Stevenson, S. What Your Klout Score Really Means. Wired, April 24, 2012

I'm beginning to work on my presentation for the upcoming Linked Ancient World Data Institute at ISAW. Here's what I'd like to accomplish in three bullets.

• Engage attendees in thinking outside the database and thinking and talking about the architecture of the web.
• Make a case for using HTTP URIs (aka URLs) whenever possible instead of other identifiers or addresses.
• Talk about using links in data for doing work (using verbs) in contrast to using linked data for reasoning (with nouns).

How to turn expertly curated non-linked data (digital scholarly editions of texts, etc) into RDF is one linked data problem, the one we're most familiar with and most focused on. How to use semantic web architecture and links to initiate and curate "born-linked" data is another interesting and important set of problems – to me, at least, and I hope to be able to make it compelling to everyone else.

Pleiades remains the only classics project in the Linked Open Data cloud today (http://thedatahub.org/group/lodcloud?q=classics) and I'd also like to talk about how other projects can join it, but time may be too short for this.

Sublime Text 2 has managed to wrest me away from Komodo Edit, my code buddy of choice for a long time. I like Sublime Text 2 so much that I dropped $60 (gasp!) on it, and I haven’t dropped money on an editor in ages.  It’s a fast, beautiful editor, and the plugin ecosystem is very robust.

One of my must-have plugins is SublimeLinter, which highlights lines of code the linter deems to contain (potential) errors, highlights things like TODO lines, and other goodies. It relies on node.js for a number of the base linters (JavaScript and CSS in particular). This seems to just work under Linux, but it just doesn’t under Windows. To get it up and running:

• Install node.js. Which, by the way, is pretty darn awesome in its own right.
• Open up Sublime Text, and close all open files.
• Head to Preferences->Package Settings->SublimeLinter->Settings – User (it will be empty if you haven’t messed with it before), and insert the following:

{

  "sublimelinter_executable_map":
    {
        "javascript":"C:/Program Files (x86)/nodejs/node.exe",
        "css":"C:/Program Files (x86)/nodejs/node.exe"
    }

}

• This is also where you’d put paths to, say, php for linting. Make sure you get the path to node correct – this is the default location on a Windows 7 install. Save the file, close the file, and restart Sublime Text.
• Marvel at how bad your code is.

You can tweak down the linting options in your settings file. The default CSS linting rules in particular are set to kill. The default JS linting rules aren’t so bad.

The concept of human geography covers a wide spectrum of functions — from understanding tribal boundaries, political ideology, birth and death rates, populous places, proximity to health facilities, principal market commodities to fully grasping ethnicity and languages. But one of the most fundamental aspects of human geography is being able to truly understand another culture. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is embarking on a new program that aims to bring our ‘cultural understanding’ of other nations to the next level.

According to NextGov, IARPA is seeking ideas for how to develop simulation tools that would allow a person to “experience a situation or interaction as if they were someone from a different culture.” Currently, IARPA is seeking “theories, techniques, tools, and metrics that would aid in building and objectively measuring capabilities that enable someone to ‘suspend’ their own cultural perspective of a particular situation or event,” according to its solicitation.

IARPA is also looking for virtual reality tools that would allow an expert to “accurately grasp a native’s point of view on a particular situation.” Be sure to check out the full solicitation here.

This screencast from Vizzuality shows you how you can import data from CartoDB into TileMill. This can be useful when you are doing some data analysis and transformation with CartoDB and you want later to integrate the results on TileMill to produce a static map. Because TileMill and CartoDB share the same styling language, Carto, you can copy and paste styles between them.

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

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

Web access to micro data

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

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

At the Global Geospatial Conference 2012 in Québec City, the Minister of Natural Resources of Canada, said that geomatics is strategic for economic development in Canada.  Geomatics annually contributes $2.8 billion to the Canadian economy, $540 million in export revenue, and employs 23 000 workers.

He said that historically mapping and geomatics have been criitical to Canada's economic development, from the early surveyors who defined national boundaries, the Canadian cadastre, and railway right of ways, through the world's first geographic information system, the Canadian Land Inventory, developed in 1963, to the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI), which made Canada’s geospatial data and information available based on industry standards on the Web.  The Minister mentioned Canada's open data initiative, the Canadian data portal, which sees over 11 million downloads per year, 90% of which is geospatial.

Specifically in the area of natural resources, he said that geomatics is an essential tool for evaluating projects from an environmental, social impact, and economic growth perspective.  The mining, oil and gas, and forestry sectors employ three quarters of a million people in Canada, and to ensure the continued development of these sectors the government has a pipeline of natural resource development projects wirth $500 billion over the next ten years. As an example, the Government of Canada is contributing to improved mapping of northern Quebec in support of Québec's $80 billion northern development initiative Plan Nord.  The Minister siad that Canada intends to support responsible natural resource development for the benefit of the public including aboriginal peoples, but also protecting the environment.  He said that the govenment has already announced its intention to streamline the review and approval process for major natural resource and infrastructure development projects.

The Minister Oliver announced the newest series of contribution agreements through GeoConnections, investments totalling $1.6 million over three years. This is the latest funding announement that are part of the $30 million five year Geoconnections program announced in 2010.

The Global Geospatial Conference is actually a combined event involving four geospatial organizations, the GSDI World Conference (GSDI 13), the 14th GEOIDE Annual Scientific Conference, the 7th 3DGeoInfo Conference, and the Canadian Geomatics Conference 2012, and draws more than 700 geospatial professionals from around the world.

For the next two days in Paris, the PostGIS development team (sans Regina Obe, unfortunately) will be meeting to discuss the 2.1 development cycle, squash a few bugs (and release 2.0.1?), and look at future directions for PostGIS.  (Paris? Yes, I said Paris. After jogging a lap around the Champs de Mars and having my croissant for breakfast this morning, I feel that this should be an annual event.)

The sprint wiki page lays out some of the topics on the agenda: routing, parallel processing, 3D, point clouds, performance, and of course the ever-present meta-topic, git.  It seems likely that PostGIS will move to git in the near future unless one of the development team is strongly opposed. Being merely ambivalent, I won’t throw myself into the gears of “progress”.

My personal development priorities for 2.1 are performance, performance, performance: I have speed improvements in mind for geometry, geography and raster. The geometry and geography improvements are based on internal indexing, as I described almost three years ago! They were too radical to go into 1.5, which was nearing release at the time, and other things (re-writing the core serialization/parsers/emitters) distracted me during 2.0. So 2.1 is it! And for raster, someone might beat me to it, but the ST_Union(raster) function should be relatively easy to speed up with the same memory management approach that the vector aggregate functions use.

This evening the developers will be meeting with a local group of power users for a discussion about roadmap priorities and where they think our development effort would be best spent. I’m looking forward to hearing some more about how folks are using PostGIS in the wild.

À bientôt!

For New Jerseyans this is no trivial matter. Where does “North Jersey” end and “South Jersey” begin? Is there such a thing as “Central Jersey”? Numerous tractates have been dedicated to this topic, not to mention blog posts (yours truly has contributed to the discussion) and at least one documentary film.

All heretofore existing North-South delineations have followed county boundaries, with a few “swing counties” always in contention. Is Mercer county North or South? How about Middlesex? Monmouth? The issue resembles a Gordian Knot, getting tighter with every argument.

Enter my friend Randall Solomon, who happens to be the Co-Director of Sustainable Jersey and the Sustainability Institute at The College of New Jersey. Randy submits that the county-by-county approach lacks the granularity needed to properly address the issue. Much like Alexander the Great, Randy slices Middlesex county in half, and voila! Everything falls into place, everything now makes sense.

Not content to merely identify the North-South Jersey checkpoint, Randy also names it – “Hamburger Hill”. Also known as “The South Brunswick water tower”, this is the elevated point on Route 1 and Sand Hills Road in South Brunswick with a McDonald’s and a Burger King on either side.

Click here for a Google Maps map of Hamburger Hill. Below is my own North-South Jersey map, based on Randy’s Hamburger Hill postulate.

14 May 2012

Rounding up our favourite tweets from last week:

• We’re big on Software as a Service (in case you didn’t already know!) – but we’re even bigger on providing excellent service to our customers. Here’s how we do it!
• We had great fun with this antipode map! Find out where your location’s opposite land is here!
• Social networking is happening all around us – and mapping has come to the fore in it. Mapinterest is social media’s newest craze! See what it’s all about here!

If you’re not already following us on Twitter – catch us here: @espatial

Welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off post from got geoint? We hope you had a restful weekend and were able to spend some quality time with mom on Mother’s Day. Well, once again, it’s Monday and time to get back into the game. As always, we have been kind enough to provide you with all the actionable news you need to kick start the work week. So, fire up that second cup of coffee and read on. Happy Monday.

GeoEye Disappointed by DigitalGlobe, Inc.’s Rejection Of the Proposed Acquisition
GeoEye released this statement in response to the announcement by DigitalGlobe that its Board of Directors has rejected GeoEye’s acquisition proposal.

China Successfully Launches New Spy Satellite Into Orbit
China launched an optical military reconnaissance satellite (pictured) last Thursday.

Huge Satellite Envisat is Dead in Space
The European Space Agency declared the death of its massive Earth-observing satellite Envisat Wednesday after a month of mysterious silence from the school bus-size spacecraft.

U.S. Seeks Alternate Satellite Terminal Bids
The U.S. Air Force said on Friday it is still in talks with Boeing about revamping a multibillion-dollar program for next-generation satellite communications terminals, but has now formally invited other companies to submit alternate bids.

Keep Satellites in the Skies to Monitor Storms
New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial on why we need weather satellites.

Russian Satellite Presents the Earth from Top to Bottom (IMAGERY)
Check out these stunning images of the Earth from the Russians.

TerraGo Releases Publisher for ArcGIS v.6 to Empower Esri Users with Unprecedented Geospatial Collaboration Capabilities
TerraGo Technologies released its Publisher for ArcGIS v.6 software to enable Esri users to produce interactive, portable and intelligent TerraGo GeoPDF maps, imagery and geospatial applications.

Geospatial Data Management and Exploitation for the Utilities Industry
Mladen Stojic, Vice President, Geospatial at Intergraph SG&I, recently authored this GIS cafe post about how the utilities sector can better embrace geospatial solutions.

Spy Moms Unite
CNN ran a feature about women in the Intelligence Community. Check it out here.

Video: Is This What Apple’s New Maps Will Look Like?
After 5 years with Google’s maps, Apple is reportedly set to unveil its own.

…you not only geocache, but you own and maintain geocaches too.

14 May 2012

We’re excited to announce that our Chief Executive Officer, Philip O’Doherty, our Chief Technical Officer, Eamon Walsh, and our US-based Senior Consultant, Paul Baynam, will be joining other geospatial leaders at the upcoming Location Intelligence/ Oracle Spatial User Conference in Washington DC.

The event, on 23-23 May, is hosted by Directions magazine, and will see technology leaders come together to explore “The Power of Place”, and the latest solutions and trends in the geospatial industry.

Philip will give a presentation at the Location Intelligence conference on day 1, and Eamon and Paul will co-present at the Oracle Spatial User conference on day 2:

• 10-11:00am, 22 May, Horizon Room B
  Philip will present on “SaaS-based GIS adoption: Successes and lessons learned” as part of the GeoCloud Computing Strategies session.
• 3-4:30pm, 23 May, Horizon Room A
  Eamon and Senior Consultant Paul Baynham will present “GIS Software as a Service Using Oracle Spatial in Amazon EC2 Cloud”.

We look forward to seeing you there!

A VerySpatial Podcast
Shownotes – Episode 356
May 13, 2012

Main Topic: Our conversation on potential cuts to the US Census Bureau

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