FANTOM PLANET

I’m a little over a month out from starting grad school and have been busy settling into short-timers syndrome at work.  So, to admit, I feel like I have been slackin’, but I think that’s normal when all you’re doing is ejecting projects from your portfolio.  I will admit, that about more than half of my projects will die or go into stasis as I depart. Which is quite unfortunate, I had some great things going.

What I really want to talk about is the email I received from the program’s staff the other day.  To paraphrase, it basically said, “Start you projects.”  So, ok! I will.  Problem I’ve noted with previous students is the actual graduation rate within the year of participants from my program.  Not very impressive. I was told that a lot of students don’t latch on to the project management aspects they’re taught and fall behind schedule. Being the PMP that I am, I need to keep this project’s scope small, focused, and on time.

My problem is, I may want to do WAY too much. So, what do I focus on?

I need to encompass what I know and what I’ll learn from the program as one of the requirements of the project. Also, the timeframe is a requirement. But topically, do I want to encompass creating a project that does meta layer analysis of information from the internet that is non-structured?  Like say use the concept ShiftSpace.org as a meta layer tool for metadata services like Geospatial One-Stop or GeoCommons and for books in a library, or for news sites like WashingtonPost.com or even blog aggregators like Planet Geospatial?

I’m not sure. May be too big. Plus, how do I use ArcGIS Server or anything else to help me analyze and visualize metadata?

Good thing I have over a month to think this through.

It has been about a month since the announcement of Google Map Mapplets and within the past week two mapplets have caught my eye. The terrain profiler and the sea level rise mapplets from the HeyWhatsThat? folks. The whole concept has has piqued my thoughts that we’re starting to see the development of online geospatial processing outside of the traditional GIS body.

There’s ESRI’s ArcGIS Server, which is for the enterprise. There is MapServer, GeoServer, GraphServer, etc from open source. But these are for dedicated GIS teams for clients who have the resources to maintain them. So, does GMapplets enable the public in a way to build their own processes for specific issues and move online geospatial processing away from the enterprise to the home?

I think it may.

I don’t think that it will cut into the enterprise solutions, open or proprietary, but will probably bring greater awareness to issues that folks care about. There’s crime, there’s public resources, there are environmental issues people are interested in that could bring greater geographic awareness to communities. There are about 276 mapplets in Google’s gallery. They range from Wikipedia, a GeoRSS reader, webcam locator, transporation surfaces, area calculators, and user generated content. As early as it is, I think we’re going to see a lot more development in this area to start complementing information generated and shared via collaborative atlases.

The other thing I wanted to note are some of the questions that everyone seems to ask at some point, “When will Google jump into GIS?” Well, I don’t think they have to. All they have to do is enable bright people with the right platforms. Then I think they’ll be eating someone’s lunch.