You know, when I first saw Ritchie’s GeoChat for ArcMap application I thought it was pretty cool, but didn’t have much use for it as it was closed-source and ArcMap-only.
I still think that it’s cool, and the release of GeoChat for ArcGIS Explorer, noted by James a few days ago got me thinking about it again.
Imagine users of GeoChat for ArcGIS communicating with users of GeoChat for OpenLayers, GeoChat for MapGuide, GeoChat for Foo. Imagine being able to engage in collaborative mapping with anyone that has a Google Talk account.
I don’t think that this too unrealistic. The ESRI GeoChat applications use an open protocol called XMPP, and the source code for both the ArcMap and the ArcGIS Explorer versions of GeoChat are now available from ArcScripts.
I have some concerns about the licensing (it shows as public domain on ArcScripts, but the license file indicates that there is proprietary third-party code included), but maybe the message creation portion of the code is open enough to form the foundation of an ad-hoc geospatial messaging standard. Does anyone else see value in this kind of cross-platform collaborative ability?
-J
1Paul Ramsey on Feb 4, 2007 at 11:30 am:
Yes! If one if going to have collaboration, it makes little sense to lock it into only one platform, it destroys the network effects. I guess the question about geochat is how open are the bits that aren’t specified in XMPP? How are the geometries and gestures and whatnot encoded?