Archive for March 2006
A recent article by Adena over at All Points Blog mentions that some folks don’t “get it”.
Having been on the Google Earth Community BBS when the first Sketchup model appeared, I definitely see the value. Sketchup is a great tool for creating 3d models–my city’s planning department uses it extensively–but its audience has typically been limited to professionals because of the price tag.
I think that Google is smart enough to see why they need companies like @Last as part of their competitive strategy. Here’s a quote from an article about the acquisition of GeoTango based on an interview with Stephen Lawler of Microsoft
SilverEye and Smart Digitizer are particularly interesting because they allow “everyone to be a data creator,” as Lawler put it. They allow the public to contribute “local knowledge” for the greater good. Of course for Microsoft that means contributing, in time, both opinion (a restaurant review) and location information (where the restaurant is, or where that new street is) to Windows Live Local.
If Google is going to truly compete in this market, they need to make tools available that empower citizen-publishers. If they do this right, perhaps they will be able to build a “geo-web”, where users provide the content and Google provides the platform (and advertising of course).
Of course, the other possibility is that I’m letting my desire for a reduction in the price of Sketchup affect my reasoning…
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In a recent poll on slashgeo, briancnorton stated (in part):
The reality of the situation is that source being open or closed is totally irrelevant to your average geospatial professional.
I commented on this poll, but I would like to develop my thoughts a bit further. While many geospatial professionals work for organisations that can afford proprietary software, and are quite capable of doing their jobs without open source geospatial software, I would argue that open source is anything but irrelevant to these users. There are at least two factors that are affecting them.
First, we have the efficiency cost. I’m not saying that proprietary software is inefficient in performing the tasks it is created for, but that it creates an overall reduction in organisational efficiency. No one product is the best at every task. By locking-in with one vendor you are either giving up the opportunity to use the right tool for the job, or accepting the additional costs of internal data translations or complicated workarounds. In order to get the most out of your investment in proprietary software you will often find yourself using a shovel to drive a nail, or deciding that you really wanted to dig a hole in the first place.
Next, we have the social cost. Knowledge is power, and when spatial knowledge can only be accessed through high-cost applications and data, disenfranchised groups within our society are pushed further out of the way. Also, people without access to proprietary tools are prevented from contributing to the common good through the unique insights they may have otherwise presented. In any case, society as a whole is suffering because knowledge is not freely discernable by all citizens.
As briancnorton said:
Until you get the working level people motivated and pushing for it, you’ve got nothing.
As geospatial professionals, we have a responsibility to ensure that the software we are using is not costing our organisations more than the initial purchase price in lost efficiency. We also have a responsibility to ensure that our society does not suffer due to a lack of knowledge. Getting involved in the open source geospatial foundation (OSGeo) and its related projects is one way of helping to ensure that these responsibilities are met.
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One of the stated goals of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is “to promote the use of open source software in the geospatial industry.” To support this goal, OSGeo has recently announced a logo contest.
While we know that there are a lot of great artists out there in the geospatial community that would do this as a labour of love, it was felt that some incentive might help. The prize breakdown is as follows:
The winner will receive:
- One copy of Autodesk Mapguide Studio1, donated by Autodesk.
- $50 worth of swag featuring their logo (after the contest closes and we get printing details worked out)
- Their name and profile featured on an “About the Logo” page on the OSGeo.org site
- Their name and profile in the official OSGeo brand manual
The four runners-up will receive:
- One copy of Autodesk Mapguide Studio, donated by Autodesk.
Voting will be done by email. In the spirit of inclusiveness which the foundation is trying to foster, all members (anyone who registers for an account on OSGeo.org) will be able to vote for the logo of their choice.
Before being posted, all logos will be screened by the OSGeo Web Site Committee with the help of some graphic designers, so don’t get any ideas about submitting inappropriate material. 
[1]MapGuide Studio is a product (currently in pre-release) which allows users to quickly and easily author maps to the MapGuide Open Source web mapping application. More information and a preview is available on the Autodesk site.
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Today, the release of MapGuide Open Source 1.0 RC1 was announced, and the website at http://mapguide.osgeo.org/ was unveiled.
This release appears to be considerably more polished than the 0.91 preview that was released last fall. The installation procedures and documentation are more complete and refined, with one of the more important additions being the developers documentation. There is now a developer’s guide and some well-written API documentation. WMS and WFS services are also now available. Unfortunately, not all of the FDO providers are available yet, but I am hoping that they will be made available soon.
An important feature of this release that may initially be overlooked is that with this release they have officially launched as a true collaborative open source project. I would imagine that it will take time to grow a following, but the steps to get involved as a developer are outlined here, and all of the bug tracking and SVN access are available live. For users that are interested in an open source geospatial data access library, the FDO project is also available, but in a limited state.
One other thing that I noticed is that they have included a screenshot of the MapGuide/Google Earth integration work that I have done, which of course gets my vote
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I have a love/hate relationship with Autodesk.
One on hand, I love their MapGuide product, especially the new MapGuide Open Source / MapGuide Enterprise 2007 applications.
On the other hand, I hate the DWG file format. With each release, I have to worry about whether I’ll be able make the engineering department’s work available to the rest of the organisation, and that is exactly what Adena’s recent pointer to Evan Yares’ comments about the new DWG format had me doing.
After sitting on that for a few days, and starting to read some of the news that is leaking out about Autocad 2007 (the blogs listed by Shaan Hurley mostly seem focused on the new 3D environment) I was starting to get pretty disappointed. After all, there are some pretty compelling features in there and I’m going to get some major pressure to move our organisation to 2007.
Something seemed odd to me though. There was no real information on Autodesk Map 3D 2007 in those blogs. I had received a short blurb from my reseller about the new releases, but had not really read through it. So, I went back and did. Then I went on a hunt for more information on Map 3D 2007 and found some on the Taylor Technologies site. Wow!
It seems Autodesk has really focussed on GIS rather than CAD with this release. A long time limitation of Map was its reliance on the DWG format. Link Templates and Object Data were both pretty unreliable and inflexible ways of storing GIS data. Oracle Spatial was a pretty good option if you could afford it, but the recently added ArcSDE support seemed difficult to implement. Autodesk Map 2007 appears to blow most of these constraints away. Here’s why:
New read/write capabilities without conversion:
- MySQL Relational Database
- Microsoft SQL Server Relational Database (not sure how they’re storing spatial info in MSSQL)
- ESRI SHP Files
- Spatial Data File (SDF)
New direct access capabilities:
- JPEG2000
- Web Map Services (WMS)
- Web Feature Service (WFS)
Extra goodies that got thrown in include enhanced support for DWF, what look to be great new cartographic capabilities, and the ability to publish to MapGuide Enterprise 2007.
With that list, who could ask for anything more? Well… me I believe that all of these new formats are provided by Autodesk’s new open source FDO spatial data abstraction layer. Now, unless I’m seeing things, Autodesk has indicated that they will be releasing a PostGIS FDO provider with MapGuide Open Source. It’s possible that this provider did not make it into the 2007 release. Maybe Service Pack 1? Another feature that I would really like to see, and it may be in there already because I do not have access to the beta, is the ability to open MapGuide Enterprise 2007 DWF eMaps as background layers. This would allow for consistant corporate styling without the limitations of WMS, at least as a stopgap until MapGuide offers SLD support.
To bring us back to the start of this post, the one item on this list that I think may get overlooked is support for the Spatial Data File (SDF) format. SDF is a single-user database format, similar to ESRI’s personal geodatabase. It is built on top of SQLite, is fully open, and is already supported by MapGuide Open Source and (yay!) Safe Software’s current FME betas. Now we can choose to use enterprise spatial data stores (Oracle, ArcSDE, PostGIS, MSSQL) for corporate data sets that warrant it, and use the SDF format for smaller projects that do not justify that level of effort. This removes the requirement for Autodesk GIS users to utilize DWG as anything but an an import/export format and working environment.
In municipal government, CAD tools are often the preferred way of maintaining spatial information, but in many cases this has left us with large interoperability barriers. Autodesk has made a huge leap in allowing us to choose the right geospatial tool for the job.
