Between the Poles

MapAsia 2006

I am at MapAsia 2006 in Bangkok this week and it looks like there is a good turnout.  I must admit that the opening of the exhibition was one of the most unique openings I have experienced.  GIS Development, who is the organizer of MapAsia, always seems to find new and unique ways to distinguish their events from the norm.

This afternoon was the inaugural session with representatives from international geospatial organizations and the Royal Thai Government welcoming the delegates.  I think one of the most interesting presentations discussed one of the most important issues in Asia, the availability of geospatial data.   Geospatial data is traditionally closely guarded and very hard to get access to especially for large scales.   Unlike the UK where access to government data is really only restricted because the OS is expected to make a profit, in Asia security is the most common reason I hear for the limited availability of geospatial data.

The most interesting aspect of this is that it appears that the GPS is really taking control of geospatial data out of the hands of governments.  In North American parlance the GPS is democratizing geospatial data. In the past you needed governments with expensive technology, first theodylites, and then airplanes, satellites and computers to create maps.  Now anybody with $100 can buy a GPS and create maps.   A classic example of this the famous Indian project called Map the Neighbourhood in which students between 8 and 12 equipped with GPS's created maps of their neighbourhoods.

I have referred previously to a very interesting site Malaysia Singapore Maps where GPS enthusiasts have created excellent Garmin compatible maps of Malaysia and Singapore.  I was in Singapore over the weekend and I can attest that these maps are not only visually excellent but can provide detailed directions from A to B.  You need Mapsource, which you normally get with Garmin GPSs.

MapGuide Open Source 1.0.1

MapGuide Open Source 1.0.1 was released last week.  I would suggest that the most interesting thing about this release is that it is the first release to be bundled with Web Studio, the web-based open source tool for developing MapGuide applications.

If you want an initial assessment of this release of MG OS, check out Jason Birch's blog.

GeoWeb 2006

GeoWeb 2006 is the outgrowth of an annual conference that used to be called GML Days, but GeoWeb is now much broader than strictly GML.  It is also now supported by GITA, which opens the door to a much broader range of folks including utilities, telcos, and municipalities.   This year there were about three times the number of attendees compared to last year's conference.

There were keynotes this year from some very well known players in the geospatial market including Microsoft Virtual Earth (Steven Lawler), Google Earth (Michael Jones), Oracle Spatial (Xavier Lopez), and Autodesk (Gary Lang).  In addition Kurt Cagle who is well-known in internet, XML, and SVG circles gave a fascinating keynote on SVG (in addition to an SVG workshop.)

The things that I found most interesting about GeoWeb 2006 was the presence of the mass market folks (Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth), the number of presentations on open standards, and the increases awareness of open source geospatial.

Mass Market Geospatial

What struck me most forcefully is how competitive the mass market spatial business is becoming.  Steven Lawler outlined major plans for Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Windows.live.local including extending Bird's Eye View to many more areas.  Michael Jones, besides including a great picture of and quote from Jack Dangermond, released some astounding numbers that give you some idea of the magnitude of users and developers that Google Earth is attracting, for example, in the first 12 months

• 32,000 developer sites
• 100,000,000 different individuals installed Google Earth

This is simply mind-boggling for anyone in the traditional GIS industry, but is what Dave Sonnen has been predicting for the relative sizes of the spatial-enabled vs traditional GIS markets.

Open Standards

There were quite a number of presentation on open standards including GML (of course) and WFS, but also the web catalog service, XQuery, GeoRSS, LandXML, and SVG.  Henry Tom gave an excellent overview of the work of the ISO TC/211 and other standards organizations and Olaf Ostensen described how TC/211, OGC, and other standards relate to the European INSPIRE initiative.

There was also a scintillating panel discussion on open standards in which I, Clemens Portele (Interactive Instruments), Noah Doyle (Google Earth), and Nic Snape (Laser-scan) participated.  The discussion focussed on whether our objective should be as Clemens phrased it "a grand unified" standard.  By the end of the discussion I think there was a consensus that simplicity  is an essential feature of successful standards, and that the objective should be several simple standards rather than a single complex grand unified standard.  To me this is relevant to LandXML (LandXML.org ), which is a widely-used and widely-supported, in other words successful, standard for highway and transporation information.  One of the reasons for the success of LandXML is its simplicity and industry focus.  It is designed to satisfy a well-defined business objective and the LandXML folks have been wise to keep it simple and industry focussed and when necessary to resist forcing it into a "grand unified" procrustean bed.

Open Source Geospatial

There were three presentations on open source and tremendous interest among attendees, as you might expect from a predominatley technical audience.  Mike Gerlek, who has been involved with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) from the beginning, presented on overview of the OSGEO, I discussed some of the implications of the OSGEO for the enterprise geospatial market, and Gary Lang in his plenary described the process by which a successful closed source company embraced open source.  I'll cover Gary's talk in a future blog because I expect this is of interest to many folks in closed source companies who may be in the midst of a similar discussion.

Fire Works Italia

To wrap this up I'll include some pictures of the absolutely amazing fire works display put on by an Italian team in English Bay.

Managing DWG spatial data using Oracle Locator

While I was in Brazil I had the opportunity to meet with Carlos Diniz and Fabio Gomes from DigiCADD. DigiCADD has been working with a large telephone company in Brazil, who have been using AutoCAD for ten years, have a large number of DWG files,  and who want to make this large volume of data available to a wide audience.  To do this they plan to improve the manageability of their data, streamline data maintenance, and make their data available to their field staff by making this data accessible in real-time using a spatially-enabled relational database management system (RDBMS).  Using Autodesk Map, DigiCADD has loaded DWG files into Oracle Locator 9.2 and at this point have about 0.7M polygonal, 10M linear, and 21M point objects (total of about 32M spatial objects) stored in Oracle Locator. 

I saw DigiCADD's MapGuide application for publishng this data to about 1000 web users and was impressed both with what DigiCADD has built and the scalability that a spatially-enabled RDBMS like Oracle Locator together with MapGuide provides.  DigiCADD intends to completely eliminate the need for maintaining and managing DWG files by providing real-time update capability for all spatial data in Oracle Locator using Autodesk Map3D and MapGuide Enterprise.  They also plan to add imagery support, integrate their spatial data with other enterprise systems, and provide access to the data to field staff using mobile devices.

Open Source Geospatial in Brazil

I recently attended GeoBrasil 2006 in Sao Paulo, where there is and has been for some time a very active open source geospatial community.  For example, the 2nd Brazilian MapServer meeting was held last November in Itajai.  A lot of this can be ascribed to the active encouragement from the Universidad do Vale do Itajai (UNIVALI) in Itajai.  For many years Brazil has had "open source" projects that, like GRASS, predate open source.  For example, the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) hosts TerraLib (TerraLib ) and TerraView (TerraView ).

An interesting web site where you can find a Brazilian Portuguese Linux distro specifically for geospatially aware applications is (Geolivre ) or (UMN Geolivre ).  One of the administrators in Helton Uchoa, whom I met at GeoBrazil and who delivered a presentation on the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (osgeo.org).

I participated on an interesting panel with Mitch Garnett from ESRI and Rubens Camargo from SISGRAPH (an Intergraph partner).  I saw broad agreement among us that sharing data is good, that Google Earth is making geospatial technology accessible to many more people - though Mitch made the point that it may not be raising the awareness of GIS, that geospatial is becoming ubiquitous - though often hidden, that geospatial web services are increasingly important, and that the pace with which geospatial is being integrated with enterprise systems is increasing.  I think it was also indicative that every speaker mentioned open source geospatial, which to me shows that this is a phenomenon that can not be ignored, certainly not in Brazil.