Between the Poles

ESRI UC: 3D and other themes of this year's conference

According to Jack Dangermond who led the plenary sessions on the first day,  this year in San Diego 12000 people from 130 countries were in San Diego for the 33rd Esri International User Conference.

I gravitated primarily to the utility sessions.  According to Bill Meehan, who is responsible for ESRI's utility business, there were 750 utility folks at this year's UC.

GIS is everywhere

GIS is being used in diveerse areas including environmental monitoring, climate change, permafrost melting, sea level rise, agriculture, water resources, aquaculture, pollution remediation, energy resources management, land information systems, urban design, utility network management, wasteshed modeling, utility pole inspection, sewer rehabilitation, port management, indoor GIS, iInsurance risk management, health-related mapping, law enforcement, mapping where space debris might fall, flood risk mapping, storm tracking and damage assessment,  geodesign, crowdsourcing for collecting a variety of data, interoperabilty, citizen engagement, government transparency, cartography, geology and mining, automatic generalization of different scale maps, story maps, portals for infrastructure, and open data, to mention just a few of the things that were singled out in the plenary session. 

Some of the areas that were singled out  for special recognition were

• Special Achievements in GIS award went to the Dartmouth Atlas for showing geographically how outcomes and the cost of medical procedures varies depending on location across the U.S. 
• The Hong Kong Lands Department received the Enterprise GIS award for their land management system which they started in the 1990's and is now in its second generation. 
• Tbe President's Award went to Direct Relief which distributes different types of equipment to people around the globe in need with 99% efficiency according to Forbes.

Themes

The theme of this UC was GIS transforming our world, not only changing the physical world as we know it, but also changing our perception of the world and how GIS has and will fundamentally help us collectively build a better future.  A classic example that has impacted everyone on the planet is GPS or more generally GNSS.   As a number of speakers including Dangermond said we are never lost any more and that is fundamental change to how we perceive the world.

Some of the major themes that emerged at this UC are common to many software and service providers in the IT sector, but some of these are new or unique to ESRI. 

Climate change

We are facing serious global challenges, in particular climate change, which both at the Geodesign Summit and at this UC conference appears to be a personal challenge for Dangermond who sees GIS as contributing in major way in creating a more sustainable future.  He sees GIS helping to change how we think and act and how we do basic things such as design. 

GIS across the organization

A theme that was pervasive throughout the conference including in the utility sessions was the need to make GIS pervasive across the organization because 90% of the data that organizations are collecting and managing has location.  This was also true in utility sessions I attended, where the thrust is to expand the use of GIS outside of the traditional area of records management into other departments.

Vertical industry "templates"

In the utility and telecommunications sectors there is a major effort underway to create preconfigured vertical "templates" for specific vertical industries.  In the utility sector one was announced yesterday for the electric power Industry, and others are underway for gas and telecommunications.  These templates are a collection of data and tools for vertical industries and are available as open source on Github.

Web

The web was pervasive, It was hard to find a session where the theme that desktop GIS is being transformed into web GIS did not come up.  It doesn't mean that the desktop is going to go away in the near future, but sharing data, applications, and apps is being recognized as a common goal and web GIS makes this very easy to do.  This includes web portals for accessing enterprise data over the web.

Cloud

A lot of the traditonal desktop GIS capabilities are now being made available in the cloud so that all you need is an iOS or Android device or a web browser.  This is also available to large enterprises who need to keep their data on their own servers for security reasons.  Cindy Salas from Centerpoint Energy demonstrated ESRI's cloud capability but running "on premise" completely wthin Centerpoint's fire wall. 

Integration

Being able to integrate location and the spatial dimension into enterprise applications such as ERP (SAP), business intelliegence (IBM Cognos), Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and Excel spreadsheets is a new focus for ESRI.   They have already created plugins for several well-known applications.

Mobile devices

In the past when you talked about mobile in the context of utilities, you were normally dealing with Panasonic Toughbooks which could cost up to $6 000 each.  At this conference just about every application was able to run on a variety of low cost mobile devices including iOS and Android mobile devices.  One of the sessions I attended was about the National Broadband rollout in Australia where the 500 field folks who are doing 300 000 pit inspections were all equipped with iPads, which you might have thought were too fragile for pretty rough field work..  This project has been underway for something like 18 months and todate only two of the iPads have been damaged.

Big data

Spatial data volumes whether from sensors at utilities, from LIDAR scanning of transmission lines, or from earth obsevration satellited are now reckoned in terabytes.  There were sessions on spatially enabling Hadoop, SAP HANA and other big data management systems for managing these data volumes.

Real-time

In the utility track managing real-tme data from sensors on transformers, smart meters, phasors, and other devices and enabling near real-time decision making was a common theme.  A general event processing capability that can be triggered by rules has been added to the quiver to make this possible for any data stream. 

In the area of imagery, Digital Globe imagery can be accessed with 4-5 hours of acquisition.

Analytics

Big data and real-time means that we need to be able to understand what these huge volumes of data are telling us and then enable decision-making, automated or human mediated, as rapidly as possible.  If a transformer is running hot, we can't wait a week until the next service check to reconfigure the network because by then we may have reduced it projected lifetime by 10%.  There were "location analytics" sessions in most of the vertical industry sessions including utilities.

Content

Software companies like ESRI and Hexagon are now in the content busines.  And with the data beng made available in the cloud, you can access it through web GIS or desktop GIS. The data includes traditional topographic maps, digital terrain models, imagery from earth observation satellites from Digital Globe and others some of it near real-time (fr example, from Digital Globe within 4-5 hours of acqusition), demographics, and others.

Dangermond's term for this is the "living atlas" because this body of content is intended to be dynamic, real-rime and comprehensive.  The goal seems to be all the data you would need to manage the planet.

Some of the content explicitly mentioned includes

• basemaps
• community. content
• imagery
• 30 cm coverage of the US
• 60 cm coverage of Western Europe
• imagery for the middle east and asia in total covering 2/3 of the world
• health
• lifestyle
• economics
• demographics, at the zip code, county, state, and national levels
• scientific maps including environmental, energy, infrastructure, and terrain models
• landscape layers

This data is accessible to web and desktop applications and makes it very easy to do standard spatial analytical things like multi-criteria suitability or site selection mapping.  Users can also publish their own data to the cloud.

Education

This has always been a strong focus area for ESRI and from Dangermond's perspective with the challenges the world is facing, GIS professionals will be even more critical in the future.  There is focus on advancing spatial literacy to a broader audience than in the past.

LiDAR

Laser scanning is a major source of important data for the construction industry (right of way determination and construction progress monitoring), utilities (transmission vegetation management), and other industries.  ESRI has made this a focus area and there were a number of sessions devoted to managing and analyzing point cloud data.

3D

Dangermond specifically singled out 3D as a major capability area for ESRI.  There are specialized 3D products, but 3D is also being built into ESRI main stream GIS and spatial analytical products.

3D city models

At the plenary there was a demonstration of how to quickly build a 3D city model from 2D data, including extruding buildings from a 3D building footprint and height, adding textures depending on building types, and then tools for analysis such as zoning and shadow analysis and visualization including flythroughs.  These models are sharable on the cloud as web scenes requiring only a web browser (with no plugins) or iOS mobile devices.

Geodesign

At the UC ESRI is demonstrating a prototype of a product designed specifically for geodesign.

Open data

Dangermond specifically mentioned the newest national open data initiative in Peru. 

Crowdsourcing/volunteered data

There are sessions specifically on editing and manipulating OpenStreetMap data.

Platform for urban planning for infrastructure and other municipal services

At the INSPIRE conference in Florence, Ewa Klien, Joachim Rix and Didier Vancutsen gave an overview of an interesting EU project called Plan4business.   Plan4business is designed to address the challenges faced by urban and regional planners today.   Datasets are not easy to use for business issues such as comparative analysis, monitoring and analysing urban statistics, or developing urban inquiries and projects.  Private and public sector researchers, planners and professionals from the real estate world, insurance, energy, agriculture, and others as well as investors realize that they need to develop the ability to used spatial datasets from many sources to perform complex analysis and then visualize the results for non-technical decision makers.  The Plan4business project is aiming at developing a web-based platform which will offer urban and regional planning data users a full range of compatible planning data and services such as transport and energy infrastructure, regional, environmental, and zoning planning.  The Plan4business project started in April 2012 and will continue through March 2014.

The Plan4business platform is intended to be competitive from a business perspective.  It is intended that the platform will provide content as well as analysis and visualisation services via both an Application Programming Interface (API) for application developersand an interactive web frontend for end users. Functions offered will have to range from simple statistical analysis to complex trend detection and to 2D/3D representations. The Plan4business platform is intended to provide opportunities for planners, private consultants, public and private data providers, and researchers.

To provide some idea of the type of planning projects that are envisaged as using this platform., a number of operational use cases have been defined for both the private and the public sectors.

Private Sector

• Spatial Planners, Planning engineers
• Banks and Insurances Services
• Energy and environmental services
• Health Services
• Commercial Services
• Real Estate
• Telecommunication Services
• Tourism and Travel Services
• Transport and Logistics Services
• Security Services

Public sector

• Spatial Planning Authorities
• Fiscal Authorities
• Regional Development Agencies
• Other Public Services
• Public researchers / Universities

Energy and environmental services

For example, the Energy and environmental services use case involves an environmental agency that needs to design and propose a number of policies for managing and moderating noise levels in urban realm, both residential settlements and productive/industrial areas. Policy designers have to assess criterion, together with competent local authorities, to limit/contain noise level to which humans are exposed, particularly in built-up areas, in public parks or other quiet areas in an agglomeration, in quiet areas in open country, near schools, hospitals and other noise-sensitive buildings areas.

Open source project for 3D urban models supporting crowdsourced data and smart services

Yesterday at the INSPIRE conference, Federico Prandi gave a presentation about a fascinating open source project called i-SCOPE that involves developing 3D urban models that can be used to provide interactive smart services.

The concept is to develop 3D Urban Information Models (UIM) from accurate urban-scale geospatial information as a basis for smart web services based on geometric, semantic, morphological and structural information at urban scale level.  This information can be used by local governments improve decision-making on issues related to urban planning, promote inclusion among various users groups (e.g. elder or disabled citizens), involve citizens collecting geo-referenced information based on location based services.  i-SCOPE provides an open platform on which ‘smart city’ services can be developed.

The models are based on CityGML 2.0.  CityGML includes 3D geometry, topology, semantics, and appearance for urban environments. CityGML also supports a standard mechanism for adding extensions, called Application Domain Extensions (ADEs).  There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains.  For example,  I blogged about a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE that was proposed for city utility networks.

The I-SCOPE project has three very practical goals

• Improved inclusion and personal mobility of aging and disabled citizens through an accurate city-level personal routing service which accounts for detailed urban layout, features and barriers.
• Optimization of energy consumption through a service for accurate assessment of solar energy potential and energy loss at the building level.
• Environmental monitoring through a real-time environmental noise mapping service leveraging citizen’s involvement will who act as distributed sensors city-wide measuring noise levels through their mobile phones.

The concept is to develop ADEs to extend CityGML 2.0 for these three application areas.

Crowdsourcing

A very interesting and innovative aspect of the project is to use crowdsourcing to collect data for two of the application areas, mobility and noise mapping.  For example, for noise mapping the idea is to create real-time and aggregated noise maps through data collected by citizens who use of their mobile phones as noise sensors measuring city-wide noise levels.  In this way citizens are involved as prosumers (producers and consumers) of environmental data.

Some of the challenges of this approach that Federico discussed include estimating statistical significance, verifying the accuracy of citizen reported noise levels, and relating noise levels to specific features of the city model.

Oracle Spatial and Graph to support NURBS

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.

3D

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.

Economic value of big geospatial data could reach $700 billion/yr by 2020

McKinsey Global Institute published a report Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity that analyzes the state of digital data, how it is used in different domains in both the private and public sectors, and offers suggestions for policy makers. In addition to looking at big data as a whole, the report examines five areas in detail including personal location data.

Real-time location data generated by mobile phones and other devices has created an entirely new set of location-based services from navigation to pricing property and casualty insurance. Personal location data is a new horizontal application domain that includes industry sectors from utilities to insurance to transportation. The growing smart phone market is creating an exponentially growing volume of location-aware data.  McKinsey sees this domain as a hotbed of innovation that has the potential to create significant value for consumers.  For example, use of real-time  traffic information for navigation will create a quantifiable consumer benefit by saving time spent traveling and fuel consumption. McKeinsey expects the economic value these innovations create to far exceed the revenue generated by service providers.

Economic value

Mobile phones with GNSS chips have created a revolution will continue over the next  decade. This personal location domain offers the potential for huge new value creation over the next ten years that McKinsey estimates at more than $100 billion/yr (about 0.14% of world GDP) in revenue to service providers and as much as $700 billion/yr (about 1% of world GDP) in value to consumer and business end users. Realizing this value will require investment in technology, infrastructure, and personnel as well as appropriate government action.

McKinsey's detailed analysis of the major applications of personal location data finds that, in ten years’ time, these applications could create value of $100 billion/yr or more for service providers  primarily from sales of navigation hardware and revenue from LBS, mobile LBS premiums, and geo-targeted advertising.

McKinsey estimates that by 2020 the benefits (difference between willingness to pay and the cost of applications) that customers, consumers and businesses, will enjoy from location-based applications will reach as as $700 billion/yr. Most of this, about 70 %, will be the consumer benefit from time and fuel saved by using GNSS navigation systems including those with real-time traffic information and mobile LBS applications. The remaining 30 % of the benefits will be through location-enabled applications such as geo-targeted mobile advertising.  Smart navigation applications are estimated to provide $500 billion in value to global consumers in time and fuel saved by 2020. Geo-targeted advertising could represent more than 5 percent of total global advertising spending by 2020.

For comparison, a recent study prepared for Google by Oxera Consulting Ltd in the UK estimated global revenues from geospatial products and services to be $150-$270 billion per year.  The geospatial industry is estimated to be growing by 13% per year through 2016.  These numbers were estimated using a different methodology to McKinsey's. The lower estimate of $150 billion/year was estimated using a bottom-up approach based on the Bloomberg BICS classification of companies worldwide and assumptions about allocating the revenue from companies that provide geospatial in addition to other services such as Trimble.  The $270 billion number was estimated by scaling up the US revenue estimated by Boston Consulting Group to come up with a world estimate.

Personal location data

McKinsey includes sources of personal location data that locate an individual to at least within a couple of city blocks in an urban settingin its analysis.

• Credit and debit card payments from cards processed at point-of-sale (POS) terminals and  automated teller machines. In 2008, there were 90 billion to 100 billion transactions of this type worldwide.
• Mobile phones - the location of such devices can be triangulated from cell-tower signals.  In 2011 there were about 6 billion of these.
• Smartphones with GPS - about 600 million devices in 2010 and the number is growing at about 20 % per year. Many smartphones also have Wi-Fi networking capability, which can be linked to a physical location of a Wi-Fi network.

In the future McKinsey expects indoor location to become more important.  They mention Shopkick, which allows merchants to track their customers from when they walk into a store, and Path Intelligence, which can track foot traffic within malls or amusement parks.

McKInsey's research estimates that the global pool of personal location data was at least 1 petabyte in 2009 and that this pool is growing by about 20 % a year. 

Location data generated by smartphones is growing at double the average rate of growth for all location data.  Asia is the leading region for the generation of personal location data because so many mobile phones are in use there. In 2010 the regions with the largest number of cell phone users were

• China 800 million
• India 650 million
• North America 300 million.

Applications of personal location data

McKInsey has identified three major categories of applications of personal location data.

• Location-based applications and services for individuals including smart routing, automotive telematics, and mobile-phone based location services
• Organizational use of individual personal location data that includes geo-targeted advertising, electronic toll collection, insurance pricing, and emergency response.
• Macro-level use of aggregate location data that includes urban planning and retail business intelligence.

Barriers to use of personal location data

Concerns about privacy and security was identified by McKinsey as a major barrier to future expansion of the use of personal location data. Laws are unclear about who owns that data and how it can be used.  McKinsey believes that a policy and legal framework that clearly describes the permissible and prohibited use of these data would be beneficial for all stakeholders.

For policy makers, McKinsey sees that a priority is incentives for innovation are in place including developing an up-to-date framework for intellectual property rules and rights, funding R&D in potential breakthrough areas, and ensuring that the infrastructure, including spectrum policies, is optimal.

Methodology

By looking at the value chain of location-based applications, McKinsey examined both the amount of data generation and the potential to create value.  McKInsey estimated the amount of personal location data generated in each category of application orsource device and in different geographic regions using the installed base of devices, usage behavior, and the frequency with which data are generated. To assess the potential value that data can generate, McKinsey estimated the economic value of each application to end users—individual consumers, enterprises, and government organizations.

Location-enabled Society: Mapping tweets using real-time big data technology and privacy

In a very appropriately titled session Taking Society's Pulse in Real-time at the Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society conference in Boston, one item really got people's attention focussed on the issues that arise from combining location with personal data. TweetMap is a technology that visualizes a large number of tweets on a map of the world. This is not the first time I have seen tweets mapped.  But what really got people's attention is that a speaker showed how to drill down to your neighbourhood and see what the people next door are tweeting about.  Of course you can do this without a map by simply following your neighbors on Twitter.  But somehow mapping it makes it seem more intrusive, even invasive to some people. In another demonstration, Tweetmap was used to show how a person sailing in the Caribbean could be tracked as they tweeted from their boat.

To be tracked geospatially on Twitter requires that you explicitly agree to geolocation tracking for Twitter on your iPhone or Android device.  For example, on an iPhone the geolocation option allows you to make your location known to others. Apps such as Facebook or Twitter for iPhone can report your location as well as the messages you post.  The iPhone requires that these applications obtain your permission before they can be enabled.  Apparently only about 2-4% of smart phone users, mostly younger folks, agree to this.  After seeing a Tweetmap drill down, I would expect that some people might have second thoughts about agreeing to the gelocation option. And in the not too distant future this will be possible in real-time on inexpensive hardware with open souce software.

TweetMap is an instance of MapD, a massively parallel database platform being developed through a collaboration between Todd Mostak, (a researcher at MIT), and the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA).  Currently the tweet database starts on 12/10/2012 and ends on 12/31/2012 and contains 125 million tweets.  The database can be queried by time, space, and keyword.  The ultimate objective is to be able to query billions of tweets live in real-time.  In this case real-time means from tweet to tweet on a map in under a second.

MapD is a general purpose SQL database that can be used to provide real-time visualization and analysis of very large data sets.  MapD uses commodity Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to parallelize compute intensive tasks such as querying and rendering very large data sets on-the-fly.  MapD runs on inexpensive hardware ( ~$1000) and is intended to be open source.

Geodesign Summit: Carl Steinitz on the early days of geodesign and organizing education for geodesign

Last night Carl Steinitz, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, gave two presentations.  The first addressed the queston of how to organize education in geosdesign and was the result of Carl being invited to advise a specific university (which remained nameless).  Last night's talk was the actual presentation he gave at the university at the culmination of a week's visit to the university.  The second was a personal history of the early days in the development of geodesign, primarily in the 60s.

Organizing education in geodesign

Geodesign involves bringing together the design professions (architecture and engineering), technology, the geographic sciences, and wha Carl calls the people of the place, the folks that are going to live in the result of a "geodesigned" environment.   A major challenge arises from scale.  Scientists approaach things from the universal anf global, designers from the local, even at the level of  one building or one parcel. 

Carl made the case that the most important thing that all students of geodesign, regardless of their background, need to learn is how to collaborate in a multi-disciplinary project environment involving architects, engineers, IT folks, and folks from geographically-oriented sciences.  He made specific recommendations on how to do this, not generally applicable to all unversities but tailored to the specific unnamed univesity he had been asked to advise.

Early days of geodesign

There is a fascinating book by Nick Chrisman called How computer mapping at Harvard became GIS that describes the early days in the development of geospatial technology and science. 

Carl Steinitz was part of these early developments.  Last night he gave a personal perspective on the early days of geodesign. 

From a technical perspective the developments I found most fascinating were the first computer geographic computer graphics that was created by hooking an IBM Selectric typewriter to a computer and using overprinting to create an approximation of grey scale thematic maps. The program to do this, SYMAP,  was developed by Howard Fisher in 1963.  When the Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics was founded in 1966, Howard Fisher was its first director.  Carl also described some of the ways colour printing was simulated in these early days, and early 3D imagery.

An interesting recollection in this fascinating talk was that computing was introduced into the design course via tutorials as and when needed, not as a separate course.

Carl described the development of geodesign methodogies such as moving from traditional programming languages in the direction of what became map algebra, spatial analysis, automating aspects of design and using linear programming to optimize design.  As Carl said they did it all, though some of it was too expensive at that time to be of practical use.

In memory of Wolfgang Bitterlich, one of the early innovators in geospatial analytics

Last week a memorial event was held in Ottawa for Wolfgang Bitterlich, one of the early technical innovators in spatial analyics.  Organized by his friend Mike Comeau, the memorial brought together a large group of Wolfgang's friends and colleagues including many that I have known from the early days of DPA and Tydac;  Laura Bobak, the daughter of Wolfgang's long time partner Esther Bobak and whom together with her sister Nadya Wolf regarded as his own daughters, Giulio Maffini and Maryjane Maffini, Richard Higgins, Louis Burry and his wife Sandra, Anne-Marie Hogue,Terry and Iris Moloney, Adla Worobec and Graham Stickler, Wendy and Dave Branson, Peter and Erin Kuciak, Kate Dickinson, Bruce Thomas, Rob and Beth VanWyngaarden, Bob Madill, and Chris McBean, Fred and Joanne Meth, and Klaus and Judy.  Quite a few years ago Wolf moved to Los Angeles, so this was the first opportunity for many of us in Ottawa to meet Wolf's wife Nidia, and her family, Elizabeth, Danny and Priscilla from Los Angeles.

Rick Higgins who was master of ceremonies, provided an opportunity for other people also to speak about their recollections of Wolf - Fred Meth, who had known Wolf since 1971; Giulio Maffini, the other half of the dynamic concept/technical team that conceived and implemented Tydac's SPANS (Spatial Analysis System); Laura Bobak, who gave a touching perspective on what Wolf meant to her as a surrogate father beginning at age eight; Maryjane Maffini who read a letter from Michael Simmons who had been with Wolf at Tydac; myself; Danny, Nidia's son; Rick Higgins who told a very funny story about Wolf as the Russian ambassador in Sri Lanka; Adla Worobec; Louis Burry, Wolf's right hand man who worked with Wolf on the technical side for many years in the 80's and early 90's; Doron Nussbaum who also worked with Wolf at Tydac; Judy and Klaus, who played chess with Wolf in Vancouver; and finally Maryjane read a letter from Fiona Smith in Australia.

SPANS

To put Wolf''s contribution in context, Canada has been an early leader in geospatial technology.  In the mid 1960’s, the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS), written in IBM 360 assembler and running on OS360 was developed under the aegis of the Department of Forestry and Rural Development.  By the late 1960's and 70s, and through the 1980's the Canada Land Inventory (CLI) was managing a geospatial database containing 2.5 million square kilometers of land and water. (The CLI database is still available on GeoGratis).

Richard Higgins founded DPA Consulting in October, 1973 in Halifax.  Giulio Maffini joined DPA in 1975 and together they managed to attract Wolfgang from the Technical University of Nova Scotia to join DPA, aslo in 1975.  As a result of the combination of Giulio's conceptual and Wolf's technical genius, many DPA projects were based on innovative modeling and simulation technologies.  In the early 1980's a few of these projects involved land use planning, for example, for Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and Sri Lanka.  Land use programming requires geospatial analysis, and Wolf implemented an early, but innovative, spatial analytics application based on a grid to support these projects.  In those days the only alternatives for printing graphics were very high end printers like Applicon and Calcomp, pen plotters, and dot matrix printers such as Printronix that allowed you address individual pixels.  I joined DPA in 1981 and to my recollection all of the graphics included in the Dartmouth and Sri Lanka reports were produced on a Printronix printer.  At this time, to give some context for the state of geospatial technology, IBM's GFIS system was storing spatial data in a hierarchical database on OS360 and ArcInfo, written in Fortran, was running on mini-computers.

The early 1980's were an inflection point in computing.  I had bought and assembled my first microcomputer, a Heathkit H89 with a Z80 CPU, in the late seventies and I had just successfully completed a DPA survey project using my H89 at considerably less than using an IBM360 timeshare would have cost.  It was obvious to me and to Richard and Giulio that the microcomputer dramatically reduced the cost of entry compared to mainframes and mini-computers making it possible for even small companies to develop and market products for the new platform.  

In 1984/1985 Richard and Giulio, projecting that the spatial analytics market had a large potential and seeing the rapid expansion of the microcomputer user community after the incredibly successful introduction in 1981 of the IBM PC, founded Tydac Technologies to develop and market a spatial software product that became known as SPANS. 

The initial Tydac team was the combination of Richard's business acumen and Giulio's conceptual and Wolfgang's mathematical genius.  Later Louis Burry brought his programming and system architecture expertise to Tydac to complement Wolf's mathematical genius. 

The most innovative element of the SPANS system was the use of quadtrees, a mathematical approach used by Wolf to provide an efficient grid-based foundation for spatial analytics. 

Another major innovation was potential mapping, known as POT MAP to SPANS users, and as multi-factor suitability analysis to the broader geospatial community, that allows you to model and display spatially land use suitability for agricultural, foresty, industrial, and commercial projects.  The SPANS modeling language allowed users to perform very sophisticated suitability analyses involving many variables.  SPANS users believe that even today no GIS has reached the level of spatial analytics that was possible with the SPANS modeling language.  SPANS originally was developed and ran on DOS with high end graphics cards from companies such as Number Nine.  Later it was migrated to OS/2.  The first SPANS product on Windows was SPANS MAP.

I joined Tydac in 1987 and by the early 1990's Tydac was one was one of the top 10 GIS companies in the world with more than 3000 systems installed in over 60 countries.  In the December 1992 issue of InfoWorld, there was a very interesting review of several of the geospatial products that were available at that time including Atlas GIS 2.0, MapInfo for Windows 2.0, and SPANS GIS 5.0.  The review was very perceptive,

"Tydac Technologies Corp's Spatial Analysis System (SPANS) GIS is the most powerful program in this comparison.  In addition to its capability to incorporate both raster and vector images into maps, this OS/2 program offers an extremely strong, if difficult-to-learn, set of analytic tools. ... Surprisingly, SPANS GIS lacks some of the basic features one would expect in such as high-end program, such as address geocoding and a traditional database interface.  And the program almost completely lacks formatting features required to print high-quality map presentations.  For these tasks, SPANS GIS relies upon a lower end sibling, SPANS MAP, which is capable of loading and altering maps from SPANS GIS."

As I was the project lead for SPANS MAP, I knew exactly what the technical issues were, but what is perhaps only clear in hindsight is that SPANS was an innovative spatial analytics engine, way ahead of its time, capable of the most sophisticated spatial analysis.  To categorize it as a general purpose GIS was misrepresenting it and its capabilities.

To continue the saga of Tydac, in 1991 Flavio Hendry founded Tydac AG in Bern, Switzerland, so the Tydac name continues to this day.  In fact a few years ago, Flavio asked me to come to the Tydac AG User Group meeting in Küsnacht to speak on the topic "20 Years of GIS: From SPANS to Google".  The SPANS code base was acquired by PCI, the company to which Louis Burry moved, and is incorporated in PCI's Geomatica.

Alll of us who were involved with SPANS recognize that Wolf's innovative technical genius provided the foundation for an, even to this day, amazingly innovative geospatial analytical engine that moved goepatial analytics far ahead of the simple mapping applications that were typical of GIS products in the 1980's.  But many of us remember Wolf  not just as  colleague but as a friend.  Laura's recollections of Wolf were so poignant at the memorial event.  Giulio's and others' recollections expressed such a sadness about Wolf's leaving us because he was a friend.   My wife Ellen and I often went swimming with Wolf at Blanchard Beach on Meech Lake, his favourite swimming location.  We also remember having a great time touring the lock sites on the Rideau Canal with Wolf and Esther.  But what remains in my memory, and it was expressed so well in Laura's recollections, was Wolf's incredible loyalty to those near and dear to him.  He was a great innovator and for many of us a good friend.