Between the Poles

Providing web access to usable open 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 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.

GeoREST

I blogged previously about an initiative called GeoREST developed by Haris Kurtagic and implemented by Jason Birch at Nanaimo for property records that attempted to enable visual browsing of open datasets, support standard search engines, plus enable simple access to raw geospatial data in web-friendly formats such as GeoJSON.

What do users want ?

Brian Timoney has reported metrics and a analysis of  how the public actually uses local goverment web maps. He has also created a minimally viable property lookup service.

In light of this Bill Morris has developed an alternative way of accessing public datasets that he feels is compelling to technicians as well as to the lay public, as an example, a template geoportal for accessing multipurpose public data, specifically, building records.

He targeted his geoportal on two audiences:

1. Citizens who want to access their own zoning information and permit history fast.  These folks can search for address, see buildings in context, and get the basic information in one minute or less.
2. GIS analysts who want to download raw building footprint geodata for urban planning, disaster response or cartography.   Thes folks acn download all the features within the current view extent, in a choice of interoperable formats.

Will IBM's adoption of OpenStack mean portable cloud applications ?

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being open, simple to implement, and massively scalable.  The OpenStack Foundation was founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA.

Last week IBM announced that all of its cloud offerings would be built around OpenStack.  But this could be more important than just an open platform for private cloud management.  IBM seems to be interested  in cloud portability, making applications portable between cloud vendors and avoiding cloud lock-in.  Right now if you develop an application on Amazon Web Services, for example, it is not an easy matter to port it to run on Rackspace.  IBM says that its objective is to make OpenStack a ubiquitous, open source infrastructure-as-a-service layer, analogous to what Apache represents in serving http.  When you recollect what IBM's support of the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, and Linux led to, this could have major implications for the future of cloud computing.

Cesium open source WebGL virtual globe and mapping Javascript library

Earlier this week on an Eclipse Foundation Locationtech teleconference, Matt Ford of Cesium provided an overview and demonstration of the features of Cesium.  You can watch the video here.

Cesium is an open source virtual globe and map library written in JavaScript using WebGL. It provides hardware-accelerated graphics in a browser without a plugin.  Cesium supports a 3D globe, 2D map, and 2.5D with the same API.   Cesium allows you to layer imagery from multiple sources, including imagery (WMS, OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, ArcGIS MapServer, and standard image files) and vector data (KML, ESRI Shapefiles, WebGL, JSON).

It supprts vector editing including pionts (labels and markers), polylines, polygons with holes, circles, ellipses, and other shapes.  It also supports cameras and animation.  One of the cool things Matt showed was a camera following a satellite.  And perhaps the coolest capability is materials which alows you to define the appearance of the surface of objects using textures such as water, checkerboard, stripes, dots, brick, cement, asphalt, wood, grass, diffuse map, specular map, reflection, and refraction.

Functionality that Cesium already supports in beta and that looked impressive in Matt's demonstration is digital terrain models.  Functionality currently under development are

• Models - the example shown was a rubber duck
• Integration with other open source packages - the example shown was a plugin for GeoServer

But perhaps the most exciting capability to look forward to is an OpenLayers API on top of Cesium.  This would provide OpenLayers with an extremely rich set of 3D capabilities in the very near future.

What to expect in the OpenLayers 3

Last week on an Eclipse Foundation Locationtech teleconference, Tim Schaub of OpenGeo outlined the plans for the next version of OpenLayers.   You can watch the video and contribute to the effort  here.

OpenLayers2 was released in Aug 2006.  It implemented a lot of the cool stuff based on AJAX and tiles in Google Maps as a Javascript library.  OL2 became the open-source standard for slippy maps and the most widely used geospatial Javascript library. 

The technology ecosystem at that time was very different from today.  For example, IE6 had about 86% of the browser market and mobile devices did not support Javascript.  Since then many things have changed, but since backward compatibiity has always been a priority for OpenLayers, applications that ran in 2006 still run today.  Some of the reasons that OpenLayers became so widely adopted are support for many different formats and protocols, both proprietary and open standards, support for multiple geographical projections,  and advanced vector editing and rendering, first introduced in OL2.4. 

But overtime backward compatibility and the evoluton of the library in a rapidly chaning technical world has meant that cruft has accumulated and it is felt that it is time for a major upgrade to OpenLayers.

Goals of OpenLayers3

The major goal for the next major version release of OpenLayers is to build on existing OL2 functionality, but to make it small for fast loading and fast running.  It is also intended to have broad functionality, all of which is tested together, unlike some of the micro frameworks that have appeared recently.  OL3 also needs to be more friendly, includes a new, clean API and a modern look for UI components.

Some of the important new capabiltiies planned for OL3 include

• Separated renderers - support for both traditional DOM as well as WebGL renderers.  In the future there could be renderers for PDF and Canvas 2D. 
• Google's Closure Compiler - allows you to build javascript libraries that include just the code you need to run your application, to run it in a specific browser or on a specific device, or to run it with a specific renderer.
• Cesium - the intention is to integrate the new Cesium library to enable full 3D spinning globe capabilities in OL3.

Some of the other developments planned include oblique views, animation, cameras, and tutorials and improved documentation.  More technical details about OL3 can be found here.

GITA PNW: Modern web portals for utilities - asynchronously updatable mashups and standards-based

At the 12th annual Geospatial Information and Technology (GITA) Pacific Northwest Conference at Salishan on the Oregon Coast, Michael Baker gave an enlightening presentation on web portals and how modern architectures make it possible for them to be much more than a flashy website.

A modern web portal is a web-based, business-critical system that integrates information,  business applications, and views to create a collaborative environment for managing utility workflows such as outage management, vegetation management, inspections, reliability, and other critical workflows.

The most important factor that differentiates modern web portals is that a modern web architecture (which is based on a service oriented architecture or SOA) allows data from many independent, data sources to be mashed together into a single web application in which each data source is independently (asynchronously) updatable.  Michael gave a simple example in which the base map came from Google Map, point outage data from a utility's outage mamagement system, weather data from an external weather service, and an additional aggregation layer provided a dashboard showing the utility's key performance indicators.

The other important factor that differentiates modern web portals is that they are standards-based.  Michael specifically mentioned Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards such as WMS, WFS and WCS that enable the integration of data from different geospatial applications from different vendors, ESRI, Intergraph, Autodesk and others.

He also provided guidelines on how to go about creating a utility portal.  He recommended focussing on how the portal helps the utility's business needs, and how critical clearly understood business needs are to defining good portal requirements.  He also made the interesting point that a portal is often the first step a utility makes toward a service oriented architecture.  Finally, he recommended that if you listen carefully to your business users, you will be able to create a shared vision for the portal including how it will be used and how it will benefit your utility. 

As an example, I blogged previously about Burlington Hydro and the portal that AGSI has built for managing and analyzing in real-time large volumes of data coming from many intelligent electronic devices comprising a smart grid.

Heatmap of the Blitz in Google Maps

Keir Clarke on the Google Maps Mania blog has developed a Blitz Map, which is is an animated heat map of the bombs dropped on London on the first night of the London Blitz in the Second World War. At this point he has included half of the over 800 bombs.  He's using the new heatmaps function in the Google Maps API.

Apple Maps adds 3D cities

Apple has announced their new Maps application as part of iOS 6.  Peter Batty has given a very interesting assessment of what's there and what isn't, compared to Google, and what the future looks like for Apple iOS users.

Overall Peter was impressed with what Apple has done with the new Maps application.  The basic 2D map functionality uses vector graphics so it allows for very smooth zooming and rotating.  He said the big thing it is missing is Street View.  For you folks like myself who take public transit whenever possible, Apple is not providing transit directions.  They are being left to third parties so it is not clear at this point how that will happen.  Peter sees search for points of interest has added some nice features like Yelp and OpenTable integration, and turn by turn directions with voice guidance.  He also mentions that Siri integration (voice commands) is a huge plus for existing iPhone users.

Late last year Apple acquired C3, a Swedish company that had developed 3D technology for viewing entire cities.  Apple has added 3D city maps based on C3 technology that "looked cool as everyone expected." But apparently Apple's pitch is that the 3D technology is a cool extra rather than the main substance.  Peter found that the 3D buildings "definitely have a wow factor and performance is very good."  Based on the demo Peter saw the cities for which Apple appears to provide data are

US

San Francisco
Las Vegas
Chicago
Seattle
Miami
Los Angeles

Canada

Montreal

Europe

Copenhagen

Australia

Sydney
Melbourne

Peter's forecast is that "the great majority of the 250 million or so iPhone users will switch to using Apple Maps when iOS 6 comes out", meaning that they will switch from Google Maps.  He speculates that if Google continues to offer Google Maps on the iPhone, they will have to provide the same features as the Android version, in particular the turn by turn navigation features.

Peter has upgraded to iOS6 beta and is providing his assessment of his experience with the new Apple Maps application on his Geothought blog.

Chrome browser exceeds IE for the first time

According to StatCounter, Google's Chrome share of the market rose to 32.8% in the week ending May 20, while Internet Explorer's share of the market dropped to 31.9%. This is the first week that Chrome has exceeded Internet Explorer.

Data creation is not information use

At the Global Geospatial Conference 2012 in Québec City, Ed Parsons of Google argued in favour of web access to micro data including geospatial. 

Google's goal is to organize the world's information, of which geospatial is just one type and not really so special, as Jack Pellicci then of Oracle, has been advancing for many years. Ed emphasized the the importance of access to data by paraphrasing the well-known movie adage, if you build it, they will not necessarily come.  In the case of spatial data infrastructure (SDI), a lot of this data has been available for a long time, but without access it has sat on shelves gathering dust.  Data creation is not information use and the focus on data creation has obscured the importance of analysis and visualization, and above all access.  Fortunately, the global information infrastructure already exists to enable this to happen in the form of the Web, which Google used to fundamentally change the way the world accesses spatial data.

Web access to micro data

He then gave an example of being able to access information about one if his favourite pubs in London by a single click, and said that we should be able to access information about individual items of infrastructure, whether a utility pole, power transformer, or water valve in the same way.  Fundamentally this is the internet of things where everything has an internet address or URI.  He gave another example, accessing information about a particular property parcel in Nanaimo, BC with a single click, which is also a good example of how the web allows you to visualize the same data in different ways.

He also made the case for adding more structure to the web, as a way of making the information you retrieve on the web more meaningful.  Many sites are generated from structured data, typically stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data, but many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data.  One way to do this is to use a standard set of html tags, defining schemas, that you can use to markup web pages in ways recognized by major search providers.

AutoCAD WS 1.4 includes GPS support

AutoCAD WS is a cloud application that allows you to view, edit, and share drawings through a web browser or a mobile device including iOS and Android phones and tablets. 

The latest version AutoCAD WS 1.4 supports GPS. It also supports viewing of 3D drawings and remote plotting using any web-connected HP ePrinter.