Steve’s Little world

I don’t have a lot to add to this post - I just think it is a great read for people thinking about what it means to motivate employees, manage risk, product development, and things of that nature. I remember hot or not when it first came it out and ignored it after seeing it once. I never knew the YouTube dudes started there. I really like the parts on managing risk versus preserving the status quo.  Anyway, I recommend the read…

James Hong: Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part I

If you haven’t seen it go do a google route RIGHT NOW! After the route is finished start dragging points in the middle and watch the route recalculate right before your very eyes. Here is a sample if you don’t want to type places in. This has to be one of the best AJAX things I have ever seen.

You wanna start taking bets now on how long until it does traveling salesman type optimizations or tying directly into the traffic feeds or tie ins to google news?

If I were a small or medium business that needed maps and directions with some custom points of interest - I would be knocking in Googles door for an intranet license. How much do you think it would costs to set up this kind of infrastructure for myself and get it to work some time in this century.  Think about the value in this.

Oh yeah, and one more point for all us developer types , the bar has been raised yet again for what users will come to expect as “standard”. I can see the discussion now - “When I move break point in the electrical line around I want to see the power reroute in real time.”

I don’t think I even have to mention what this means for ArcGIS Server w/ network analyst or even on desktop ArcGIS…

Hat tip to Brian Flood for pointing it out. As he said (paraphrasing) - if they can do with web service calls what can they not do?

Now this is definitive, witness the RESTlike urls…

http://sucks-rocks.com/rate/GeoServer/MapServer/ArcIMS/ArcGIS+Server/FeatureServer 

What would blogging and the web be without ad hominem attacks?

One reminder - I do agree that sharing the data for others to see without metadata is pointless - for the same reason I ignore anonymous reviews at amazon and discard GIS data without a known source.

You know - people hurt themselves ever day with over the counter drugs and people make calculations mistakes every day with excel. Should we remove them from everyone except “professional” use because some people make mistakes.

It is not just about the cost to buy the software but the time it takes to learn the intracicies of the software before you can do it.

Sometimes all you need is a bike to get across town and not the BWM or the 18 wheeler. Sometimes all you want to do is look at a rough figure of what things look like without it being “professional quality”.   Do you make graphs in excel even though it is not a graphing program - for shame. You mean you couldn’t take the time to learn R to make a graph. Did you write VBA code without taking CS classes and without learning VB first and using Visual Studio?

Seriously though I appreciate the value of having professionals do some of this work, and I said as much at wherecamp.  I have been trained in that world and I have also made a good part of my living being an expert in that world. But I do not feel the need to keep the tools and the fun of playing with and visualizing data to myself. I know people will draw mistaken inference with geocommons, but I see people do it every day with ArcGIS and SAS. 

Oh yeah, and one more time for the people in the back… elitist

So I see that James has seen fit to place our conversation up in the echo chamber and then fails to leave out my crucial ending line

I agree that other peoples data and analysis may be of little to no use to you without metadata but for your own internal purposes

So I think he is missing my point - this is not about some new great place to go look at interesting maps. This is about the democratization of GIS tools. As James states, and I would say rather predictably, “my posse is backing me…. “. And you know why that is, because I would bet most of those people are traditional GIS users.  And since geocommons did not come officialy baptised by the high GIS priesthood it must be crap. Thanks all for proving my point about why we can’t get along.

One point of clarification - I never liked this as a tool to look at the data other people uploaded. I thought it was awesome for the way in which they can take your data and make heat maps from it. I think it is nice cartography and I think it is nice to be able to save the output as KML.  

Geocommons gives anyone the ability to make a heat map with very little specialized training. You may say that is a bad thing, but I say it is interesting. There is less and less need to purchase and learn complicated desktop tools to do some simple analysis.

Beyond that - all these critiques about interface and user experience and such - tell me how long it would take them to fix that interface compared to how long it takes a traditional software vendor to roll out a new rev of their software.

Do I think this will put ESRI out of business and make all my GIS skills useless - heck no. I know there are a lot of caveats that go into interpolation and there is where more to spatial analysis than geocommons exposes. Will Duke Power, Shell Oil, or consultants doing EIR/EIS analysis use this - ummmmm no. Do I think it is cool that some small business owner, city worker, or field biologist can take their GPS data and make a interpolated map from it without spending two semesters in a GIS class - hell yeah.

Tagzania gave a very funny overview of the conference

My boring talk

Geo ERV and GIS Vista - basically setting up mobile mapping units and they are hiring. They are doing good work with setting up strategic disaster mapping services

Hacking Google StreetView - man these folks are good. They basically used someone elses steps to hack the service and they did things like show the images of street van that has a GPS unit attached or add the streetview pictures to upcoming.com for events - most excellent and funny

Geotudes - they want to divide the world into cells and use it rather than lat and long. They think of this as a permanent address for all spaces on earth.

FreeEarth - Poly9 Free earth -buit in flash with a free api great demo of all the places using it.

NNDB.com - part of rotten.com

GPS Drift - artist describing how we deal place

Ortho production - Marc P from #planetgs gives a talk about the process of creating orthorectified photos. Quick and just demonstrating what needs to be done

Steve Echtamen - doing a start up of location based aggregation content, media streaming, and handheld portable devices.

<aside>Man there are a lot of Steves at this conference </aside>

Had to go to meet with the family….

See you on the other side.

So I gave a lightning talk about building an OpenSource stack to move beyond collecting spatial data and putting pushpins on a map. I just showed a bunch of web pages of my dream stack being integrated into a platform for deriving spatial knowledge

Here are the links I used:
Started with some local pages that are really not important…

Data mining - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Decision support system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Role of Business Intelligence in Knowledge Management

Business Intelligence Network delivers business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics resources provided by Claudia Imhoff, Bill Inmon and other experts. Additional topics include data quality, data integration, CRM, data marts, data mining, business performance management, BPM, data modeling, enterprise application management, ERP, RFID, storage, supply chain and others.

PostGIS : Home

PostGIS spatial database extension for PostgreSQL.

OpenJUMP

GeoServer

OpenLayers: Home

World Wind JAVA SDK

GeoVISTA Studio Project

Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence: Product Overview

Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence: Dashboards

Processing 1.0 (BETA)

Processing is an electronic sketchbook for developing
ideas. It is a context for learning fundamentals of computer programming
within the context of the electronic arts.

The R Project for Statistical Computing

The Omega Project for Statistical Computing

GRASS GIS - The World Leading Free Software GIS

GRASS GIS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is an open source,
free software (FOSS) Geographical Information System (GIS) with raster, topological
vector, image processing, and visualization functionality

MASON Multiagent Simulation Toolkit

Sitting in a introduction to the OpenSource stack for WhereCamp it was kinda sad how dismissive this crowd can be of all that has come before. I think it is because most of them have not come from GIS they might feel like they have introduced all this new and great stuff. And while I agree they have definetly pushing consumer based mapping light years beyond where it was. Their ability to do this has been made possible through the narrowing of the problem space. Their is still a lot of mapping and “where” that happens outside of this space. I do think the traditional GIS crowd has somewhat brought this on themselves by portraying themselves as the “high priesthood” of GIS and if you don’t do follow along our path and do your time in the Monastarey then you are not worthy.

There could be a lot of synergy here but instead the mistrust and dismissive attitudes on both side really hurts the realm of the possible.
So there is my assessment of the attitude I mentioned in one of my earlier posts…

Cool find from Chris Heilmann at the WhereCamp. A little app that when installed allows you to just start typing the name of the app you want to lauch. It goes to the registry (sorry, windows only) and looks for apps with the letters you have started to type. No more mousing to the start menu or anything. Freeckin shweet!

Launchy: The Open Source Keystroke Launcher for Windows

So the biggest benefit about being at WhereCamp so far is getting a USB stick from crshhmidt (James has already covered some of it). Man he has packed a great bunch on a small space. It is a great way again to get started. Ahh the riches of the OpenSource world. He has written featureserver to be a great and simple API to mapping data in a ton-o-formats ™. He has a demo that both publishes and accepts KML. It has a great REST API for featureserver which allows you to say /<layer>/<feature> or  /layer/feature/with a bunch of parameters.

Another cool feature is the ability to get the featureserver to give back attribute data in html format. So if you have shapefile or other geodata source being served through featureserver your url ends in .html and you get all the attribute data for those features in a standard html page. Can you say hello google bot indexing all your attribute data. You can control the template behind the page and get it to point to the data source. This is great for “show me all the data sets which talk about Central Park”.

The configuration files are just plain text files with a structure similar to an apache config file - which is easy cheezy to understand.

Hats off to Chris for putting together a sweet little get going in an easy way  dem/application on a stick