Eclipse. These projects are10 times larger than the largest single-vendor projects. Ingo recommended that vendors seriously consider participating in a collaborative community run by a non-profit foundation because they could expect 10 time growth in the project and its addressable market.

Malware

Several years ago virtually all of the world's malware exploits targeted MS Windows. Now according to F-Secure, exploits against mobile devices are exploding. In 1Q2013 the main target for mobile exploits is Android which is open source.

91.3% Android (49% increase over 4Q2012) *
8.7% Symbian
Apple, Microsoft, and Blackberry - free of malware

In 1Q 2013 for the first time Android malware was identified by F-Secure as being distributed by email in addition to apps.

Geospatial open source

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation was formed in 2006 supported by Autodesk. Prior to that geospatial software was dominated by proprietary vendors ESRI, Intergraph, Autodesk, Bentley, and others. Now there are many open source geospatial companies that provide alternatives to proprietary vendors. They primarily rely on OSGEO software such as PostGIS, OpenLayers, MapServer, GeoServer, and others. Earlier this year ESRI acquired GeoIQ and now offers both open source and proprietary software.

Open geospatial standards

One of the key reasons for the rapid expansion in the deployment and use of open source geospatial software solutions is the open standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium notably the SQL Simple Feature Specification, KML, WMS, WFS, GML, and CSW. Open source and open standards are very different things, but open source gravitates to open standards. It is hard to imagine that geospatial open source would have progressed as rapidly and widely as it has without the OGC standards.

Bing Maps Blog: Image Overlays with Bing Maps (JavaScript)

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:05:00 +0000

There are a lot of different types of data that can be overlaid on top of Bing Maps. In this post, we are going to look at how to overlay images on top of the Bing Maps V7 AJAX and Windows Store JavaScript controls. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of great use cases for overlaying images on top of the map. Some of the more common use cases include: floor plans, satellite imagery of hurricanes or other natural disasters, historic maps, and other maps,

There are two main approaches for overlaying images on Bing Maps. The first approach is to turn the image into map tiles ahead of time and serve them up to the application as a custom tile layer. This has been a common approach for many and have accomplished this by using a tool called MapCruncher. This approach does require hosting the tiles on a server, which can be slow going due to the number of tile loads. This approach is ideal for when you want to overlay a high resolution image with a large file size. The second approach is to overlay the image directly on the map and lock it to a specific bounding box, scaling and positioning it accordingly as the map moves. With the Bing Maps Silverlight control we are able to overlay images on top of the map by simply adding the image as a child of a layer and providing a bounding box for the image. A sample of this can be found here. While this approach is much simpler than the tiled, it is not recommended for images that have large file sizes.

MapCruncher Approach

MapCruncher is a Microsoft Research project that makes it easy to cross reference an image with a location on a map and then turn the image into a tile layer. Instructions on how to use MapCruncher can be found here. By default, MapCruncher will generate a test application for you that is built on Bing Maps V6.3. For a better user experience you will want use the Bing Maps V7 AJAX control. To do this, simply locate the folder from the output directory that contains the map tiles. You will want to add these as a folder in your project on a server. You can then add it as a custom tile layer.

Scaling Image Approach

When the Bing Maps Silverlight control was released one of the new features we found was the ability to overlay any UIElement such as an image or video on top of the map and having it bound to a specific bounding box on the map. This feature was never available in the JavaScript version of Bing Maps, but has been something of interest to me.

Looking at the Bing Maps JavaScript controls we have the ability to overlay custom HTML pushpins. We can easily use a custom image to create a pushpin, but it will not be positioned or scaled properly without a little work. If we attached to the viewchangeevent of the map, and update the size and position of the image, we can properly bind it to a specific bounding box. To accomplish this, lets create a reusable module for Bing Maps.

Open up a text editor and copy and paste the following code and save it as ImageOverlayModule.js.

var ImageOverlay;

(function () {
    var canvasIdNumber = 0;

    function generateUniqueID() {
        var canvasID = 'strechedImg' + canvasIdNumber;
        canvasIdNumber++;

        if (window[canvasID]) {
            return generateUniqueID();
        }

        return canvasID;
    }

    // map - Microsoft.Maps.Map object
    // imageURL - String URL to where the image is located
    // boundingBox - Microsoft.Maps.LocationRect object
    ImageOverlay = function (map, imageURL, boundingBox) {
        var _basePushpin = new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(boundingBox.center);
        var _opacity = 1;
        var _id = generateUniqueID();

        function render(){
            var size = calculateSize();

            var pushpinOptions = {
                width: null,
                height: null,
                anchor: new Microsoft.Maps.Point(size.width/2, size.height/2),
                htmlContent: "<img id='" + _id + "' style='width:" + size.width + "px;height:" + size.height + "px;opacity:" + _opacity + ";filter:alpha(opacity=" + (_opacity * 100) + ");' src='" + imageURL + "'/>"
            };

            _basePushpin.setOptions(pushpinOptions);
        }

        function calculateSize(){
            var nwPixel = map.tryLocationToPixel(boundingBox.getNorthwest());
            var sePixel = map.tryLocationToPixel(boundingBox.getSoutheast());

            var width = Math.abs(sePixel.x - nwPixel.x);
            var height = Math.abs(nwPixel.y - sePixel.y);

            return {
                width: width,
                height: height
            };
        }

        _basePushpin.Refresh = function () {
            var size = calculateSize();

            _basePushpin.setOptions({anchor : new Microsoft.Maps.Point(size.width/2, size.height/2)});

            var elm = document.getElementById(_id);

            if(elm){
                elm.style.width = size.width + 'px';
                elm.style.height = size.height + 'px';            
            }
        };

        _basePushpin.SetOpacity = function (opacity) {
            if (opacity >= 0 || opctity <= 1) {
                _opacity = opacity;
                render();
            }
        };

        //Map view change event to resize the image
        Microsoft.Maps.Events.addHandler(map, 'viewchange', function (e) {
            if (!e.linear) {
                //Check if zoom level has changed. If it has then resize the pushpin image
                _basePushpin.Refresh();
            }
        });

        render();

        return _basePushpin;
    };
})();

//Call the Module Loaded method
Microsoft.Maps.moduleLoaded('ImageOverlayModule');

This module creates a class called ImageOverlay which we takes in a reference of the map, a URL to the image we want to overlay and a LocationRect of the bounding box to bind the image. The following is an example of how you can use this module with the Bing Maps V7 AJAX control.

Note: you could also use this module with the Bing Maps Windows Store JavaScript control.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
    <title></title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0"></script>

    <script type="text/javascript">
        var map;

        function GetMap() {
            // Initialize the map
            map = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(document.getElementById("myMap"),
            {
                credentials: "YOUR_BING_MAPS_KEY",
                center: new Microsoft.Maps.Location(40.25, -123.25),
                zoom: 7
            });

            //Register and load the Image Overlay Module
            Microsoft.Maps.registerModule("ImageOverlayModule", "scripts/ImageOverlayModule.js");
            Microsoft.Maps.loadModule("ImageOverlayModule", { callback: function () {
                var imageRect = Microsoft.Maps.LocationRect.fromCorners(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(40.5, -123.5), new Microsoft.Maps.Location(40, -123));
                var imgPin = ImageOverlay(map, 'images/topographicMap.gif', imageRect);
                imgPin.SetOpacity(0.5);
                map.entities.push(imgPin);
            }});
        }
    </script>
</head>
<body onload="GetMap();">
    <div id='myMap' style="position:relative;width:800px;height:600px;"></div>
</body>
</html>

For this example, I grabbed a topographic map image from Bing image search and gave it an approximate bounding box. NASA also has a lot of great imagery you can overlay that is geo-referenced. I’ve even seen some pretty cool animated gif’sthat would work too. When you run the application you should see your image overlaid on top of the map like this:

This module has also been made available through the Bing Maps V7 Modules CodePlex project.

- Ricky Brundritt, EMEA Bing Maps Technology Solution Professional

OpenGeo: Announcing Mapmeter: a new tool for analyzing geospatial deployments

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:02:30 +0000

This week at FOSS4G-North America 2013 in Minneapolis, we are excited to announce a full public beta of our new product. What we’ve previously referred to as “The Enterprise Console,” is now Mapmeter, a full administration and management tool for analyzing GeoServer systems.

Mapmeter enables organizations to monitor the health of production deployments, optimize applications during development and diagnose critical issues. With these details, administrators and managers can better — and more cost effectively — make decisions about their geospatial deployments. With Mapmeter, spatial monitoring and reporting become a primary component in your spatial IT workflow.

You may have heard us talk about this product in recent months. We started with an announcement at FedGeo, then Alyssa Wright showed a live demo with James Fee, and some of you were able to get in on a private beta. With the help and feedback of our early testers, we are now able to open up the software to all.

If you want to learn more or see a demo, please join us for the Mapmeter launch at Sponsor Day at FOSS4G-North America at 9 a.m. Friday, May 24 (look for the OpenGeo room). Sponsor Day is free, but you need to register. We’ll also be holding office hours at our FOSS4G North America booth today (5/22/2013) from 2:00pm to 3:00pm.

If you won’t be able to join us in Minneapolis, head over to http://mapmeter.com to learn more about these exciting new features, connect with the development team and join us for this beta program.

We hope you’re as excited as we are about Mapmeter! If you have questions, please contact us. You can also contact the Mapmeter team directly for personalized help with the public beta.

Spatial Law and Policy: 6 Key Spatial Law and Policy Links (May 13, 2013)

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:54:13 +0000

Map of Links

Apple's user data-sharing takes a hit in Germany after court objects to privacy policy (ZDnet) To quote from the article: "Apple may need to redesign its data sharing practices for German consumers if the decision, handed down on Tuesday, by a Berlin regional court sticks." Location data is part of the issue.

Restaurants and hotels worried by EU data bill (EU Observer.com) This article highlights how tougher data protection laws in Europe could impact a broad range of companies.

Has Big Data Made Anonymity Impossible? (MIT Technology Review)

Reporting Fail: The Reidentification of Personal Genome Project Participants (Info/Law) Anonymization and Reindentification are two very important concepts with respect to privacy. It is critical for the research surrounding them- be to be neutral and correct.

Will filming Times Square now require negotiating with hundreds of copyright owners? (King & Wood Mallesons) Discussion of copyright in U.S. and Australia.

China's Drone Program Appears To Be Moving Into Overdrive (Huffington Post) I wonder if other nations appreciate the resources China is allocating to geospatial technology.

Spatial Law and Policy: 5 Key Spatial Law and Policy Links (May 20, 2013)

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:50:11 +0000

Five links from the most recent Spatial Law and Policy Update prepared for the members of the Centre for Spatial Law and Policy. For more information about becoming a member of the Centre, click here.

ESA Study recommends free, open data policy for Sentinel data (Geospatial World)

INTERNET LAW - Use of Mobile Phone Geolocation in Ireland's Criminal Proceedings (ibls) An informative discussion on the use of geolocation data from mobile devices by Irish authorities.

Judge Allows FBI To Use Evidence Collected Via Stingray Fake Cell Towers (techdirt) I find it interesting that it did not bother the judge that law enforcement failed to explain how the "Stingray" technology worked.

Germany cancels $1.3 billion purchase of unmanned Euro Hawk surveillance drones (Washington Post) To quote from the article "A government official said Tuesday the decision not to buy four more drones was taken after it became clear that getting the required authorization to fly them over European airspace would be too costly." I wonder whether addressing privacy concerns were part of the anticipated costs.

Crowdsourcing - a great concept but are you aware of the legal risks? (Kingsley Napley) Written by a UK law firm - but issues are applicable in most countries.

LiDAR News: Nikon’s CMM Horizontal Laser Scanner Arm

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:01:20 +0000

the automotive industry is probably the most advanced of any when it comes to the use of laser scanning. Continue reading →

Click Title to Continue Reading...

All Points Blog: USC and others Share Mapping Data via an API

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:50:15 +0000

The University of Southern Canlifornia USC Map Data API: The University of Southern California’s Map Data API provides a RESTful interface for retrieving content from the University’s online map. The API supports JSON and JSONP formats. Users can search for locations, building codes... Continue reading

Directions Magazine: TruePosition Tackles Indoor Locating

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:00:04 +0000

TruePosition released testing results of its indoor location technology in April. These tests put the company squarely into the Federal Communication Commission explorations of indoor locating for emergency response. Directions Magazine interviewed Rob Andersen, chief technology officer of TruePosition, about the company’s technology and plans for the future.

Spatial Law and Policy: Posts/Editorials from recent conference on a Location-enabled society

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin) — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:57:01 +0000

A video of the recent conference on The Legal and Policy Framework for A Location-enabled Society will be available shortly. In the meantime, I would like to thank three of the speakers who wrote about the program in blog posts and editorials for contributing to the discussion on these important issues.

Nancy Colleton (Institute for Global Environmental Studies) Location Data Reveals Our Changing Planet

Geoff Zeiss (Between the Poles) Privacy and Personal Geographic Data

Valerie Shuman (Shuman Group) Location-enabled Society Conference

Cameron Shorter: Will OGC’s standards meet government purchasing guidelines?

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:40:45 +0000

In what has become the OGC’s most contentious vote to date, OGC members are being asked whether the proposed "Geoservices REST API" should be accepted as an OGC standard. A summary of concerns are listed in an Open Letter from the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) to the OGC. However, the crux of contentions hinge around the definition of an Open Standard and whether the "Geoservices REST API" qualifies as one.
When measured against government’s policy drivers of interoperability, fair competition, and economical use of government funds, the evidence is overwhelming. "Geoservices REST API" fails on all accounts. In fact, we should be questioning why our OGC processes haven’t identified and then addressed these issues much earlier.

Background

As background, the "Geoservices REST API" describes the interface to a dominant vendor’s web service (ESRI’s ArcGIS Server), and overlaps substantially with OGC’s existing suite of web service standards.

What is an Open Standard?

Most government purchasing guidelines, such as the United Kingdom Open Source, Open Standards and ReUse: Government Action Plan, now include clauses such as:

The Government will use open standards in its procurement specifications and require solutions to comply with open standards. The Government will support the development of open standards and specifications.

Consequently, government contracts typically specify OGC standards when purchasing spatial systems. This places a responsibility on the OGC and OGC members to protect government policy when selecting and defining the OGC standards baseline.
Superficially, the "Geoservices REST API" meets the European Interoperability Framework minimal definition of a standard:

The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

However, the "Geoservices REST API" falls short of addressing government policy drivers for the creation of standards. These are summarised in the Guideline on Public Procurement of Open Source Software, written for the European Commission:

Public sector consumers of software have an obligation to support interoperability, transparency and flexibility, as well as economical use of public funds. When it comes to public procurement, the principles applied to the public sector require them to support (and certainly not to harm) competition through their procurement practices. ...
Good practice eGovernment services should provide access based on open standards, and in particular, never require citizens to purchase or use systems from specific vendors in order to access public services: this is equivalent to granting such vendors a state-sanctioned monopoly.

Lets address these issues point by point.

Costs and Interoperability

Regarding when to create new standards, the United States Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned & Best Practices for Military Software has the following advice:

... use/modify/create open standards, in that order.

Unfortunately, the "Geoservices REST API" would create new standards rather than use and/or extend existing OGC web services. Emphasis on reuse of standards is important for increasing interoperability, as duplication of standards typically results in:

Implementation costs to support multiple standards increases.
Consequently, organisations and/or applications may choose to only support one standard, or only support one standard fully.
Sponsors (such as governments) who require compliance with standards will discover that applications don't communicate together, due to applications supporting different standards that essentially do the same thing.

Costs increase, interoperability decreases.

Fair competition

ESRI’s ArcGIS Server is currently the only server which provides a full implementation of the "Geoservices REST API", as you would expect when an API is derived directly from a product. As such, if the "Geoservices REST API" were to be included in the OGC baseline, and government contracts continue to reference the OGC baseline in contracts, then governments would be giving one vendor a significant market advantage while other vendors wear the cost of developing matching implementations for the proposed standard.

Further, ESRI may continue to use its market dominance to promote use of the "Geoservices REST API" at the expense of existing OGC web services. (As described in ArcGIS Server documentation, support for OGC’s W*S services are disabled by default while GeoServices REST and KML are enabled).

Where are the Open Source implementations?

Another test for identifying open standards is defined by the United States Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned & Best Practices for Military Software:

Verify that the standards used are open; a simple test for openness is to determine if the standard is implemented by open source software.

Currently, very little open source has been developed to support the "Geoservices REST API" and there is wide opposition to the proposed standard from the Open Source community.
Open Source implementations referenced by proponents of the "Geoservices REST API" include immature implementations, partial implementations and a library application. That is: a roadmap document for GeoServer, a sandbox implementation of an Openlayers client, a 52North SOS extension to ArcGIS Server and the GDAL translation library.
By comparison, there are multiple production grade, client and server, open source implementations, which cover the full breadth of existing OGC standards, which have matured over the past decade, and there are open source reference implementations for most (all?) current OGC standards.
So by the Open Technology Development definition, The "Geoservices REST API" hasn’t yet reached the maturity of an Open Standard.

Where are OGC’s gatekeepers?

There are 481 OGC members, with close to 100 of them with voting privileges, yet regularly, less than 40% of these voting members actually vote on proposed standards. This is a concern if these members are being relied upon to uphold OGC values, and we should question why voting is so low. A key factor in low voter turnout is likely the complexity and volume of material voters need to understand in order to make an informed decision. Gatekeepers just don’t have the time to be abreast of all the issues, and current standards are hard to read. The increase in the breadth and application of OGC standards has led to a stronger need for integration of standards, architectural overviews, and clearer implementation guidelines.
Maintaining and verifying quality best addressed by defining and following development and validation processes, and OGC processes should be improved to match the complexity of the systems they represent. In particular, OGC should revisit goals and requirements for quality standards, then resource technical writers and reviewers to work against such requirements. Approving a standard is therefore simplified to verifying the process is valid and has been followed. This would require OGC sponsorship priorities changed to provide greater emphasis on quality over quantity of standards.

A blueprint for moving forward

Lets expand on the steps involved in deciding on the value of a standard:

Governments policies should embody government best practices. Many countries have already taken this initiative.
Standards organisations, should embrace such government policies.
A clear definition of an "open standard" is required, which addresses government policy requirements of interoperability, fair competition, free access to government services, and economical use of public funds. This should be expanded into clear guidelines to be applied by OGC Gatekeepers and standards developers. The OGC should revisit the "open standards" definition, and in particular, ensure the definition extends beyond the technical to include policy implications.
Suitable training should be available to OGC Gatekeepers and implementers of OGC based solutions. LISAsoft provides an Effective Software Selection course which closely aligns with such training requirements.
The OGC and OGC sponsors should consider realigning priorities. In particular:

Place a greater emphasis on quality over quantity of standards. This includes: harmonising competing standards, improving quality of writing to support understandability and implementability, and extend testing to verify standards are implemented correctly.
Provide simple and clear descriptions of standards. The OSGeo-Live project has addressed similar issues by providing a concise one page project overview, plus a ten minute quickstart, translated into 11 languages, for fifty of the best geospatial open source applications.

Summary

As the success of the OGC increases, the OGC will need to be mindful of business and policy implications associated with adopting established interfaces as standards. Specifically, accepting the currently proposed "Geoservices REST API" as a standard will have detrimental impacts on interoperability, fair competition, and economic use of public funds. Instead, the positive aspects of the "Geoservices REST API" should be harmonised and incorporated into the existing OGC baseline of standards. Also, as the breadth of technology covered by OGC standards increases, it is becoming more difficult for gatekeepers to monitor the quality of these standards and consequently it is becoming more important to focus on quality and understandability of these standards. In moving forward, the OGC membership should revisit OGC priorities, and consider placing a greater emphasis on quality over quantity.

LISasoft Blog: Will OGC’s standards meet government purchasing guidelines?

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:40:45 +0000

Background

What is an Open Standard?

Most government purchasing guidelines, such as the United Kingdom Open Source, Open Standards and ReUse: Government Action Plan, now include clauses such as:

The Government will use open standards in its procurement specifications and require solutions to comply with open standards. The Government will support the development of open standards and specifications.

The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

Public sector consumers of software have an obligation to support interoperability, transparency and flexibility, as well as economical use of public funds. When it comes to public procurement, the principles applied to the public sector require them to support (and certainly not to harm) competition through their procurement practices. ...
Good practice eGovernment services should provide access based on open standards, and in particular, never require citizens to purchase or use systems from specific vendors in order to access public services: this is equivalent to granting such vendors a state-sanctioned monopoly.

Lets address these issues point by point.

Costs and Interoperability

Regarding when to create new standards, the United States Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned & Best Practices for Military Software has the following advice:

... use/modify/create open standards, in that order.

Implementation costs to support multiple standards increases.
Consequently, organisations and/or applications may choose to only support one standard, or only support one standard fully.
Sponsors (such as governments) who require compliance with standards will discover that applications don't communicate together, due to applications supporting different standards that essentially do the same thing.

Costs increase, interoperability decreases.

Fair competition

Where are the Open Source implementations?

Another test for identifying open standards is defined by the United States Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned & Best Practices for Military Software:

Verify that the standards used are open; a simple test for openness is to determine if the standard is implemented by open source software.

Where are OGC’s gatekeepers?

A blueprint for moving forward

Lets expand on the steps involved in deciding on the value of a standard:

Governments policies should embody government best practices. Many countries have already taken this initiative.
Standards organisations, should embrace such government policies.
A clear definition of an "open standard" is required, which addresses government policy requirements of interoperability, fair competition, free access to government services, and economical use of public funds. This should be expanded into clear guidelines to be applied by OGC Gatekeepers and standards developers. The OGC should revisit the "open standards" definition, and in particular, ensure the definition extends beyond the technical to include policy implications.
Suitable training should be available to OGC Gatekeepers and implementers of OGC based solutions. LISAsoft provides an Effective Software Selection course which closely aligns with such training requirements.
The OGC and OGC sponsors should consider realigning priorities. In particular:

Place a greater emphasis on quality over quantity of standards. This includes: harmonising competing standards, improving quality of writing to support understandability and implementability, and extend testing to verify standards are implemented correctly.
Provide simple and clear descriptions of standards. The OSGeo-Live project has addressed similar issues by providing a concise one page project overview, plus a ten minute quickstart, translated into 11 languages, for fifty of the best geospatial open source applications.

Summary

AnyGeo: Caterpillar Announces Cat B15 Rugged, Android Smartphone

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:55:54 +0000

WOAH, this is just downright awesome! The annual CTIA wireless industry show is on this week in Vegas and as usual, there’s plenty of cool announcements coming out of the mobile ecosystem. One announcement that really got my attention comes … Continue reading →

VerySpatial: GIS and Oklahoma Disaster

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:52:33 +0000

Many geospatial professionals, such as those on the GIS Stack Exchange, have asked what they can do with geospatial technologies to help in the aftermath of the tornadoes in Oklahoma or for other disasters. There are several crisis maps online including Google’s Oklahoma Crisis Map and ESRI’s Public Information Map. The American Red Cross has the Safe and Well Communication site and a map of available shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the NOAA National Weather Service, and other

There are organizations that do crisis mapping, the most well-known being the URISA GIS Corps. Many times local areas have their own crisis mappers organizations which work with local geospatial groups, first responders, and municipalities. The volunteer profile for Sean Bohac from RECON Environmental gives a good insight into what it is like to be a GIS volunteer in a disaster situation. Anahi Ayala Iacucci talks about other types of crisis mapping on her Diary of a Crisis Mapper website.

Crisis mapping is often an overlap of existing geospatial infrastructure, when available, and disaster response by geospatial professionals and neogeographers. The National Academy of Sciences has an open book called, “Successful Response Starts with a Map: Improving Geospatial Support for Disaster Management (2007)” by the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources (BESR). The City of Moore, Oklahoma publicly available interactive map includes tornado damaged parcels from 2003 and many utilities including fire hydrants, which many towns have not located and mapped yet. They also ask that donations be made through The Red Cross.

I wasn’t able to locate any information related to directly related volunteer efforts, so please feel free to post any information you might have. Thank you.

The Big Blue Thread: Rerun of Twister TV

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:56:51 +0000

By Jeffery Robichaud

I was saddened just like most of you to see the footage from yesterday’s events in Moore, Oklahoma. Several years ago I posted this article on EPA’s main Greenversations Blog. Two years ago our Region experienced our own devastation to the south in Joplin, Missouri. Tornadoes are serious stuff. Make sure you and your family are prepared especially if you live east of the Rockies as they can hit most anywhere (great visualization from John Nelson of uxblog.idvsolutions.com).

EPA has a broad and powerful mission to protect human health and the environment. We often think of this in the context of human impacts on the environment, but sometimes it is the other way around.

In Kansas City, a threat to our well-being rears its head every spring. I could tell it arrived the other night when I flipped on the TV to watch LOST and the screen lit up with red and green splotches over a map. It was storm season again and meteorologists had pre-empted Must-see TV for Twister TV with the fervor of election-night coverage or the latest celebrity car chase.

It was our first warning of the season, and my wife and I scooped up the kids and raced down into the basement. The all clear came, but another siren sounded an hour or so later. We repeated the drill (this time with sleeping children) and trudged to bed after another all clear. Not until the morning did we learn that two twisters touched down next to our local drug store. Five years prior a tornado ripped through Kansas City just a mile south of our house (my wife ever the wiser of the pair dragged me inside reminding me that I was now a dad). Sadly this was reinforced two years ago when our good friends lost their home in Springfield, Missouri to a twister. They had a newborn, which, as my friend told me, was the only reason they got off the couch and ran to the closet that saved their life.

Last year (edit: 6 years ago now) was a rough one for natural disasters in our Region. Everyone remembers the devastation that occurred in Greensburg, Kansas. At EPA, we get called in to assist with public health and environmental problems in the aftermath of events like the tornado in Greensburg or the flooding that struck Coffeyville, Kansas. It is heartbreaking to hear the stories of our neighbors, especially the occasional ones who ignored warnings.

Yes, newscasters tend towards exaggeration and embellishment to ensure rapt audiences, but don’t let that overwhelm the importance of heeding the underlying message. Next time you are faced with a flood, fire, hurricane, or tornado warning make sure you get yourself and family to a safe place instead of watching TV. And if anybody in Kansas City needs to know what happened on LOST let me know… I DVR’d the re-broadcast.

Jeffery Robichaud is a second generation EPA scientist who has worked for the Agency since 1998. He currently serves as Deputy Director of EPA Region 7′s Environmental Services Division.

AnyGeo: The Nokia Lumia 925 #switch Launch Video

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:08:52 +0000

Nokia launched the Nokia 925 in an official PR launch event last week (May 14, 2013) in London, sadly the invite to yours truly @gletham seems to have gone missing ;0) but regardless, here’s a cool video from the event … Continue reading →

GeoSolutions' Blog: Fun with MapStore: Italian UNESCO Sites as OpenData

noreply@blogger.com (Simone Giannecchini) — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:21:27 +0000

Dear All,
there days the Italian UNESCO Sites of interests have been released as OpenData via this portal (NOTICE; we were not involved :)).

The data can be downloaded, there are WMS and WFS end endpoints available (using GeoServer), and there is a small webgis based on OpenLayers (which could actually be improved a litlle bit ;) ).
Well, OpenData + Open Services, this is really nice so I thought I could share a map I created with the cloud version of MapStore the same data with proper querying capabilities and so on.

So there you go, here below you can find a pretty simple map that just shows our UNESCO items, you can embed it in your site with the following HTML code:

<iframe height="400" src="http://mapstore.geo-solutions.it/mapcomposer/viewer?locale=en&bbox=-1851508.8592676,4102979.8193213,4351508.8592676,7429519.2898291&mapId=356" style="border: none;" width="500"></iframe>

Next steps would be customizing the info boxes and probaly adding more markers (get some info here) but I guess for the moment this is enough from us :). Ah yeah, I would probably also make good use of the buffer WMS parameter of configuration to make sure symbologies don't get cut in tiled development, here is some additional infomation.

Visit our online demo or download the MapStore binary, read the Quick Start guide and start to create and share your own maps. If you need more info, please check to the complete documentation wiki.

If you have questions or if you just want to talk to us about using our tools in your project, please, subscribe to the mailing list here. In any case, do not hesitate to contact us.

Happy mapping to everybody!

The GeoSolutions team,

Gary's Bloggage: Welcome To The United States; A Cold War Tourist Map For Soviet Visitors

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:35:12 +0000

In the mid 1950s America and Russia were in the middle of the game of oneupmanship, with added nuclear weapons, that was the Cold War. Despite the uneasy detente between the two countries, if you were one of an elite group of Soviet citizens you were actually able to visit the United States. But not all of it. Large swathes of the US were closed to prospective Soviet tourists.

What makes this map interesting is not so much the slice of relatively recent world history that it portrays but more of the questions it poses. What were the criteria that were used to determine where a Cold War era Soviet visitor could and couldn’t go?

You can make some educated guesses. It’s not unreasonable to assume that major ports, coastlines, industrial areas and military and weapons areas were off limits. But that doesn’t cover the full scope of the open and closed areas.

Over at BoingBoing, there’s speculation that this was as much a tit-for-tat set of restrictions as it was a set of restrictions based on what the US Government didn’t want Soviets to see. As Cold War era historian Audra Wolfe, the author of the Slate article on this map, notes

The main premise is ‘strict reciprocity’. X% of Soviet coasts are off-limits, therefore X% of US coasts are off-limits, too.

Photo Credits: Rockefeller Archive Center, Item record: Rockefeller Family Archives (III) Record Group: 4 Nelson A. Rockefeller – Personal, Series: Washington D.C Files, Subseries: O.9 Special Assistant to the President Declassified Materials, 1954-1956, 1969 Box: 4 Folder 94.

Written and posted from the British Library, London (51.53004, -0.12765)

Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary

Self professed ”geek with a life”, geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of Global Community Programs for Nokia’s HERE Maps; he’s a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

All Points Blog: Jack Levis, UPS, Keynotes Location Intelligence 2013

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:26:23 +0000

Jack Levis, is known to many readers as “the UPS guy” in the Penn State Public Broadcasting production The Geospatial Revolution. He gave the opening keynote at this year's Location Intelligence Conference in Washington, DC. He basically backed up his now-famous quip about how UPS used... Continue reading

All Points Blog: Esri’s Timely Severe Weather Map

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:04:23 +0000

Update: Moore, Oklahoma Tornado Public Information Map, too. Esri shares: Get the latest info on the ground as it happens. Esri’s live Severe Weather Map allows you to view continuously updated tornado reports, wind storm info, weather warnings, and precipitation. The map also... Continue reading

All Points Blog: GeoNews from Asia: Alibaba Gets into Mapping, the Man behind Esri in APAC

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:55:29 +0000

China's largest Internet company Alibaba has made a significant investment into AutoNavi, a key provider of mobile maps and directions. Alibaba is handing over $294 million for a 28% stake in AutoNavi Holdings, which boasts a 100 million-plus user base and 30% ownerhip of the mobile... Continue reading

All Points Blog: Where are the ACA Eligible in Illinois and other Health GIS News

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:53:58 +0000

Health & Disability Advocates has released an expanded interactive mapping tool that shows where uninsured Illinois residents live, highlighting who will be eligible to gain some form of coverage under the Affordable Care Act. It's an update of a map from last year with more data from... Continue reading

Directions Magazine: Google Geospatial Announcements from Google I/O 2013: Should GIS Users Care?

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:22:34 +0000

Google announced new location services APIs, a new Google Maps and a visual refresh for Google Maps at Google I/O last week. There was lots of descriptive coverage from the mainstream and tech press. But there was very little response from the geospatial community - except from Esri. Who should or should not be excited about the new Google Maps and APIs?

All Points Blog: Pitney Bowes Insights User Conference Skips 2013

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:05:38 +0000

Back in April Pitney Bowes Software announced via a message to customers that it would not be holding its Insights User Conference this year, but rather would use the year to revamp the organization. The event is usually held in May or June. The PB Software group includes the software... Continue reading

LiDAR News: Nuclear Underwater Laser Scanner

Tue, 21 May 2013 02:15:42 +0000

It was recently used successfully at Nine Mile Point 1, one of the oldest reactors in the United States, to inspect the steam dryer assembly and support brackets. Continue reading →

Click Title to Continue Reading...

OpenGeo: New Job Postings

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:15:40 +0000

OpenGeo is looking for talented people to join our team. We offer interesting technical work, competitive salaries, great benefits, and a fantastic working environment. Most importantly we challenge our employees to build the best open source and interoperable tools for spatial data on the web. We added a few new posts this week, if any look like a fit for you, please apply!

Here’s a list of our open positions:

UX Developer - We’re seeking a talented user experience developer to design and implement creative user interfaces for our innovative open source geospatial software.

Support Manager - OpenGeo is looking for a support manager to ensure that customers large and small are familiarized with our software, properly trained in its function, and supported if anything should go wrong. The ability to think quickly and communicate clearly in a fast-paced environment is essential. Enthusiastic problem-solving skills and a desire to be engaged at all levels of a problem are even better.

Software Project Manager - OpenGeo is seeking a skilled Software Project Manager to help us bring open source software to governments, commercial enterprises, NGOs, and other organizations around the world.

Java Developer - OpenGeo is seeking skilled software engineers interested in helping us bring open source software to organizations around the world. Our team improves the open source components underlying the OpenGeo Suite, allowing a wide variety of customers to share and edit data using open standards.

Front End Developer - We’re looking for someone who is ready to work with peers in design and engineering to create pixel-perfect interfaces across a range of projects and products. You’ll own the code-base, work on the hard problems, build your ideas into reality, and help determine best practices throughout our organization.

Sales Account Manager – Our current (and future) clients are looking to open source to solve their spatial IT needs. Our account managers help commercial enterprises and federal clients use our innovative, open source geospatial software as efficiently and effectively as possible, allowing them to get more than ever out of their geospatial instances.

Here’s the full list, please apply and/or spread the word!

Between the Poles: Reusing integrated geospatial and design data across the construction lifecyle

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:22:36 +0000

One of the most important things that impressed me at the Geospatial World Forum 2013 (GWF 2013) conference in Rotterdam is the degree to which in the Netherlands that building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial are perceived to be tightly linked. In my previous post I gave an overview of a presentation by Bram Mommers, who works for the large private engineering company ARCADIS, on why integrating geospatial into the construction process is important.

Jaap Bakkers, who is with the Rijkswaterstaat, the national water company in the Netherlands, presented more details about the Concept Library (CB-NL) initiative.

It is supported by the Dutch Council on Building Information (BIR), which is a joint industry and government council created to foster the development of building information modeling (BIM) in the Netherlands. It includes government agencies such as Rijkswaterstaat, private construction contractors, and engineering and architural firms. Government funds it, but most of its expertise is seconded from industry.

Construction processes in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands many government projects are private-public partnerships (P3), where a private sector firm or consortium is responsible for the design-build-finance-maintain phases of the lifecycle and the government as the owner is responsible for operation.

Many AEC firms are adopting BIM because it is cheaper, reduces risk of budget, schedule overruns, and results in fewer change orders. They may be motivated to adopt BIM to increase their margin or because they are required to by the owner, which is often a governmental organization such as the Rijkswaterstaat. Once construction is complete, at commissioning, the owner is handed a large volume of facilities data and as-builts. But this data is often unusable by the owner because it is incompatible or non-interoperable with the owner's asset management, GIS, and other systems. This is the primary objective of the Concept Library (CB-NL), to create standards that enable re-use of design and construction data for operations. This is one example of the data impedance problem, where at every handover, design to construction, construction to operations, data is lost and has to be recreated.

Geospatial in the construction process

Marcel Reuvers, Manager of Geo-standards at Geonovum, gave an overview of some the critical roles that geospatial plays on the construction lifecycle.

Planning / preparation phase
Asset management / maintenance
Managing as-builts

I would add sustainable design which always requires geospatial information about local prevailing weather pattern and the location and orientation of neighbouring structures for right to light, wind, solar heating, natural lighting, solar PV generation potential, and other analysis.

I blogged previously about some fundamental changes to the construction process that will make geospatial central to the construction process. What has been proposed is that a post-construction survey would become the critical source of reliable asset information in the form of a 3D intelligent model which would be maintained in a geospatially-enabled asset database. When a new project is initiated, 80-90% of the necessary information would already available in the database making a complete resurvey, as is the current construction practice, unnecessary. All that is required before design can begin is minimal due diligence to validate the as-builts. The new process also implies that there is a reliable geospatially-enabled asset database that is maintained thoughout the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecycle.

Concept Library (CB-NL)

In the Netherlands there is already a standard decomposition for buildings called COINS. The idea is to build on this to create a general approach for decomposing infrastructure as well as buildings and that it suffiiciently general to include geospatial.

The Concept Library is intended to map different terminology across domains: design, engineering, architecture, construction, asset management, facilities manmagement,and geospatial. For example, it interelates terms like arch bridge, rail bridge, spanning structure, viaduct, and crossing, each of which may be used by a different domain to refer to the same structure. The business benefit is that it would reduce the data impedance problem, where at every handover in the construction lifecycle, designer to contractor or contractor to owner, data is lost and has to be recreated.

The vision is that the Concept Library is an open database based on a standard ontology that is searchable and has an open API so that vendors such as Autodesk, Bentley or ESRI can develop interfaces to it for their products.

CB=NL and geospatial

CB-NL was initially focused on BIM, but is being extended to include geospatial. CB-NL enables designers, contractors, asset managers and GIS staff to share a common dataset. It also makes it possible to automate the process of populating asset and facilities management application and GIS databases for the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecycle.

Concept Library (CB-NL)

A two year project to develop the Concept Library has just been initiated, in January 2013, which is supported by a large number of government and private organizations. It is using the OWL ontology language, which has been endorsed by the W3C. It uses tools and constructs from buildingSmart's Semantic Constructs for inputting and editing semantic content. Real world pilots, for example, a Rijkswaterstaat water services project and the Schipol, Amsterdam, Almere ring road project, will be used to demnstrate the practicality of the approach.

According to Marcel Reuvers, there are a number of standards that relate to the CB-NL project from a number of standards bodies including the OGC, buildingSmart, ISO/TC211, and LandXML. Jaap Bakker said that the project team has been in touch wth the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in additon to the buildingSmart Alliance about the CB-NL project.

AnyGeo: Webinar – Rebuilding After Sandy: Surveying the Aftermath

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:19:45 +0000

Free Webinar! Rebuilding After Sandy: Surveying the Aftermath – Last October, the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history put our mapping and forecasting systems to the test. As it turns out, the tragic truth is that the best means of determining … Continue reading →

Free and Open Source GIS Ramblings: TimeManager in QGIS 2.0

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:39:51 +0000

Today, I updated my QGIS Time Manager plugin to version 0.8. It now works with the QGIS 2.0 API and that means that we can take advantage of all the cool new features in our animations. The following quick example uses the “multiply” blend mode with the tweet sample data which is provided by default when you install the plugin:

(The video here is a little small. Watch it on Youtube to see the details.)

The Big Blue Thread: EPA Region 7′s GIS VIP

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:09:48 +0000

By Shawn Henderson

After several attempts at college, including the part-time approach, I decided in the mid 2000’s to start taking full-time classes and finish up my degree. I knew that I wanted computers to be my major, because I love technology, but I also had a strong affinity for geo-sciences. Not knowing much about geographic information systems (GIS) at the time, it seemed to be the perfect mix of geography, geology, and computers and therefore tailored specifically to my interests. I thought GIS was just going to be about map making, but I had a lot to learn. I was in the first pure GIS class that my alma mater, Park University offered. At the time there was no dedicated computer lab, and the text book was less than helpful, but it was interesting. I remember that in the computer lab on the main floor of the science building there were only five computers with ArcGIS licenses; we had to fight other students who were working on reports in MS Word to get access to the software we needed. Park’s Professor David Fox did the best with what resources were at his disposal, and he made the class really interesting and enjoyable. I developed a good relationship with Dave. One afternoon I was frustrated and fed up with the turn-over of professors in the Computer Science program back then, so I asked him if he would be my unofficial advisor. He agreed. From then on, we were good.

One afternoon I had enough of my computer programming class and decided to go for a stroll to clear my mind. I had been working on a user interface class but, the buttons and layout were not lining up. I wanted to throw the computer across the room. I walked over by the library and found an advertisement for an EPA summer intern program. At this point I had applied for a dozen internships and I chuckled to myself that I had absolutely no chance, but I also figured that I had nothing to lose. It just so happened that I had a certification in MS Access, and a group at EPA was looking for an intern to develop a tracking database in Access. I applied, the stars aligned, and I was accepted for the internship.

I quickly finished the tracking database, and I was able to detail into the Region’s GIS group and onto our Aqua Team with fellow colleagues like Roberta Vogel-Leutung and Laura Webb. I transitioned into the Student Career Employment Program and was offered a full time position with the Agency after I graduated. Sometime after that, my supervisor and I were brainstorming about GIS and we wondered if we could leverage my knowledge of Park’s program (which requires an internship) to offer their students a more robust GIS experience at EPA. I approached Dave Fox with the idea, and he thought it was a fantastic approach. Thus was born our GIS VIP (VOLUNTARY INTERNSHIP with PARK). From there our program has blossomed with more than 15 students working on EPA GIS projects.

Map completed by Park Intern

The experience of working with these students has been amazing! There has been a variety of unique personalities come through the door. I have had students that were worried and timid at the beginning, but by the end they were confidant and ready to save the world with GIS. I’ve also had students come through to find out how much database/computer work is involved and realize that the real world experience of GIS isn’t something they want to head towards as a career goal. In the end, not all the projects end up like we planned, but the experience the students and EPA staff get from these projects is invaluable. Students have had the opportunity to work with EPA staff which provides them with professional experience and contacts. In return the Agency gets a fresh look on things with young enthusiastic students and volunteer assistance on projects of substance.

Besides our work with Park, the Agency has several other voluntary opportunities. Currently EPA Region 7’s Office of Public Affairs, is seeking a volunteer intern to work on social media coordination who is motivated, hard-working, and interested in helping the EPA protect human health and the environment. You can find out all the details here. Additionally our Superfund program is seeking two volunteer interns to work on separate projects found here and here. These are great opportunities to build skills and your resume. Heck my old boss Jeffery Robichaud, also a fellow blogger, did his own volunteer internship with EPA in Philadelphia 20 years ago.

Shawn Henderson is an Environmental Protection Specialist with the Environmental Assessment and Monitoring Branch of the Environmental Services Division. He is a part of the Aqua Team, and conducts water quality sampling around the Region’s four states. He has a Computer Science degree from Park University and helped to develop the Region’s KCWaterBug app and kcwaters.org.