"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 more information, contact us or call 888-898-3404 x 2.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
Costs increase, interoperability decreases.
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).
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.
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.
Lets expand on the steps involved in deciding on the value of a standard:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
Costs increase, interoperability decreases.
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).
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.
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.
Lets expand on the steps involved in deciding on the value of a standard:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
A VerySpatial Podcast
Shownotes – Episode 409
May 19, 2013
Main Topic: Some thoughts on geofencing
Click for the detailed shownotes
Music
News
Web Corner
Main topic
Tip of the week
Events Corner
This week, A VerySpatial Podcast is sponsored by Esri
The GeoServer team is pleased to announce the release of GeoServer 2.3.2 for download.
More details can be found in the GeoServer 2.3.2 Release Notes.