VerySpatial http://veryspatial.com Discussions on Geography and geospatial technologies Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:17:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.1 en hourly 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ ESRI UC Day 2 Roundup – Couple of Sessions http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/15/esri-uc-day-2-roundup-couple-of-sessions/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/15/esri-uc-day-2-roundup-couple-of-sessions/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:34:18 +0000 Frank http://veryspatial.com/?p=5969 Frank Looking at His Tweet in the Socail Media Lounge

I caught a few sessions and two in particular I thought were worth taking notes.  The first is about return on investments and calculating them for government.  Ultimately the presentations weren’t that strong on this topic in that session, but there was a wealth of information about how local governments can develop GIS even on limited budgets.  Personally, I think the session was slighly misnamed, which is unfortunate because the presenations were great.  The second session wasn’t even actually a regular session – it was a Special Interest Groups.  Not a lot of people note the SIGs – largely because they happen at lunch time, I suspect – but there was a lot of great information at the Flex developers Special Interest Group.  There was a fascinating presenation by Adobe concerning skinning your Flex application.  Although the topic sounds trivial, anyone who’s done much with the Flex development environment can tell you that the interface development is a bit of a bear.  The session really helped boil some of that complex stuff down, I think.  Anywho, enough with my monday morning quarterbacking comentary and on to the notes!

Quantifying the Benefits of GIS in Government

Using GIS to track ROI, which is a pretty cool way to use GIS, I think.  Rebecca from Chesapeake VA is going to give the presentation.  She’s a tad quiet, but whatdaygonna do?  She works at the planning department of the areas.  In 2001, they had mapbooks and development would be approved and recorded only in the mapbook.  Sadly, that’s how it works in much of WV to this day, which is nuts.  They moved the product to a personal geodatabase.  That must have been hard to get all the records into the early versions of personal geodatabase.  She’s showing a lot of usful maps that show how developments are approved and actually developed.  From the development, they moved to a more analytical mode.  They started looking at things that were in pre-improvement phases.  So far, typical GIS-y stuff.  I wonder how they convinced the policy makers to invest in this stuff?  Hope she gets to that soon.  Seems they developed a fairly standard GIS system for county/local planning use.  What they’ve done well is go back to the policy makers and show them this stuff in public meetings.  So policy makers get to see this stuff working in real time, and they get to see the public respond to that stuff in real time.

Next up Bruce who’s worked with various groups in California.  He’s doing stuff with dealing with difficult financial times.  Clearly a skill he had to develop from working with CA agencies (ZING!)  Seriously, he has a small list of counties and areas that have had to deal with declining “revenues” from counties in the state and I’d challenge anyone to drop 8-15% and not blink.  He’s going through a pretty stock slide of how GIS gets rid of redundancy and all that.  Anyone familiar with GIS can probably picture most of what’s on the slide in their head.  Next he’s moved onto how to implement this stuff in the standard low/medium/high budget scenarios.  It’s interesting he’s highlighting web portal implementations.  Personally, I think this would be attractive for even high budget situations when a lot of the users are fairly unknowledgeable about the technology.  He’s also highlighting the free software option, which too many people ignore.  There are a number of grants for software/hardware acquisition.  There are DHS grants, ESRI grants, USGS, and even state grants.  It’s a good suggestion as all of these groups would like you to get into GIS if you’re not already.  Bruce tells us to think about phasing your GIS system.  Great suggestion!  That can really help spread the cost across budget years.  Again, too many people miss this option.  He’s pointing out that you really have to ask the question “how much accuracy do you need?”  High spatial accuracy can really burn through your budget in no time at all.  Sometimes fuzziness isn’t really that bad a thing.  He’s also suggesting you consider getting consultants or outside groups to manage your GIS.  I’m not hugely supportive of this one, as my experience is outside consultants can save cash in the short run, but really catch you in the long.  Of course since he’s a consultant, he might be slightly more biased toward this option J  Finally, on to the idea of regional programs.  You can get surrounding areas to work together to get regional groups to implement GIS.  That’s a really good idea.  It can help spread the cost out, especially when paired with the “good enough” accuracy suggestion.  He’s now suggesting dong a ROI analysis, and you can head over to roi.esri.com for more information.  Personally, I find GIS ROI analysis to be a bit tricky.

Flex Special Information Group

First, they need a bigger room.  The thing is packed.  Clearly there’s enough interest.  Adobe is about to give a talk about skinning in the Flex API.  Zoinks!  Intertubse are down!  So much for live demo.  They’re in a Mac, which isn’t suprising, using the Flex builder.  Skinning is pretty cool, but it is kinda intimidating, as the presenter is saying.  I’m sorry, I missed his name, so I’m going to call him Bob.  Apologies to “not Bob” if you read this and it turns out your name isn’t Bob.  He’s demoing converting the Flex Builder styles into CSS.  I’m not a huge fan of Adobe’s CSS implementation (sorry Dream Weaver fans), but it is the industry standard.  It generally works, which at the end of the day is what you want, so no knocks there.    That’s their first major tip – use CSS to do the styling, so you can work with classes and groups of classes.  Good tip.  However, canvases only have so many things you can mess with.  Sometimes you want to do some radical designs, so you have to turn to something he calls graphical design.  He then asks how many people here consider themselves designers and not a hand was raised.  Clearly a heavy coding group of people.  Graphical design is pretty cool because your designers can make their designs in Photoshop (or whatever tool they choose) and you can import them as a skin into your elements.  It’s a nice way to separate the design from the code.  What you end up doing is applying an image, say a PNG, to an element, which is pretty neat.  However, I’m curious if you have to re-do that process every time the image changes?  Can the designer re-fresh the image and it automagically show up in the app?  I’m guessing not because the coder can change the details of how that is applied to the element.  That might change with a different image.  The last option is through programmatic skinning.  Basically Action Script can do a lot of skinning elements, like gradients and whatnot.  It’s probably what a lot of the people here will opt to do.  How many GIS shops have designers on staff?  The plus side is the app is smaller because you don’t include a lot of images.  The downside is your code is more complex.  He’s now demoing an interesting little app he wrote that takes the data from this GPS logger he carries.  The app has a default skin, but then he opened the skinned version.  You can really see where the graphics matter.  The skin makes the app pop, that’s for sure.  Now we’re onto Flex 4.  I just figured out Flex 3… (sigh).  There’s a new interaction toolbar that is supposed to bridge the gap between designer and developer.  The way he describes it, it sounds something like ESRI’s model builder, but for Flex.  Flex builder now has a set of tools that describe items in the abstract and then it’s the designer who comes along and makes it look nice.  So the developer says, “hey, there’s a scroll bar named X and there’s a item that makes the scroll bar scroll, and that’s called Y.”  Flex 4 will keep the too linked in its code.  However, the designer can come along and mark up or design those two things however he/she likes.  They don’t even have to be near each other.  The developer just says, “get the stuff from X and Y and do some stuff” and the designer says, “X and Y should look and act like this.  Again, great work flow for Flex in general, I think.  I’m not sure how good it will be for GIS shops.  Not many have full time designers on staff.  And Photoshop isn’t exactly the easiest tool to learn how to use effectively.  Quick update: turns out Bob’s name is Kevin.  Sorry Kevin.  For the rest of this paragraph, the part of “Bob” will actually be played by “Kevin”.  Conceptually, the direction Adobe is moving with Flex 4 really is the future of web development.  Object Orientated Programming gives us the conceptual tools to understand that items are largely independent of each other and can be built well using those ideas.  This is just taking this conceptually to the design world, which is great.  Flex builder is going away as of version 4… it’s now going to be called Flash Builder.  Meh.  However, the idea is still solid.  You basically make your Flex (Flash Builder now, I guess) Builder app and point it to a “skin”.  The skin holds the display, the app holds the functionality.  He’s showing how he can change the skin and suddenly we’re seeing an iPhone-esque app.  The functionality works the same, but the interface alters as per platform necessity.  Also, that’s pretty funny that it looks like the iPhone, since you can’t actually run this on an iPhone, since ultimately it’s Flash.  Also, it doesn’t take into account the fact that a netbook has a different set of power functions than a full computer and that’s different than your average smart phone.  Stuff you might want users to do in a full desktop might not be available or even possible in a smart phone.  Changing the skin doesn’t make the app scale from what I can tell.  Side note: one of the questions led to a comment by Kevin.  Flex uses two models, the vbox and hbox model and the canvas “constraints” model.  Adobe thinks you should use the constraints model most of the time.  That’s kinda different from web standard approaches which require the ability to resize at will.  It’s a different way of thinking.  All in all, the Flex world is clearly highly in flux.  We can do some amazing rich apps now, but we’re going to have to get used to a lot of variability for the foreseeable future.  That’s part of life on the technology treadmill, I guess!  Flex 4 looks to be released in the early 2010 release date.  The ESRI speaker just said that the next API will be moving to Flex 4, so we’re all moving that direction.  ESRI is now calling for more examples codes to be put in the web site.  So if you have anything you’d like to highlight, get it up in the codebase!

]]> http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/15/esri-uc-day-2-roundup-couple-of-sessions/feed/ 0 Social & Environmental Sustainability http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/14/social-environmental-sustainability/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/14/social-environmental-sustainability/#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:41:18 +0000 Barb http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/14/social-environmental-sustainability/ I just went to a great ESRI session on social & environmental sustainability where researchers in areas as diverse as homelessness and toxic waste, asked the age old question of cause and effect. The interesting part was that they sought to gain depth of knowledge using GIS. As the last speaker, Dr. bossard from San Jose said about his upcoming book, Envisioning Neighborhoods, deeper understanding of places leads to wisdom. Wisdom can add to quality of life.

]]> http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/14/social-environmental-sustainability/feed/ 0 A VerySpatial Podcast – Episode 208 http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/14/a-veryspatial-podcast-episode-208/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/14/a-veryspatial-podcast-episode-208/#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:15:28 +0000 Sue http://veryspatial.com/?p=5960 A VerySpatial Podcast
Shownotes – Episode 208
July 13, 2009

Main Topic: Our conversation with Dylan Lorimer of Google

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    Music

  • This week’s podsafe music: “Lonely Tree” by Greg Federico

    • News

    This week A Very Spatial Podcast is sponsored by ESRI.
    This year the ESRI International User Conference is more social than ever! Be a part of the conversation by following along on Twitter at twitter.com/esriuc. You can also join the community on Facebook at the Official ESRI UC page. To learn more about the ESRI International User Conference visit www.esri.com/uc

    ArcPad ]]> http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/14/a-veryspatial-podcast-episode-208/feed/ 0 ESRI Live Blogging of Plenary http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/13/esri-live-blogging-of-plenary/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/13/esri-live-blogging-of-plenary/#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:54:35 +0000 Frank http://veryspatial.com/?p=5935 Live blogging – all times PST and I’ll try to get pictures up as quick as possible.

    8:39 – Meet the people around you.  I met a nice guy from the ESRI surfaces office out of Denver named Jonathan.  He’s involed in the aerospace group out of that office

    8:40 – Jack’s running down the wealth of work that everyone out in the field actually do.  No shock – nearly every field is touched by GIS.

    8:42 – SAG Award winners stand up.  I always like to look for those badges and give them the two finger “howdy” salute bikers give each other on the highway.  Not sure anyone else gets that.  But it amuses me.

    8:43 – Centpoint energy gets a SAG award.  Short video showing what they do.  No surprise energy is winner, as they’re a huge GIS user.  They’re heavily in the enterprise stuff.  Right now, they’re demoing how storm and hurricane predictions help they figure out where to put their repair resources.  It’s pretty cool.  Thousands of crews together ready to deploy.  Cindy is accepting the award for the company.  Jack is saying that in several hurricans, Cindy mobilized all their people to restore power in days.

    8:47 – Making a difference award.  Being given to an Indian scientist Dr. Kasturirangan, who is the godfather of the India remote sensing space organization.  He has apparently run for office in the Indian government, and is now going to run the national planning in that country.

    8:50 – President’s Award.  Jack’s favorite (no surprise there).  This year goes to the state of Maryland, one of ESRI’s first customers.  They’ve been doing some interesting things with server.  I know West Virginia has adopted some of the technology and techniques they’ve developed.  Jack says this is largely to result of the vision of the Governor O’Malley.  The Governor is saying that GIS isn’t just a tool or a techniques, it allows connections to be made between groups and ideas.  Side note – the green tie is kinda cool.  Not many politicians rock the bright green tie, so kudos.  He’s bringing up some of their government people actually doing the work.  He’s asking why every citizen’s first question is always – “Can you show me my house?”  Good question.  Then half of them will freak out because you CAN show them your house.  Just my own experience, not the good Governor’s.  He’s detailing how they’re using “smart maps”.  Oddly enough, probably the most popular is using them to reduce wait times at the DMV.  Is there any government agency more hated than the DMV?  Green print sounds cool.  It shows the environment of anyone who wants to put in their address and how it can be protected.  Now he’s talking about the recovery act.  Maryland has developed a really cool site to track how and where that money from the federal government is being spent.  West Virginia has adopted the same system.  It’s built on ArcServer and the Flex API (which is pretty fun in my experience).

    8:50 – President’s Award.  Jack’s favorite (no surprise there).  This year goes to the state of Maryland, one of ESRI’s first customers.  They’ve been doing some interesting things with server.  I know West Virginia has adopted some of the technology and techniques they’ve developed.  Jack says this is largely to result of the vision of the Governor O’Malley.  The Governor is saying that GIS isn’t just a tool or a techniques, it allows connections to be made between groups and ideas.  Side note – the green tie is kinda cool.  Not many politicians rock the bright green tie, so kudos.  He’s bringing up some of their government people actually doing the work.  He’s asking why every citizen’s first question is always – “Can you show me my house?”  Good question.  Then half of them will freak out because you CAN show them your house.  Just my own experience, not the good Governor’s.  He’s detailing how they’re using “smart maps”.  Oddly enough, probably the most popular is using them to reduce wait times at the DMV.  Is there any government agency more hated than the DMV?  Green print sounds cool.  It shows the environment of anyone who wants to put in their address and how it can be protected.  Now he’s talking about the recovery act.  Maryland has developed a really cool site to track how and where that money from the federal government is being spent.  West Virginia has adopted the same system.  It’s built on ArcServer and the Flex API (which is pretty fun in my experience).

    9:04 – Governor still talking.  Intertubes got a small hiccup.  Hope I can upload the live blog.  Oh no Mr. Bill!  Whole presentation just went down.  Lovely blue screens abound.  Ok, they got it back.  That got a round of applause.  Is there any more stressful thing for an IT person than a live blow up?

    9:08 – Back to the governor’s “can you show me my house?” question.  The posits that it might be that people know the government knows about them.  Or it might be about the desire to know you belong to a greater connection of the outside world.  I think there’s some truth to that, but mostly I think it’s because that’s the geography they know best.  We just like to see what we know, because most people don’t understand what they’re seeing with GIS right off the bat.  Just my two

    9:10 – Jack is back on.  He’s saying that Jack and the Governor have down three demos of technology together, and every time the demo has blown up.  So don’t buy any lottery tickets with the governor of Maryland and Jack standing in line behind you!  Video of people talking is still broken.  I bet there are some guys up front freaking out right now.

    9:12 – Video’s back.  Internet’s not.  Now onto ESRI’s “Designing our Future” idea.  Jack says they fall into 3 main areas, software, systems, and geography.  Everyone is a designer.  GIS does design naturally, according to Jack.  Thus Jack calls this GeoDesign.  He talking about the impact of human existence on the planet.  Our landscape is suffering due to the unchecked, unguided and uncoordinated human activities.  Ut oh!  His slides went out.  He’s gotta turn around to the screen.  Gets a good laugh.

    9:16 – Notion of Geodesign.  It’s an interactive design process, where design can get immediate feedback.  GIS hasn’t done this well in the past.  ESRI is extending their products with tools and methods to allow for this stuff.  Now a short video about land use and impacts of development of habitate areas.  The notion is that you can see impacts in real time.  He’s showing it as a desktop model, then as using Microsoft’s touch table (which looks WAY cool – must get one!), then on the web.  The idea is the expert and the layman should be able to interact with the technology in real time.  Moving onto a few questions about geodesign.  How can we describe geography?  How does geography operate?  How can we alter geography?  What are the alternative scenarios?  What are the consequences of change?  How should geography be changed?  Jack now says that GeoDesign is an evolutionary step in GIS.  It is just beginning and will be utilized in a variety of places/venues.  From utilities, to law enforcement, to military, to retail.  He sees this as a way of getting at “information based design making” or “getting science into decisions”.  These are what Jack sees as the true smart maps.

    9:23 – Maps and GIS are changing.  They’re getting richer and more persuasive.  “Tweetering” (HA!)  He’s talking about Web 2.0 and social networks are changing how we do things.  He thinks it will lead to GIS being more persuasive.  Obviously we dig the new media thing, but I’m glad to see even Jack getting into the groove.  Maybe we’ll see Jack’s weekly musings podcast soon! J  He’s moved onto how GIS is translating into a variety of platforms and patterns of storage and transmission.  Basically from cloud computing to iPhone type stuff.  He is now taking a division between “web GIS” and desktop/server divisions.  I think it’s interesting he’s dividing the web off from the rest.  I’m not exactly clear which he thinks will be “greater”… the web or the desktop still.

    9:28 – now on to ESRI’s work and how it fits into that vision.  Main focus is ArcGIS software.  They want it to be a complete and integrated system for server to desktop to web.  Seeing online being a greater segment of their vision.  The Geodatabase becomes the center point of this vision.  It should be a comprehensive information model that is storable in a scalable system.  He’s now talking about the patterns of how people use their software.  Talking about the highlights on 9.3.1.  Now onto Evan’s demo of some of the cool stuff in 9.3.1.

    9:32 – Evan is demoing how dynamic services are a lot faster in 9.3.1.  That’s good because we found them almost unusable in 9.3.  Having moved to 9.3.1, I can see it is LOADS better.  Cache map services allow for increased usability and scalability.  They’re showing that ArcIMS refreshes at around 3 secs, whereas the ArcServer does a refresh in less than a second.  It’s pretty cool to watch.  If you ask me, I say… Down with ArcIMS!  There’s a cool new preview in ArcMap that lets you see how the service will look online, ‘cause it uses the same render engine.  This should help cartographic viewing easier, because you can compare the two easily.  Nothing worse than seeing something in ArcMap and seeing it rendered differently in ArcIMS or ArcServer.  Then you can publish it directly from ArcMap to the server, which is pretty cool.  Now they’re showing some end user’s utilization of ArcServer 9.3.1.  There’s a javascript one and a Flex one.  They’re pretty quick and cover a range of areas.

    9:41 – Rich Internet Applications.  It’s sorta the intersection of web 2.0 and MASHUPS.  Basically Flex and Silverlight.  Those APIs come standard with Server, but as of today, non-corporate users will have them for free, which is super cool.  He mentioned government agencies, education users, and NGOs.  I’d guess you should check with your sales rep to see if you qualify.  Having played with RIA’s, I can say they will easily be the future of this Web GIS Jack talks about.

    9:44 – Christophe is talking about all the free data available for users.  There’s ESRI’s stuff, but now as of 9.3.1, Microsoft’s BING! (I can’t type that without caps and an exclamation point, ‘cause that’s how it sounds in my head) data is available for free.  The ESRI data looks better, I think, but the Microsoft data might be more comprehensive, not sure.  Soon they’re creating data for the whole world down to 1:200,000 (? Not sure about that).  Topographic maps for the whole world, with the US down to 1:20K.  Lastly, we have demographic maps from ESRI.  You can drape this over any other layers, like terrain.  You can also query the demographic information easily.  All of this stuff is free for desktop users.  They’re constantly adding content – more to follow soon.

    9:48 – ArcExplorer.  New version coming out soon, which Jack says will be evolutionary.  Bernie is demoing ArcGIS Explorer (we like Bernie at the VS HQ).  They’ve added an ribbon interface like Office 2007, which customers will either love or hate (I fall into love camp).  Integrated basemaps, which connect to that stuff Christophe was talking about.  There’s also both a 2 and 3D view.  It looks like Google Maps sorta, but slightly newer and fresher.  Now have added support for layer packages.  You can also do plugins, which is super cool.  You can do a geoprocess on server and have Explorer connect to it.  They results are pretty impressive.  It will be great for pushing out a lightweight client to non-expert users.  You can also publish this stuff to a powerpoint presentation for live demoing.  It looks like powerpoint slides (blech!) but oh no!  Surprise!  You can actually interact with this “slide” live with a nice slippy slide interface.  Now that’s super cool.  You can zoom around in both 2D and 3D and its stupid fast.  Berne linked this to a live webcam of Old Faithful, which brought it up right away.  The animated parts are impressive.  Yeah!  No more boring as watching paint dry on grass growing GIS presentations!  Everyone should jump on this bandwagon the second it comes out, if you ask me.

    9:56 – Jack is talking more about these layer packages.  It is a way to package up layers and data and give it out to people.  You can put it on CD or even share it online on ArcGIS online.  There’s now a new, free, integrated cloud storage site online.  You can share maps and data with whomever you choose.  I’m curious how much storage space you get.  Our portal has a couple TB of data, so I wonder if they’ll hold all of that information?  Onto a layer package demo with Rob.  You can create one via ArcMap, then you login to ArcGIS online.  You can then upload it and tag it with keywords and a title.  That helps with the searching for end users.  Now you can create and share the map/data with a private group.  Maria is going to show how you can get at the package that’s been published.  She’s looking for the package Rob uploaded (we like Maria at VS HQ too!)  She opens up the package in ArcGIS Explorer, although she could have chosen desktop.  You can look at the map in 2D or 3D.  Rob is making a webmap using ArcGIS online.  It’s a new and easy way to do Mashups without having to have lots of programming knowledge.  You can save your new mashup online and allow others to use it to further extend to more powerful mashups.  Jack is now back suggesting this is like Flickr… he calls it GeoFlickr.

    10:03 – Jack is now onto Templates.  This is a way of sorta publishing “best practices” for work being done.  You can share these online.  We’re seeing a video talking about how this works.  When you find a template, you can watch a video to see how it works, check out a live demo of the template, and look at some instructions.  You download the template with starting data and applications.  For instances, they’re demoing a tax parcel viewer.  It’s a web viewer for publishing tax parcel mapping.  The template is pretty cool, but I can see a LOT of counties with “stock” tax parcel viewers.  Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but it does sorta “tag” your application.  Supposedly you only need to connect the template to your data and edit some config options and you’re good to go.  Color me skeptical, but it looked good in the viewer.  They’re looking for feedback, so if you’re at the UC, give your two cents!

    10:08 – Jack is now announcing MapIt, a new product jointly developed with Microsoft.  It has a Silverlight viewer and is designed to connect IT people into maps more fully.  I’m not clear what the product does, to be honest, so look for more information throughout the week as we ask about it.

    10:11  – Break time!

    10:33 – Break Over, back to the show!  FedEx is going to show a display of how they’re using GIS to help their business.  Adam from Fed Ex is talking.  He’s in the division that deals with time critical, super important stuff that absolutely has to be there on time.  We’re seeing a live view of where drivers and trucks are currently traveling.  There’s a neat routing view that looks like most in car navigation systems, but the neat thing is the home office can see those views in real time too.  Customers can subscribe to certain events, say within 15 mins of delivery, and get notified via phone or text message or something.  They’re also linking to other sensors that might be for specific purposes, like a temperature control unit to monitor the package(s).  They can also re-route in real time.

    10:41 – What’s next?  What’s ESRI been working on?  I’m really hoping hard wired maps to the brain, but I’m betting that’s not what the next video will show.  Scott, director of software development, is talking about what they’re doing.  Editing, spatial analysis, stream lining the software, productivity increases, all good stuff.  And I’d like to note that Scott has an EPIC level beard.  I’m actually green with envy!

    10:44 – Next version is definitely going to be 9.4, NOT 10 as they hinted at various time.  The focus is making us all more productive.  Also, more quality and performance issues.  The desktop is going to become easier to use.  Time visualization, map display, integration search, dynamic TOC (woot!), better reports, better access to SQL Server spatial and Oracle Spatial.  Easier administration, as you’ll be able to have 9.3.1 installed concurrently with 9.4.  Now for the top 10 favorite things, which is an annual thing they do.  John is giving us his rundown.  Here we go:

    10:46 – Top Ten Things in 9.4:  (crap… missed number 10!) 9) Upgraded user interface.  Dockable windows and hidable.  You can make the TOC go away.  Addition of a catalog directly in ArcMap (woot!)  That’s also dockable and hidable. 8) Attribute tables – dockable and hideable tables.  You can open multiple tables, so you can get selected and all at the same time, which will be nice.  Side by side show available too, ‘cause you can make it look however you want. 7) New Search to find data.  You can easily look for data directly from ArcMap.  The results look Google-esque, which is cool. 6) New reporting capability.  You can make a report much like you see in MS Office products.  You can select fields and organizations and apply templates.  You can also safe the report to run with a different select step. 5) Model builder updates.  You can now see inputs/outputs without having to run tool.  You can undo and redo stuff in model builder.  You can now customize toolbars so you can add your own geoprocessing models, which is pretty darn useful.  Here’s a nice feature – with 9.4 you can run a geoprocess as a background process and continue to work.  That’ll be great for all those times you do 3-4 day processing tasks, that’s for sure. 4) New layers – only show symbology and legend for visible features.  Basically dynamic  TOC.  I love this, ‘cause I HATE futzing with the current TOC.  It’s a complement to traditional TOC, which you can still use. 3) Symbol browsing.  You can quickly look and search for symbols, which is much better than just browsing the thousands of symbols. 2) Time (it’s on our side, yeah it is… sorry)  They’re including more temporal tools, which is great because this is somewhere where GIS hasn’t been great in the past.  There’s a system clock so you can set the date/time over the last period of time.  It changes your layers quickly, which is great because the current way with the TOC sucks. 1)Drum roll….. fast base maps! (I’d have picked the time controls personally).  Right now, layers re-draw sequentially.  Now you can set a group of layers to be the “basemap layer”.  As you pan, the redraw on those layers is continuous.  You can do a roam that allows you to move around freely, which is cool.  Turns out I didn’t miss the 10th one… there were only 9!

    10:59 – Doug is going to show us stuff about editing in 9.4.  My observations aren’t going to be much here, because I don’t do a lot of editing.  I can say poor Doug isn’t getting as many claps as John got with his Top Ten (strike that Nine) list.  One cool thing is when you click on the map, you get a list of the selectable layers at that point, which makes editing easier.  The new tracing tool will make splitting polygons a heck of a lot easier, as it can follow along a line pretty easy, say the boundary of a stream as per the demo.  You can also say splits should be done only at right angles, which is nice for those of us not so hot at drawing, so says the master of the 87 degree angle!

    11:05 – Jack is talking about web editing, which I find intriguing.  As Jack is saying, collaborative and distributed data collection and editing will be easier.  You can use a mix of desktop and handheld useful.  He thinks this is critical for user generated content (using terms like Citizen/Government Interaction, Crowd Sourcing, Collaborative Design, and user generated content – UGC).  This is potentially huge, I think.  Apparently Jack agrees J

    11:07 – Next up, automation.  Creation of map books and the like are huge.  At the end of the day a paper map is sometimes just what you need.  It’s a hard nut to crack, that’s for sure.  Jack says 9.3 introduces some good stuff on multiscale map generation.  Onto Adam, who is going to show some automation for 9.4.  Now python is imbedded into the system.  The script can repair paths to data, which is a huge problem.  Hugely annoying too.  Now he’s showing updating symbology automatically via the script.  Guess I gotta learn python soon.  Meh.  Apparently a bunch of this stuff was born from Centerpoint energy (the SAG winner from earlier) needs when they developed map books for their remote teams.  They created a single map document that has multiple pages one can cycle through.  It’s one of those things I think a lot of people are a tad surprised it didn’t already do.  Hence the no clapping.  Dynamic text, which updates the labels with each turn of the page (that got a healthy clap).  You can publish this into a multipage PDF document.

    11:14 – Now onto analysis, what Jack says is the heart of GIS.  More Python, which is cool and all, but I’m still not convinced of python’s power.  Plus the tabbing is annoying.  But that’s just me.  ESRI clearly disagrees with me, so python is going to be huge for analysis stuff.  Time is going to be integrating through all their stuff, not just the desktop.  I’m assuming ArcObjects will have a bunch of new features for that.  Network analysis is expanding in 9.4 with the addition of Location/Allocation Modeling, Allocation Gravity Modeling, Dynamic Barriers, and time dependent routes.  The last one will be a huge help, I think.  Jack is now saying 9.4 will be a complete 3D GIS.  Let’s hope so.  Again, I’m skeptical.  Designed for virtual cities.  Supports 3D vector model, which is great.  It’ll support 3D editing.  They’re also getting rid of a lot of the limitations they used to have.  I can’t see Sue, but I wonder if she’s jumping out of her seat ;)   Dynamic texturing changes depending on view distance (now I’m certain Sue must be jumping out of her seat).  You can do symbols by any attribute.  He (missed the presenter’s name) is showing editing in 3D from above and below ground.  You can now import and georeference a sketchup model with a single click, as well as continue to edit it (ok, I should really look at Sue now).  Updates analytic tools are included too.  There’s an updated line of sight tool, which helps for new development.  New tool called skyline.  It’s to help protect skylines of cities.  You can see if a proposed building will screw up an existing skyline.  There’s a new layer type, video layer.  There is a georeferenced video showing over top static GIS layers.  That’s pretty cool.  You can also include georeferenced camera displays.  This is way cool stuff!

    11:24 – Jack just made the same Stones/Time joke I did.  Apparently we both have the same dorky sense of humor.  This should surprise me, yet oddly doesn’t.  But on to more 9.4 stuff!  Geodatabase is going to open up to allow any client to read/write to the database via an open API.  That’ll help the platform become a solid standard.  More replication tools, which is great because their current ones aren’t that great.  They’re dramatically improving imagery handling.  ESRI has always been great at vector, so-so at imagery, which is good that they’re tackling this important side of the equation.  With 9.4, there’s a new type of raster catalog called a mosaic, which lives in the geodatabase.  This keeps imagery in native format and access data dynamically without changing the original data.  They’ve attempted to cut out a lot of the middle steps to creating/editing/using imagery data.  Makes it all run faster and reduce time between acquisition and use.  Next, in 9.4 is real time roam and zoom across data.  Looks like it loads up different data depending on location.  Pretty fast.  There’s also the inclusion of an image analysis window/tool set.  You can swipe back and forth between original data and this new “analyzed” data.  They’ve also created an partnership with Envy, which allows you to quickly and easily extract a layer from the imagery.  They’re showing a box panning over a city (Toronto) and automatically generate building footprints, which is pretty cool.  Wonder if you can run it automatically in a geoprocessing tool?  That’ll make making building footprints pretty darn quick.

    11:33 – Moblie GIS (shameless plug!  Don’t forget to come see our live show on Wednesday where we’ll be talking with the ArcPad team!).  They’re extending the functionality to new devices, like the iPhone.  I would have expected a bigger clap from that… oh well.  Bonnie is showing the mobile options.  She’s showing the Flex API default page to show how mobile devices can be used.  Now we see a Trimble “virtual” hand held device.  She’s adding new records and editing them in real time.  Now she’s moved onto showing in on a tablet PC that can be mounted in a vehicle.  Again, I kinda thought it could already do that, but I’m not a heavy mobile user, so what do I know?  It seems to work pretty well, but I’m curious how it will work as that touch screen starts to fade.  Of course, that’s not really ESRI’s problem, but a hardware one.  The buttons are nice and big, I’ll have to say, which is important when you’re driving and trying to do work (and not run anyone over).  It also integrates with ArcLogistics navigator.

    11:40 – Now Chris is going to show the 3rd device, which I’m assuming will be the iPhone.  That makes sense with their increased emphasis on crowd sourcing.  You can use your own maps or someone else’s maps instead of, say, Google’s default map.  The map is pretty detailed and works pretty good for using just your finger.  Basemap switching is quick.  Selecting buildings is simple.  End user’s can actually add data into the map, even going so far as to take pictures with the iPhone and attach it to the map.  It can be emailed, SMS, or synched with the server.  Ok, this may be the central technology for my dissertation, so I’d kinda like to get this… say… today J  By far, the coolest thing I’ve personally seen today!

    11:46 – Jack sounds like he’s wrapping up now.  He’s emphasizing how user driven requests drive a lot of their development.  People are walking around with notebooks to write down people’s suggestions and criticisms.  If you’re at the UC, don’t forget to give feedback!  I’ve done it a number of times and seen some of it end up in finished products, so they are really interested in user’s input.  Don’t be afraid to call them or email them and tell’em what you think.  I’ve never gotten a negative response when I’ve done it.

    11:49 – Onto a film showing what ESRI is doing outside of their software development.  They’re talking about ramping up their services sector and their data services.  They’re constantly looking for better data they can publish.  I’ve used the professional services in the past and I can say they’re top notch.  Not cheap, but top notch.

    12:00 – Lunch break!

    2:05 – Back from lunch.  Normally the afternoon is about people doing interesting things with GIS.  Jack is moving on to the US Census Bureau.  Tim Trainer from census is talking.  Obviously GIS is important to census (at least it should be obvious, I think).  Census blocks are aggregated into larger units for census taking.  They’ve moved the system to a wireless one, instead of shipping paper products around.  Speeds up the process dramatically, from what he’s saying.  The TIGER project was good enough accuracy for those paper products, but since the move to GPS, it isn’t as viable as it once was.  So clearly they’re moving beyond the TIGER project.  They’ve got over 145,000 handhelds for census taking.  I wonder if they’ve going to move beyond handhelds since a lot of those are really going away.  The picture shows a consumer grade PDA unit, not a commercial grade GPS unit.  Apparently the latest census was supposed to take 7 weeks to pull off, but as of this past Friday, the census has finished a full week in advance.  He credits this to GIS.  Census day is April 1st, 2010 (why do so many agencies like to do things on April Fools Day?).  The Census motto – count you once, only once, and in the right place.  Apparently the census is changing how they distribute their data.  American Fact Finder is moving to Web 2.0.  Cached maps and thematic maps are going to become the norm.  It’s about time, if you ask me.  Census is the foundation of our democracy, in that it produces how many seats for the House.  So remember, fill out your census form!

    2:20 – Dr. Scholten is getting the Lifetime Achievement award.  He got his degrees in Geography and Math (wow!).  He’s a professor at Vrije University in Amsterdam and CEO.  There’s a cool picture of Jack and Dr. Scholten in 1984 with Arc-Info 3.1.  He’s reminiscing about when he first met Jack 25 years ago when ESRI’s success wasn’t so sure.  He’s talking a bit about the history of his country.  They began making maps in the 1600’s, with inclusion of maps in art and the creation of maps for exploration.  He’s talking about teams and how he’s impressed with ESRI’s team.  His company, Geodan, has a good team.  He’s also talking about his University team and now the EDUGIS Team.  Finally, his “home” team, meaning his family.  He’s basically stating that the strength of his work rests on these teams of people working together to create successes.  He’ll be in the Microsoft booth this week if you’d like to stop by and chat with him.  Nice award presentation.

    2:34 – Another award, this time to a non-profit out of the UK called MapAction.  Their role is in the field of humanitarian relief.  They send mapping/GIS professionals to hot spots and dangerous areas for humanitarian relief work.  They have a display in the map gallery area, which will be cool to check out.  Hopefully we can get a short bit of interview from their team.  Their work seems fascinating.

    2:42 – Education section with Charlie.  He’ll introduce kids groups doing stuff with GIS.  This is always the best part of the plenary for me.  He’s saying that young people who get involved in GIS work tend to move on to great things with their community and within the greater GIS work.  He’s calling for geomentors to help schools and educators.  Let me add my modest voice to this call, if I may.  Helping teachers and their students can be one of the most rewarding experiences of GIS professionals.  A teacher from Maryland is talking about high school students working late on GIS projects.  Two kids, Joey and Matt, are telling us about what they learned.  Once more I’m UTTERLY AMAZED these kids stand up in front of thousands of geospatial experts and talk about the amazing work they did.  I know I couldn’t do it.  These kids covered a LOT of interesting basic skills.  They did a project analyzing the best place for a new school to be built.  They used geostatistics and demographic data.  These two kids are going to have a remote sensing and geospatial technology certifications.  Just amazing.  I tweeted this, but I also want to note that these kids made metadata as part of what they did.  Look, if two high school students just learning could find the time and knowledge to make metadata, then GIS professionals HAVE NO EXCUSE for not making metadata.  The geomentor is giving some great advice for mentoring.  He’s saying go find teachers willing to learn and students willing to learn and give them the time and energy to enable them.  Hands down the biggest applause of the plenary came when Jack asked, “Do you guys want anything?”, one of the guys (Joey?) said, “I want to go to college.  Anyone got a scholarship?”  That’s gold right there!  You can’t make that stuff up.

    2:59 – Next up, Hernado de Soto, world famous economist.  He has stated that cadastral data is critical for countries to transition from poor to rich.  He’s talking about how words relate you to the outside world.  Relationships are important and connections allow us to relate to the outside world.  Now we have picture of an apple and he’s making the point that looking at the picture tells you nothing about ownership/property or his relationship to that apple.  You have to have documentation to detail relationships and you can work through these records to understand these relationships.  He tells the story of the show Miami Vice… I’ll skip the details but the short point of the story is that addresses allow that show to work, because they travel from address to address, ie place to place.  He says there is no credit without property paper.  The ultimate point he’s working toward is clear – documentation of property defines the modern financial world.  Without that, you can’t have secure or reliable understanding of relationships between people and property.  Why does this matter?  Because billions of people don’t have good property rights or documentation of those rights and are thus unable to partake in the modern property system.  Most countries that don’t’ have good right would very much like to have them.  Even tribal nations have developed an ad hoc system which isn’t as effective as one would like, but critical.  His ultimate message is that property law must be developed in the third world.  He’s challenging the United States to create property law in places like Iraq, because the lack of that law in these places is contributing to the abject instability.  His presentation and message is well taken, but I will insert my editorial comment that we often see what we see because of where we sit.  It seems natural to me that an economist would be concerned most importantly with property.  I think this might be one of several legs of a table, one without which democracy can exist.  However, we shouldn’t ignore the other legs for this one, as they’re important as well.

    3:38 – Willie Smits, second Keynote.  He created a University in Indonesia and is a wildlife conservation expert.  He’s been in Indonesia for 30 years and he is talking about the deforestation and ecological damage being done in that area.  He’s got some impressive pictures of the deforestation… impressive and sad.  He’s talking about palm oil and how it is connected to Indonesia and how the world-wide demand of palm oil is killing the Indonesian rainforests.  He showing how they used geospatial analysis to detail this tale.  The analysis shows that a lot of concessions for oil palm plantations are foolish, as the land isn’t really suited for growing oil palm.  In fact, a full 60% of the plantations are being created in places where they can’t make a profit.  This takes into account soil, weather, and transportation costs.  A time analysis shows deforestation happening every 3 months.  Furthermore, the government is issuing permits to legally develop areas that really shouldn’t be developed legally, just some tricks to make it looks like it is developable.  In short, they could use the technology to analyze the real information, not the assumed and prove illegal usage was happening.  We can contend with these issues such as deforestation before they become life critical because the technology allows us to do so.

    ]]>     http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/13/esri-live-blogging-of-plenary/feed/ 0     EdUC plenary and keynote 2009 http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/11/educ-plenary-and-keynote-2009/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/11/educ-plenary-and-keynote-2009/#comments Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:20:35 +0000 Jesse http://veryspatial.com/?p=5931 The multiple-conferenced beast that is the ESRI User Conference is underway today with the Education User Conference (where I am), the Homeland Security Summit, and the Surveying & Engineering Summit. 

    This year the EdUC has moved to the other end of the SDCC to the Hilton Bayfront. The opening plenary saw the motley crew that is the ESRI Ed team make their way on stage to highlight and discuss a few things. Michael Gould started things off (ok so i walked in at the end of Angela’s topic) with a discussion of the vision of the Ed Team and how GIS use will likely follow the general trend and move to the cloud in education. Tom Baker talked about how the http://edcommunity.esri.com has expanded over the year and the resources that are available for GIS educators to interact and learn. Joseph Kerski talked about just a couple of the lessons available from ArcLessons and the data conduit that is the Ed team blog. Laura Bowden talked about ESRI Press’s new Academic imprint, the rollout of new translations of Press books, and the republication of some older books. She also pointed out that ESRI will be rolling out a software certification program at 9.4 (won’t compeat with GISP or ASPRS certification) and a few new training courses. Ann Johnson highlighted changes to 9.3.1 education license options that see some license levels getting additional seats, new extensions, and new names. I am sure details are available on the Ed industry page. Of interest to some, they have made it easier for educators to get student disks, though they have a new name now. Finally, Charlie Fitzpatrick spoke about the http://geomentor.org program that you should check out and think about supporting (yeah, I am talking to you).

    There was a great moment at the end of the plenary when they recognized the soon to be ‘retiring’ Ann Johnson to a well deserved round of applause. But don’t worry. as you already know from the podcast Ann is going to be working with the GeoTech Center after she leaves ESRI.    

    Bern kicked off the keynote section showing off AGX 900, ArcGIS Online (are we going to call it AGO?), and layer packages and talked about their potential place in education. 

    The keynote was given by Dr Henk Scholten and he talked about some of their work on using geospatial technologies to develop spatial thinking. 

    Be sure to check out our Saturday wrap up podcast to hear more about the plenary, keynote, and the sessions we make it to when we aren’t finishing our own presentations.         

    ]]>     http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/11/educ-plenary-and-keynote-2009/feed/ 0     AVSP Roadshow – GamePath @ GES’09 http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/10/avsp-roadshow-gamepath-ges09/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/10/avsp-roadshow-gamepath-ges09/#comments Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:10:50 +0000 Jesse http://veryspatial.com/?p=5923 We spoke with Steve Farrer and Suzanne Freyjadis of GamePath about the recent Game Education Summit and GamePath’s related events.

    Click here to download the episode in MP3 format

    ]]>     http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/10/avsp-roadshow-gamepath-ges09/feed/ 0     Google Earth Enterprise 3.2 Released http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/09/google-earth-enterprise-3-2-released/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/09/google-earth-enterprise-3-2-released/#comments Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:20:10 +0000 Frank http://veryspatial.com/?p=5929 The crew over on the Google Earth Enterprise have a new version to announce – 3.2.  The fellows over at Google have had a pretty busy week, what with the big OS announcement, not to mention the offical launch of much of their product line, so it’d be easy to miss this in the diluge of information.  However, this new version adds a lot of functionality to their product and it’s well worth checking out the blog for more information.  Look for a good interview with Dylan, the project lead on GEE, in a near future episode!

    ]]>     http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/09/google-earth-enterprise-3-2-released/feed/ 2     AVSP Roadshow – GES’09 Round-up http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/09/avsp-roadshow-ges09-round-up/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/09/avsp-roadshow-ges09-round-up/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:17:04 +0000 Jesse http://veryspatial.com/?p=5927 Jesse and Sue talk about the recent Game Education Summit and the sessions they attended.

    Click here to download the episode in MP3 format

    ]]>     http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/09/avsp-roadshow-ges09-round-up/feed/ 0     A VerySpatial Podcast – Special Episode 50 http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/08/a-veryspatial-podcast-special-episode-50/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/08/a-veryspatial-podcast-special-episode-50/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:58:26 +0000 Jesse http://veryspatial.com/?p=5921 We spoke with Moshe Binyamin of Pitney Bowes about announcements made at the recent Insights conference including MapInfo 10.0.

    Click to download mp3 version

    Click to download aac version

    ]]>     http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/08/a-veryspatial-podcast-special-episode-50/feed/ 0     Lost in the Virtual Fog – A Question of Scale http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/07/lost-in-the-virtual-fog-a-question-of-scale/ http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/07/lost-in-the-virtual-fog-a-question-of-scale/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:11:44 +0000 Sue http://veryspatial.com/?p=5917 bigMan1I have been remiss in not doing any diary entries for awhile, but I have been feverishly working trying to get my demo XNA application ready for the ESRI UC presentation. Finally today, I think I got the last bit of functionality on my list working, so I am pretty excited and crossing my fingers that everything will run right at the conference, Of course, you can never predict a live demo, so tonight I am recording a few videos of Virtual Morgantown in action, using a cool little software tool called GameCam.

    Last month, we were happy to be able to go to Pittsburgh to cover the Game Education Summit, held at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. We got some nice interviews, including the conversation with ETC Pittsburgh Director Drew Davidson, which we featured on Episode 206 of the podcast. While I’m going to have another entry soon that will be specifically about some of my thoughts on the Game Education Summit, since I’ve gotten back, I’ve had to literally burn the midnight oil to get Virtual Morgantown looking and running the way I want it for this stage in the project. As I’ve been sitting here opening each model in SketchUp, cleaning up what I can, and exporting them to the XNA application as .X files (many, many thanks for Zbyl’s .X Exporter plugin!), I am continually reminded of the challenges in working at this scale after coming from a GIS background.

    As you can zoom in and essentially immerse yourself at a nearly 1:1 scale in the virtual world, issues that never would have mattered suddenly become vital. Even Google Earth, World Wind, ArcGIS Explorer, any of the virtual globes aren’t really meant to be used at that scale, as their background imagery and 3D models look best from a viewpoint well above ground level. So, when you get down to the ground, and are actually representing real features, you have to give each one at least some individual attention. It’s often the opposite of the way most of us are trained. Rather than looking for commonalities and creating data layers that characterize those similarities, you have to bring out the aspects that might make a particular feature unique.

    It’s a strange notion for a lot of geographers and GIS people, I think, to change their perspective from starting with a zoomed-out view of the world and then drilling down toward individual features to starting with the viewpoint of a single person in the world and then have to move and explore in order to identify and understand the nature of the virtual environment you’re immersed in. And, the more you’re drawn into the virtual world, the more obvious the individual differences become, and the more important it is for the creator of the simulation or interactive environment to pay attention to those small design details that help form a sense of actually experiencing the virtual world.

    As I have progressed from childlike wonder and delight over my ability to create a simple XNA application with real-world terrain data, to relief when each one of my new functions actually builds and runs or when I get my model assets adjusted to just the right location and height, I am becoming even more of a believer in taking gaming technology and design seriously, and looking at how we can create virtual world applications that integrate aspects from many different areas, from gaming to GIS and geospatial to geography, and even history and other disciplines.

    ]]>     http://veryspatial.com/2009/07/07/lost-in-the-virtual-fog-a-question-of-scale/feed/ 0