Between the Poles

FDO Toolbox 0.9.1 Available

Jackie Ng has released FDO Toolbox 0.9.1.

MEST 2009: Spatial Data, Convergence, Intelligent Models, Collaboration, Open Source Geospatial, GeoWeb, and Fusion

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the MEST conferences, is the daily wrap up where one of the organizers briefly reviews and summarizes the day's presentations.  I find the exercise very worthwhile because it gives you a chance to review and digest what you've heard during the day's proceedings.  There is also a session at the end of the conference, where the entire conference is reviewed by several of the speakers and organizers. 

By way of a little background, MEST is organized by the Bahrain Society of Engineers, so I find it more akin to the infrastructure conferences I attend than a traditional GIS conference.   Although it has commercial sponsors, it is non-denominational and this is reflected in most of the presentations.  It also tends to attract government people from many of the Gulf states, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia.

This year I was one of the panelists for the final wrap up, and I mentally did my own review which I presented as a personal precis of the conference.

Spatial Data

One of the themes that came up repeatedly was the importance of data, and especially of accurate, real-time data. Spatial data now includes not just traditional geospatial data sources but other sources such as architectural and engineering design, laser scanning, high resolution photogrammetry with multiple cameras, and ground penetrating radar.  Some of the newer technologies for acquiring spatial date were the subject of several talks including laser-scanning and LiDAR, high resolution photogrammetry, and earth observation satellites.  Dominic McPolin of the Central Planning Unit (CPU) in Bahrain and others emphasized the importance of reliable data in infrastructure planning.

Intelligent Models

Increasingly people want to do more than simply prepare maps.  They want to analyze and and simulate which requires more intelligent data.  For years utilities and telecommunications companies have maintained information about their outside facilities including location, properties such as maintenance records, and connectivity, because outage management, asset management and other utility applications require this information.  For example, outage management (OMS) is the primary user of connectivity because OMS typically needs to perform traces to identify controlling devices which may be the source of network traces and to identify customers affected by the failure of a device such as a transformer or pump. The increasing adoption of model-based design for structures such as buildings (building information modeling or BIM), roads and highways, electric power substations, nuclear power stations, hydroelectric plants, and renewable energy generation facilities, means that intelligent models are becoming available for many more types of infrastructure. Government permitting organizations are seeing the advantage of model-based design and are mandating (US GSA) or recommending (Singapore BCA) BIM to support building permit submissions.

Convergence

Another common theme is the convergence of architectural and engineering design, traditional GIS, and 3D technologies which enable what Dominic McPolin called a more holistic view of the built world.  World trends such as population growth, global climate change, and increasing complexity of our world are seen as major drivers motivating the broader interest in convergence.  Dominic McPolin emphasized that the complexity of modern economies requires a new fusion that will allow us to respond effectively to global climate change and other world challenges and predicted that because of its small size next year Bahrain will be a world leader in developing a new fusion of information and systems or conceptual business architecture that will provide a more holistic view of the national economy.

Collaboration

An important theme throughout the conference was the importance of collaboration between different disciplines such as engineering and business, different levels of government, different government ministries and agencies, and government and the private sector.  IT in many organizations is characterized by stovepipes, or islands of information, with limited communications between the different IT systems such as ERP, CRM, GIS, engineering design and others.  For example, a large utility or telecommunications firm may have thousands of applications, each running on one of ten or more operating systems, with its own proprietary database, which may be one of nine or more independent databases containing the same information.  This problem is exacerbated in government by multiple levels of government, national, state or provincial, and municipal.  In this respect small, centralized nations such as Singapore and Bahrain often have a significant advantage, because the problems associated with multiple levels of government are minimized.

Dr Al-Tamimi outlined a vendor-neutral architecture for the integration of different spatial systems within government including infrastructure, engineering, building permitting, mapping, and environmental, that is designed to be implemented in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.  A key feature of the architecture Dr Al-Tamimi is developing is that it includes the full range of spatial information from the very detailed, engineering precision, large scale to very small scale.  He said that integrating model-based design or BIM is a priority and planned as the next step. 

Ron Lake, who has developed and has been proselytizing the concept of the GeoWeb or worldwide, web-based  integration of spatial information for several years, made what I think is a key point that the GeoWeb needs to be treated as a web of systems, rather than a web of documents.  Ron, who is the founder of the GeoWeb conferences, has been a proponent for the integration of model-based design and BIM, which was a central theme of the last GeoWeb in Vancouver, as a key component of the GeoWeb.

New Software Business Models

Several of the presentations at the conference either focussed on open source geospatial software or described projects that used open source software.  Daniel Ames, from Idaho State University, gave what I suspect was an eye-opening presentation for many in the audience, outlining some of the advantages of open source software.  He referred several times to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) and very generously mentioned Autodesk's initial and continued support for the OSGEO.  Dan is the founder of  the MapWindow open source project, which has about 250 participants worldwide including 20 committers (developers with permission to contribute and modify code.) 

Innovation

Bahrain has announced that it intends to reduce CO2 emissions per capita by 60% by 2014. This will require the biggest infrastructure program (road, water, electricity) program the country has ever seen.  Dominic McPolin was unequivocal in identifying the key to achieving this aggressive goal as innovation and he made an impassioned plea to the private sector to provide the technology to enable this goal to be realized.

Video Recordings of FOSS4G Presentations

The FOSSLC folks have released video recordings of most of the presentations at FOSS4G 2009 in Sydney.

Paul Ramsey's Keynote

The FDO Toolbox

GeoREST

FDO Toolbox 0.9.0 Released

Jackie Ng has announced the release of a new version 0.9.0 of the FDO Toolbox. You can also see Jackie Ng's presentation on the FDO Toolbox at FOSS4G here.

Chile: Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Data

I have been in Chile most of last week in Santiago, where I gave a presentation at the International Cartographic Conference (ICC 2009).  This is my first time in Chile, and I am extremely impressed by the natural environment, the Andes on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, and secondly by the quality of the infrastructure, especially the electric power network, I have seen here in Santiago.

I have had the opportunity to visit several government and commercial sites.  One in particular I found particularly interesting. I met Ivan Alonso Lienlaf Nova of SNIT (Sistema Nacional de Coordination de Informacion Territorial), which is a federal government organization that was created in 2006 to coordinate geospatial data among eleven ministries of the federal government.  From a technical perspective they have created a data catalog for all government geospatial data.  The national catalog currently contains metadata and references for 10 000 geospatial products in diverse areas such as agriculture, biology, administrative boundaries, roads, educational institutions, and cadastre.  SNIT is reaching out to other non-government sectors as well, including private companies and universities.

Open Standards

SNIT supports open standards including OGC and ISO standards, and in particular the ISO 19115 and 19139 standards for metadata. 

Open Source

GeoNodo is SNIT's web-based application portal, that is designed to allow developers to build web-based applications for accessing the SNIT metadata catalog and indirectly government geospatial data.  GeoNodo is based on open source geospatial tools,  MapServer, PostGIS, and Apache. The Regional Government of the Region del Los Rios has developed a web site using GeoNodo.

Open Data

Chile's freedom of Information bill was passed in 2008, after a decade long campaign by Proacceso, Chile’s right-to-know movement.  Ivan Alonso was optimistic that the bill will result in free and open access to government geospatial data, perhaps in a similar way to the November, 2008 decree published in Brazil that established the principle that federal government geospatial data should be made available without cost to Brazilian citizens.

FOSS4G: Open Source GeoREST Project Announced

I have blogged on previous occasions about the RESTful API for accessing raw geospatial data which Haris Kurtagic developed and which Jason Birch has used to provide open access to geospatial data at the City of Nanaimo, BC.  At FOSS4G I gave a presentation on behalf of Haris and Jason, who couldn't make it to Sydney, which announced the creation of the open source GeoREST project (www.geoREST.org).

Open Access to Raw Geospatial Data

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 most recently by the City of Vancouver.  The benefits of free and open access to government geospatial data as identified by Senator Kate Lundy are

• Citizen engagement
• Transparency and accountability
• Economic development

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.  The thesis on which GeoREST is based is that standard Web protocols, HTTP and MIME, are the simplest way of providing searchable raw geospatial data on the web.

REST

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architecture style of networked systems which relies on the Web protocols HTTP and MIME. The best example of a RESTful implementation is the Web itself.  REST uses URIs, HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE), HTTP response codes, and MIME.

The single major advantage of REST is that because it relies only on standard Web protocols, standard services available on the Web are available "out of the box" including

• Searching
• Passing through firewalls
• Caching
• Scaling/load balancing

GeoREST

GeoREST is a framework for accessing, distributing, and editing raw geospatial data over the web. Because it is based on REST, it supports searching using standard Web search engines such as Google and Bing. 

In its current form it provides feature-based access to FDO spatial data sources including editing. Examples of FDO data sources include PostGIS, SHP, Oracle Spatial, Microsoft SQL Server Spatial, MySQL, SDF, GML, and others.  GeoREST returns geospatial data over the Web in a number of Web friendly formats including KML, GeoRSS, HTML, GeoJSON, XML, PNG, HTML, CSV, and other text-based formats.  

GeoREST relies on open source libraries including CTemplate, POCO, FDO, MapGuide Open Source, and libkml.  GeoREST source code is available at www.geoREST.org.

Example Application Using GeoREST

You can find an example of an application built on GeoREST at the City of Nanaimo Property Search Site. More information about the implementation can be found on Jason Birch's Blog.

If you want to verify that Nanaimo's raw geospatial data is searchable, enter "2323 Rosstown Road, Nanaimo, BC" into Google, Bing or any other search engine, and then click on the first item that gets returned by the search engine.

MapGuide and Google Earth

Jackie Ng has tested MapGuide with different versions of Google Earth and his recommendation is to use GE 5.1 and to avoid GE 4.3 through 5.0.

Nominations Requested by OSGEO for the Sol Katz Award

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) is requesting nominations for the 2009 Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software.  The Award is for individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the GFOSS community. Recipients of the award will have contributed significantly through their activities to advancing open source in the geospatial sector.  Sol Katz was an early pioneer of GFOSS while at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. 

Nominations for the Sol Katz Award should be sent to SolKatzAward@osgeo.org with a description of the reasons for the nomination. Nominations will be accepted until midnight UTC on October 9th.

The winner of the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software will be announced October 23^rd at the FOSS4G 2009 closing plenary in Sydney, Australia.

Past Awardees:

2008: Paul Ramsey

2007: Steve Lime

2006: Markus Neteler

2005: Frank Warmerdam

MapGuide Open Source 2.1 Beta Released

The MapGuide Open Source project team has announced that MapGuide Open Source 2.1 Beta is available. You can access Release notes and  Downloads.

Two of the most important enhancements are

• Raster re-projection;
• CS-Map (originally from Mentor Software) as the coordinate system library.

And there's a new Windows installer thanks to Jackie Ng and Jason Birch.

Open RESTful Architecture for Geospatial Data Web Services: Accessing Spatial Data with No Programming

Recently the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre (FOSSLC) held their annual Summercamp in Ottawa.  Haris Kurtagic and I prepared a presentation on a RESTful implementation of an open API for data access that Haris has developed and that has been implemented by Jason Birch at the City of Nanaimo and by Haris at a Slovenian water company.  This presentation is now on-line at the FOSSLC site including audio, video, and the presentation itself.  I've blogged about this before and Haris and I have published an article in the on-line journal OSBR.

Parenthetically, one of the really cool things about FOSSLC is that the presentations from Summercamps and other events that they organize are available on line.

Feature Data Object API

A critical guideline for sharing data is to avoid making copies, because as soon as you make a copy, your data maintenance problem becomes much more complicated. The Feature Data Object API (FDO) was developed and designed to help address this problem.  FDO is designed to be read/write so that you can not only read data, but you can also modify and update data sources without making copies.  FDO is a project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO).

FDO supports many different types of data stores including shape files, SDF, Oracle Spatial/Locator, SQL Server, MySQL, PostGIS and other spatial data stores.  

FDO is fundamentally a C++ API, but it is available in Web programming environments such as PHP, JSP, and .Net/ASP.  All of which is fine if you're a programmer.

Open Web-based Spatial Data Access for Non-programmers

But what if you're not a programmer and want to access spatial data on-line ?  To begin to address this challenge, at FOSSLC we outlined an open architecture implemented by Haris and based on REST (Representational State Transfer) that provides web services for geospatial data. The most important feature of this architecture is that because it's REST, all you need to know how to do to access spatial data on-line for both read and write is to write an URL, the string of characters at the top of your browser you use to link to web sites.  To be concrete here's an example,  

http://maps.nanaimo.ca/data/property/.html?filter_1_and_equal_house=2323&filter_2_and_like_street=Rosstown&count=20&submit=Search 

You can choose how you want the data to come back, as HTML, KML, XML, GeoJSON, or PNG just by changing the "html" in the URL.

For example, 

http://maps.nanaimo.ca/data/property/.kml?filter_1_and_equal_house=2323&filter_2_and_like_street=Rosstown&count=20&submit=Search 

will retrieve KML which will invoke Google Earth.

In the presentation at FOSSLC we provided some examples of RESTful URLs for both the City of Nanaimo (Nanaimo Geodata) and the water company in Slovenia (GeoData Site), both of which you can try yourself.  For English speakers with no Slovenian I would recommend the Nanaimo site.