Later this week we’ll be at the Esri Federal GIS Conference showcasing Fulcrum, along with some other Spatial Networks capabilities and data to a host of federal agency representatives, NGOs, GIS professionals, and others.

The federal marketplace is replete with organizations that have a need for mobile data collection tools. With smartphones ubiquitous, cheap, and in most cases built with more advanced hardware and software than many high-end specialized electronics, easy-to-use apps are becoming incredibly attractive even to large organizations looking for a simplified solution to a long-standing problem. Fulcrum is our response to the question: “Can the process of collecting data in the field be simplified down to the bare essentials for field workers and collection teams?”

We’ve built a tool with the intent to solve the problem of data collection, not to put a total “mobile GIS package” in the hands of field collectors – because we believe the latter is in most cases overkill. Fulcrum let’s the management staff design advanced field data collection forms with our hosted web portral and deploy them to dozens of devices in the field for simple, fast, yet powerful data collection capabilities. We want to solve the problem of collection (even collecting offline); getting the data from the field and into your office to be combined, stored, and analyzed along with your other data sources, brought into your own toolsets such as ArcMap, ArcGIS Server, or a host of other data storage and analytics platforms.

Head over to the website and sign up for a free account to give it a try and create some forms for yourself. The iOS app is free on the App Store as well, so download that and collect some of your own data — you can even collect totally off the network and sync your data when you’re connected again.

Drop by booth #220 at the conference on Wednesday and Thursday (22nd and 23rd) to check out what we’ve got going on with Fulcrum to see what modern mobile data collection looks like in action – and follow @fulcrumapp on Twitter for updates throughout the week.

Last weekend I took part in the first annual WhereCamp Tampa Bay, day two of which was the unconference at the SPC Collaborative Labs. This was a wonderful networking opportunity for each participant to engage with each other in a true open discussion format. I sat in on a couple of interesting sessions: one of which was the “GIS in the community” breakout session that involved talking about a wide range of sub-topics that the average GIS’er rarely has the opportunity to share with others, particularly across a wide spectrum of subdisciplines.

A large portion of the GIS folks participating in this group came from local government GIS shops. I was eager to hear more about GIS at the county level as I come from the private sector background. My viewpoint may be skewed one way more than the other, but from what I was able to gather, a lot of local government decision makers have a lack of understanding for the capabilities of GIS tools and datasets. It was made clear that more often than not, GIS departments are often left out of major planning operations and are seen as a just the resident “map makers”, relegated to a support role to provide simple data and documentation to other departments. Of course there is a disconnect here, as the power of GIS can enable users to model and discover expected or unexpected scenarios during planning design phases of many projects.

This discussion in turn gave rise to our next topic, “Education in Geography (or lack thereof)”. If there were a stronger emphasis on teaching the essentials, especially in the Florida public school system, there would not be such an uphill battle of educating people on how to incorporate geography and GIS into civic systems. Today’s public educational system is too hardened on teaching the students just enough for a passing FCAT score. It was refreshing to share with one another our first discoveries that led to our passion for geography and GIS. My first experiences with a GIS tool came at the young age of twelve when my classmates and I mapped out our school using ArcMap 8.0 and handheld GPS units. There are several opportunities for geographers and GIS folk alike to become more active in their communities such as Geography Awareness Week, The Great American Teach In, and the widespread phenomenon of geocaching.

Grassroots events such as WhereCamp are a growing trend throughout major cities such as Portland, San Francisco, Montreal, and Washington D.C. Maybe this will inspire you to bring a WhereCamp to your community! I’m always interested in what other GIS professionals think about the role GIS plays in community and local government, so if you have an interesting perspective on the subject, feel free to hit me on Twitter or leave your comments below. Open discussion can give us all new ideas on how to increase the value of GIS technology.

During the UnConference at WhereCampTB held this past Saturday at the Collaborative Labs of St. Petersburg College, one of the topics that generated a robust dialogue involved the subject of Open Data in Government.  Ian from MapBox (a WhereCampTB sponsor) brought up the topic earlier in the day as something he was interested in talking about or presenting.

It had already become a topic on my twitter stream the week prior when I had a brisk exchange with John Reiser and Don Meltz about the notion of open data in context of (US) taxpayer funds, so I was anxious to continue the discussion and try and perfect my opinion about the matter.

So, when it came time later in the afternoon that we did discuss open data, I wanted to know why it is that organizations or companies that do not subscribe to a policy or business strategy of 100% open data 100% of the time (or any time for that matter) are vilified or casted as “evil” by those in the open data community? I don’t recall getting a full or satisfactory answer and so I’m putting the question out for general feedback and comment.

Eric Wolf from the USGS (also a WhereCampTB sponsor) made the point that the USGS does in fact, withhold geospatial data and for good reason(s).  I was actually surprised by this but listening to the rationale, it became clear to me that there is no absolute right answer on this subject, even when it comes to (US) taxpayer funded data. One participant made it clear that there was no problem in giving the public access to data on fire hydrant locations, but he did not feel it was ok to give infrastructure data such as the drinking water pipeline system or other buried utilities because of the threat of terrorism and that this policy was somehow mandated or implemented in accordance with DHS requirements or guidelines.

The problem for me, at least in most conversations about this, is that proponents and supporters of open data (particularly geospatial) often pollute the very valid and credible argument that Government (US taxpayer-funded) geospatial data should be open and freely accessible (note: cartons of CDs shipped first-class mail in the era of Dropbox is hardly defensible) by not qualifying their position and simply lumping all other forms of geospatial data into the argument and demanding it all be “open” and free.  This is the rub for me, not simply because we produce, obtain and license commercially valuable data to a wide array of markets, but because it just isn’t a credible argument in a free-market economy.  I absolutely support open data in our own Government or any other Government for that matter, and I would add my voice to the chorus demanding more (not less) geospatial data be made readily accessible to anyone.  If I take that data and add value to it, licensing that added-value is a perfectly legitimate and sound business model.  Just because someone disagrees or dislikes that business model doesn’t make it less viable, credible or virtuous. This is true even for OSM data, perhaps the most accessible and freely available geospatial data in history.  However, characterizing corporations as bad or treating them with contempt because their business strategy includes licensing geospatial data for a fee is without merit. I’ve heard the arguments that use specific examples of companies acting badly and I would simply respond that those are clear cases of poor execution or questionable leadership but it does not invalidate the strategy of for-profit data licensing.

I appreciated the comment by another participant (Dan Dye?) pointing out that open data was much more important and relevant at the State and local levels than at the Federal level.  This was stunningly obvious and I realized that I had spent far too much energy arguing from the position of “you can’t release that kind of taxpayer funded data because…” that I failed to realize the most utility and the greatest benefit to taxpayers after all, is at the State and local levels and it absolutely makes much more sense to demand and lobby for most if not all geospatial data at State and local levels to be pushed out to the public domain in contemporary, transparent technology.  After all, what good is having data open if users have to buy proprietary GIS software to take advantage of all that open goodness.  It’s a particularly caustic issue when taxpayer funds are spent on that same proprietary software to generate publicly funded data that is then opened up to the taxpayer – a cycle with negative equity.  This was recently covered in a well-written piece found here, but the most salient part for me in this blog post is as follows:

“But I have a problem when ESRI also claims to be an enabler of open government, facilitating data sharing and collaboration. I have an even bigger problem when it takes taxpayer money to manage public data, and then requires taxpayers to buy ESRI software in order to access that data.”

Lastly, there is nothing more or less virtuous about a company or an organization producing (geospatial) data and then giving it away for free.  There is a cost to producing anything, and whether that cost is in time, cash or barter, there is still a cost to produce and maintain.  If every one of the 500,000 registered users of OSM put in only 10 hours per year, that’s 5,000,000 hours of “producing” geospatial data.  At the 2012 Federal minimum wage (US$) of $7.25/hr, that’s the equivalent of $36,250,000 per year in costs to map on OSM.  Still, OSM pales in comparison with the commercial data holdings (globally) by even the top 10 largest geospatial companies, and the costs to build and maintain their data would be many multiples of that (conservative) OSM production cost.   Shifting the cost of data licensing (in order to give it away for free) is only that, a shift in cost to something else – perhaps map design, custom software development, SaaS, data-as-a-service hosting, advertising, PPC, etc. and all are legitimate, valuable and contribute to a globalized economy.

I am sure to catch a lot of heat for this from multiple fronts but perhaps that’s not a bad thing after all – I’m not entirely clear on the totality of the subject and as stated earlier, I continue to evolve my opinion on the matter and can certainly be persuaded by professional dialogue if in fact, it’s a truly credible perspective, however different from my own.

Well, we’re happy to report that the first ever WhereCamp in Tampa Bay was held this past weekend with an Ignite [Spatial] event on Friday night, February 10, 2012, followed by an UnConference on Saturday, February 11, 2012.   The event had been conceived on the spot during last year’s WhereCampDC Unconference when I opened my big mouth and announced that we [spatial networks] would be organizing a WhereCampTB in the spring and hopefully entice people to Florida to escape the cold and snowy north.  We had no real experience in organizing such an event and Nathaniel Kelso was helpful  on a number of occasions with guidance and “how to” advice, but nevertheless, it would not have been nearly as successful without the generous support of our sponsors and the substantial efforts by spatial networks staff to bring this event to fruition.  I’d like to thank again our sponsors at USGIF (@USGIF), O’Reilly Media (@whereconf), USGS (@usgs), MapBox (@mapbox), Collaborative Labs at St. Petersburg College, and City of Tampa.  A special shoutout to our incredible designer Aaron White (@internetaaron), Coleman McCormick (@colemanm) and Leigh Rayner (@pev0732) for their tireless dedication to getting the venues lined up, coordinating all the logistics and making sure all that could go wrong didn’t in the lead up to the event.  Much appreciated and I think everyone that attended WhereCampTB would agree and appreciate how smooth both days unfolded.

WhereCampTB Ignite Spatial

For anyone not familiar with the Ignite format, I’d invite you to check out many of the incredibly inspiring talks here and for those of you interested in Ignite talks that focus on the issue of location, there are a number of IgniteSpatial events that have transpired in conjunction with WhereCamps over the years and here are some of the more recent (wherecampdc, wherecampphx, wherecamppdx) to give some context.  We had a total of 12 talks submitted and that made for a great night for the presenters and audience alike.  The event was held at the USGS / US Fish and Wildlife Service campus in St. Petersburg and although a bit challenging to find parking, attendance was encouraging.  We will be posting the videos and slides of the Ignite talks soon and for a complete list of speakers, you can visit the WhereCampTB website.

WhereCampTB UnConference

The Saturday event was held at the Collaborative Labs at St. Petersburg College and while I had been there on a number of occasions before, the space provided for WhereCampTB was new to me and it was a fantastic setup for an UnConference.  Anyone not familiar with an UnConference can find out more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp, but the day is typically unplanned before the start of the event and the agenda is set by those in attendance and there is typically no single leader running the show and this allows and encourages maximum participation and the topics discussed emerge organically.  The range of topics included, among others; the politics of OSM +  OSM licensing, open data, DIY depth-sounding, TileMill, metadata and data sharing and open-source software.  The breakout sessions that I attended enjoyed healthy debate and a fairly robust discussion around issues relating to many things re: OSM as well as open-data.  The discussions continued for some time after the lunch-break, but after a number of people from difference parts of Florida had to depart, the crowd began to dwindle and we wrapped up the event shortly before 4pm.

I’ll be posting more articles here in the coming days on specific topics that were discussed during the UnConference, as they deserve more attention given the nature of the discussions and the passions involved on all sides.  We’ll also be posting videos of each of the Ignite talks soon on the WhereCampTB site.  Lastly, thanks to our sponsors at O’Reilly, we raffled off one full admission to the WhereConf later this spring at both the Friday night Ignite event as well as the UnConference on Saturday.  Kevin Stofan (one of our Ignite presenters) was picked at the end of the UnConference and Kyle Schaper was picked at the end of the Ignite event.  Congratulations to both and hope they get the most out of the WhereConf, we’ll be looking forward to hearing how things went when they get back from California.  We will be planning a WhereCampTB 2013 based on the overwhelming and encouraging response we have received from the Florida geonerd community and look forward to coordinating next year’s event with a broader group of people for an even bigger and better event.

Over the weekend Tampa Bay had its first WhereCamp event, where I gave an Ignite talk about creating nautical maps with open data. In my talk I discussed a few techniques and tools I used to create a nautical slippy map.

View full map on MapBox.com

Data & Tools

To create the map I used open data from several online sources. I downloaded bathymetry data from NOAA, bouys and channel data from Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation, and some road and point of interest data from OpenStreetMap.

I needed several tools to work with the data and create the map. To manipulate the raster bathymetry data, I used GDAL, which has a bunch of awesome tools to merge, warp, color map, and create contours from a bunch of common data formats. It’s extensible plugin system also enables additional file format support developed by the community. I also used QGIS to work with some of the vector data. Since I’m very comfortable working with SQL, I put all of the data in PostGIS to make it easier to write custom queries. The real workhorse for creating the slippy map is TileMill, a fantastic app (now on Windows too!) for creating very complex and beautiful cartography. If you’re interested in getting started with QGIS, PostGIS, and TileMill, I recommend this awesome post by @spara.

What’s Missing?

During my talk I asked the question “What’s missing?” where I mentioned that better bathymetry data would enable more accurate and nicer looking maps. While that’s fairly obvious, Eric Wolf (from the USGS) came up to me afterwards and brought up the idea of DIY crowd-sourced depth sounding. That topic interests me, and during the unconference the next day we had another short discussion about the feasibility of creating a mobile phone app that integrates with existing transducers and marine hardware. What do you think? If you have any questions or ideas for creating better nautical maps, hit me up on Twitter at @zacmcc.

Presentation

This past weekend was the first WhereCampTB event here in Tampa, which I helped put together over the last couple of months. While there are tons of GIS users, mappers, developers, and geeks in the Tampa-St Petersburg area, there’s never been a solid community event for all these folks to gather and talk about the stuff they enjoy and work on every day.

We did an Ignite Spatial on Friday night with 12 talks (the unconference was Saturday), and I talked about the OSM Tampa Bay mapping group which I sort of sparked up late last year to start growing the OpenStreetMap contributor community here in the Bay Area.

A few years back myself and a couple of other people tried starting up a mapping group, but I don’t think the time was right – the OSM project wasn’t well known enough in the wider community. Now, several years on, OSM has become widely known and respected, even outside the core mapping geek world. Back in December I sparked up a meetup group to start developing the map in our area.

My talk mainly concerned why a local would want to join the group and edit the map, but also what there is to edit when you show up to a mapping party. Stuff like the imported TIGER line data needs a huge amount of attention in this area, as well as the richness of POIs and addresses. And to give ideas about other non-local efforts in adding to the map, I touched briefly on the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and its efforts in mapping places to assist NGOs and to create communities that can map their own cities and towns.

If you’re local and interested in joining the group, check the meetup page to find out about upcoming events, or if you have any other questions about the content of the talk, or just ideas and comments about OpenStreetMap, you can contact me on Twitter at @colemanm.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve released some major updates and upgrades to Fulcrum, our mobile data collection app.

After releasing an initial version back in October, we’ve completely redesigned the user interface and have added some fantastic new features to simplify the process of creating data collection forms to take into the field and offline. Head over to the registration page to sign up for a free account, and hit the App Store to get the latest app version (or update if you’ve already downloaded it).

Now let’s walk through some of the big changes and improvements…

Form builder, revamped

The drag-and-drop form builder inside Fulcrum has gotten a major overhaul. After dragging some data types out into the palette area, if you select a field you’ll see a whole suite of new settings to apply to each field – things like default values, requirement, long descriptions:

The new form builder also supports adding conditional logic to define when fields are shown or required. This means you can dictate all the requirements for your collection project up front, so you don’t have to scroll through a huge list of options each time you create a record on the app just to fill out two pieces of data – and it’s great for collecting lots of detail quickly.

Choice Lists and Classification Sets

Choice lists are new in this release, and allow you to define picklists of options to reuse across multiple forms. Whether it’s a list of statuses, ratings, cities, states, or anything else, choice lists save you from repeating yourself, and also help provide better data integrity across forms.

In a similar vein to choice lists, classification sets let you define hierarchical sets of options to drill into for more and more detail. Also like choice lists, these can be added to as many forms as you’d like. If you already have a model of types and categories for your field collection projects, you can build out the same structures in Fulcrum to use on the mobile app.

iOS app update

The iPhone app has also had an update to accommodate the new features, so head over to the App Store to download the app, or update if you’ve already got it.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more updates, including new pricing plans for multi-user organizations that want to collaborate on data collection. Also follow us on Twitter at @fulcrumapp and subscribe to the blog feed to keep up with news and updates.

Next month marks the first ever WhereCamp Tampa Bay, the Bay Area’s first WhereCamp event for our geospatial community. This two day event isn’t your standard conference or seminar, no boring preset schedule of presentations and PowerPoint slides – it’s a volunteer-based event for hackers, geographers, geonerds, geeks, developers, mappers, open source enthusiasts, and anyone interested in discussing the ins and outs of the mapping industry.

The first evening there will be an Ignite talk series, Ignite Spatial, on February 10th at 6pm at the Fish & Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, FL. Ignite Spatial is a series of fast-paced 5 minute talks, with a specific focus on geospatial and mapping ideas and opinions. Remember, location can be applied to everything, so bring your own crazy ideas or projects to show to your geonerd peers! Check out the talks submitted so far to see the variety of creative ideas being brought to the show.

Day two will be the main event unconference at the Saint Petersburg College EpiCenter. This is 100% participatory driven content – there’s no schedule or list of topics planned out until attendees provide content the day of. It’s an opportunity to have in-depth extended discussions about whatever topics interest you, just show up with an idea and propose it to the crowd. Topics could be anything like the use of augmented reality, art, social cartography, politics, funding, past present and future projects… or anything else connected with maps, data, or location. This provides a fantastic social networking opportunity to interact amongst fellow geonerds and collaborate ideas.

It is not too late to submit your Ignite Spatial topic and sign up for the Unconference. Check out the website for more info.

Tickets are free, so get yours now! Hope to see you there!

• Ignite Spatial tickets
• Unconference tickets

Hi there, I’m Zac McCormick, a software engineer here at Spatial Networks. We’re obsessed with beautiful maps, and I thought I’d share a mapping experiment I did with openly available data, map projections, and TileMill. Traditional web mapping depicts Antarctica as a massive landmass at the bottom of the Earth that appears larger than just about every other continent — completely distorted in traditional Mercator projections. I thought it would be a fun experiement to try and make a slippy map of Antarctica with accurate proportions.

The map is based on data from the SCAR Antarctic Digital Database, NGDC ETOPO1 Global Relief, and the USGS Geographic Names database. I manipulated the data with QGIS, PostGIS, and a few GDAL/OGR scripts. The cartography was done in TileMill, an awesome map design studio from our friends at MapBox.

View full map on MapBox.com

Creating the Map

A screenshot of the label data in QGIS

The data is projected into EPSG 3031 and rendered as if it were EPSG 3857 (Web Mercator) in TileMill. While creating this map I thought I would also experiement with custom labeling techniques, like the curved ones used to label the oceans, seas, and major areas of the continent. AJ Ashton showed this technique earlier this year and I thought I would try it in this map. To the right is a screenshot of QGIS showing the line data I created to get the custom curved labels.

I didn’t have enough room to label all of the major areas, but I selected some based on a few other static maps of Antarctica I saw out on the web. I was pretty happy with the end result, and I think we will use this technique in some of our other maps.

For more information about Spatial Networks maps or technology, ping me or @spatialnetworks on Twitter. Comments are also welcome here on the blog.

Last week we were at the Special Operations Summit here in Tampa, showcasing some of what we do with geospatial technology, particularly in the realm of human and cultural geography.

With a dedicated “Human Geography Day” workshop devoted exclusively to discussions of the application of socio-cultural GEOINT, it’s clear that the US Special Forces community sees the need for high-quality foundational- and tactical-level intelligence products to help understand the human landscape. Tony’s panel session (“Going Tribal: Putting the Human in Geography”) generated some interesting points of discussion surrounding the timeliness of temporal data, and some lively chatter about data veracity – an issue at the forefront of everyone’s mind when it comes to geospatial data in general.

In a community so focused on such challenging missions as the US SOF, it was great to see that high-value GEOINT data – both human and physical, in challenging places – is considered an invaluable tool in the warfighter’s toolchest.

If you’re interested in hearing more about our participation at the Summit, get in touch with us with your questions or feedback. And remember to follow @spatialnetworks for updates and announcements.