On the Shoulders of Giants?

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I was recently reading a post by Gordon Luckett about how he’s been able to use Google Maps and Bing layers in MapGuide / Fusion maps. This is only possible because the Fusion project decided to build on top of OpenLayers, and recent builds of Fusion have enabled the OpenLayers commercial base maps.

This got me to thinking about the amount of work that the MapGuide project is leveraging every time you see a map. MapGuide directly includes about a dozen open source libraries. Many of these (such as FDO, GDAL, GD and Fusion) have their own stack of libraries that they depend on. With a bit of digging, I quickly ended up over 30–I’m sure I could have gone further–and this doesn’t even count the open source utilities such as GCC, Ant and SWIG that are integral to turning all of this code into something you can use.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that no matter how cool your code is, you’re really just the tip of the iceberg. We’re not standing on the shoulders of giants, we’re standing on the shoulders of thousands of regular people who have dedicated their time to help build this ecosystem. We have to make sure that we in turn enhance other projects where possible, and provide a solid base for those who come to build on our work in the future.

-J

NanaimoMap Testers Wanted

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The City of Nanaimo is launching our new MapGuide Open Source / Fusion based map in beta. I’d love to see some feedback from testers, and to get help generating some real-world usage patterns. You can only do so much with canned load tests.

If you’ve got a few minutes to play with it, please join us here:

NanaimoMap Beta

It’s in beta because of the issues that will likely be shaken out by more widespread use, and because we have not yet built out the layers and search functionality required to match our current MapGuide 6.5 ActiveX-based mapping portal CityMap. This will be completed before the end of the year.

Thanks!

-J

P.S. This application was developed by DM Solutions Group. We’re running Fusion 1.1 with the latest test build (r4114) of MapGuide. We wouldn’t have been able to launch–even in beta–without some last minute fixes by Trevor Wekel of OTX Systems and Haris Kurtagic of SL King. From a personal perspective, these guys are both amazing to work with, moderately priced for the value they offer, and are great resources if you’re stuck with a problem in MapGuide core that you can’t fix on your own. As always, the opinions offered on this blog are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.

Do You See Spiders? Making Government Data Truly Open

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The trend towards open government data is growing, with recent developments like Data.Gov and Vancouver’s Open3 motion, but these simply do not go far enough. In addition to publishing downloadable data and open interfaces, government needs to learn from successful commercial websites and bring their “Deep Web” data to the surface.

The internet search experience is constantly evolving. In the early days it was normal to search for a single keyword, be redirected to an authoritative website, and then explore that site to find what you were really looking for. As the search engines became smarter and publishers learned to expose their database records as individual web pages, people have learned to search for more specific information. For instance, searching for the name of a book will take you to an Amazon or Wikipedia entry for that book. Searching for the name of a current release movie will get you local show times and the name of the theatre it’s playing at.

Unfortunately, government has largely failed to recognise this change, and an entrenched tendency to develop stateful applications and portals is making the problem worse. As an example, try searching for US patent number 6368227. You will likely find a few results from ad-driven private websites that were re-publishing the government data, and maybe a broken link to the official patent search. Why bother publishing your information online if you are going to do so in a way that holds it apart from the web?

The good news is that fixing this problem is not hard. The search engines already assign a lot of authority to government sites, so you’re already a step ahead of commercial sites facing the same problem. Just follow a few simple suggestions that the rest of the web has already figured out for us:

  • Publish each well-formatted record to a consistent location on the web that will not change. This allows both people and search engines to come back to these records whenever they want.
     
  • Ensure that search engine spiders have a way of following basic hyperlinks to find this information. This can be either a simple paged set of results, or a more complex hierarchical system if the data allows.
     
  • Generate SiteMaps that link to all of your records as cheap insurance to make sure that the search engines can find all of your content. Be careful to pay attention to the maximum size, and break your data up into multiple sitemaps if necessary.
     
  • Make use of clear and logical metadata such as Title, Description and Canonical tags to ensure that both search engines and your prospective searchers can make sense of the results. Nothing worse than publishing a record with an HTML title like “32432-43A”. Nobody is going to click on that!
     

Do we still need to build applications? Absolutely! Sometimes free text search across the entire web does not offer enough granularity. Do we still need to make data and services available to third parties? Definitely! There are lots of smart people out there who can use our data to help make the world a better place. However, these are secondary to the single most effective way we have of giving citizens access to the data we maintain on their behalf. Our highest level of service can be delivered by being of the web, not just on the web.

Oh, and since this is a geospatial blog: Just because your data is in a GIS, don’t think you can avoid doing something about this. Spatial search is still nowhere near as powerful as general web search, but it’s getting better all the time. Government geodata needs to be published as web pages too.

For some concrete examples of the benefits of becoming part of the web, check out a slide show that I recently published as “Moving Beyond the Desk“. Make sure to turn on the speaker notes. If you don’t feel like watching the slides, just try searching Google for Mark Bate Statue or 2323 Rosstown Rd and see if you can find the City of Nanaimo’s data in the results. For technical information on the systems behind these results, see my previous posts on the public art project and the MapGuide GeoREST extension the City is using to publish property information.

-J

P.S. This post was prompted by James’ mention of the Moving Beyond the Desk slide show. Thanks James!

Nanaimo Public Art with Seadragon AJAX and KML awesomeness

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One of my co-workers, Jessica Maple, has just launched a cool new web application that allows people to view public art in the City of Nanaimo. This application combines traditional information (photograph, artist, description) with the power of geography and some neat technology from Microsoft in an innovative way.

You can visit the Nanaimo Public Art Inventory on the City’s website, or view the art directly in KML (Google Earth) or Google Maps.

One of the neat things about this is that if you’re running Google Earth 5, you can see the Microsoft Seadragon AJAX zoomable images inside the KML pop-up balloons. Jessica had to jump through some hoops to get this to work properly in multiple versions of Google Earth and in Google Maps but I think the result is worth it. For this, she borrowed heavily from some of the techniques used by Sean Askay of Google Earth Outreach in his Map The Fallen application.

Here are a couple examples of the art pieces included in the inventory:

A Thousand Fibres (View as KML)

Admiral of the Fleet (view as KML)

Way to go Jessica, and the City of Nanaimo Parks Recreation and Culture department. Full press release available here (pdf).

-J