FANTOM PLANET

See, the quake was the website update for Adobe Acrobat 9 Extended!

…A friend once told me, “PDF is where data goes to die.” If that holds true, then geoPDF is where maps go to die…

Word on the street is that ArcGIS 9.3 will natively export to this new Acrobat format. Schweet.

The other neat thing that I’d like to point out is the Flash embed capability for Acrobat. Could the ArcGIS Server 9.3 Flex API be embedded in the PDF for dynamic mapping?

Just forget about workflow for a moment. Is it possible?

Ok, now think of the workflow. Could it have the potential to be another SharePoint-like pain in the butt?

Adobe = Upgrade (with the potential to Fail!)
ESRI = Upgrade!
TerraGo = Fail!

Andrew asked if I could recommend some resources for GIS analysis and cartography. So, I went through my recent Amazon.com purchase list and put together a table. I could add all of the ESRI press books, but many of those are heavily ESRI button-centric. Instead, the books below are focused on theory and methodology. The ESRI books below are actually useful books about the science and mathematics behind GIS analysis.

I’d like to note that Elements of Cartography, may be a little dated since it was last updated in 1996. It’s a good read and one of those books that ties you to the art of Cartography.

There are some cultural geography books in the list too. Everything we do involves people and I’ve been working on some stuff involving mapping cultures. If you’re interested in activism or NGO mapping, these books can be helpful rounding your geographic education.

Why Geography Matters is on the list. Harm de Blij has written many human and cultural geography textbooks in America and this book, I feel is a good read about why having an understanding of geography matters. He focuses on climate change, the rise of China, and the effects of terrorism. You’ll feel that you have chosen the right line of work.

Finally, there are hundreds of books on spatial databases, GIS for the Web, and all sorts of different avenues that geography and GIS cover. As much as I’m trying, I can’t seem to read or buy them all. I would love to, but I like my work-life configuration right now. These are a few titles to get you started. I hope others make recommendations of their own favorite materials as well.

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I’ve been intrigued with Lisa Parks’ presentation at Where 2.0 last week. Personally, I like the topic because I study the exact same stuff in my day job—when I’m not Twittering. Yet, it had an air of ignorance in it. It was observed from a cultural studies, almost post-modern view. It might be an observation from the outside that we don’t care for, but it is interesting and a needed perspective.

So, do we think of the effect of our media? Those media that are representations of real life in spatial terms.

We could put some deep thought into this for years and months, but for any geo-types who feel like Parks gave us a bum rap, and for those who may want to challenge her assumptions about geo as a medium, then start off by reading a paper by Daniel Sui and Mike Goodchild. It’s called, “A tetradic analysis of GIS and society using McLuhan’s law of the media.”

This paper argues that GIS are increasingly becoming media for communicating various crucial social and environmental information to the general public. By reconceptualizing GIS as media, the paper conducts a detailed tetradic analysis on the social implications of GIS using Marshall McLuhan’s law of media. The analysis reveals the paradoxical and ambivalent nature of GIS technology. To make GIS fulfill democratic ideals in society, this paper calls for a shift of perspective, from viewing them as instruments for problem‐solving to viewing them as media for communication. This shift from instrumental to communicative rationality enables us to examine more critically and holistically how space, people and environment have been represented, manipulated and visualized in GIS and thus promotes a more critical and democratic GIS practice. [Emphasis mine]

For all things GeoWeb, this starts you off with some perspective where Parks was trying to come from. It did for me, and it’s probably why I’m reading books on media ecology and cultural geography of media. It’s a crazy shift for a kind of paleo/neogeography guy like myself, but just its another way of studying geography and our impact on place and people.

Understanding geo as a medium will help you realize the impact and design of your applications… As well as debating the academic film and media department’s evaluation of your lifestyle.

To quote a line from Jack Ryan:

[imitating the Admiral] “The average Rooskie, son, don’t take a dump without a plan.” Wait a minute. We don’t have to figure out how to get the crew off the sub. He’s already done that, he would have had to. All we gotta do is figure out what he’s gonna do. So how’s he gonna get the crew of the sub. They have to want to get off. How do you get a crew to want to get off a submarine? How do you get a crew to want to get off a nuclear sub…
[eureka!]

Someone doesn’t have a plan, or they’re friggin’ geniuses. Think about this. There’s going to be Google data going to ESRI users and ESRI user data will be visible to the Google indexers. That leaves us with some unanswered questions:

• What is going to be the EULA going to look like on both sides?
• Will data made w/ gData be the user’s data, or Google or ESRI’s data if it’s exposed to Google’s web?
• Will the analysis layers be indexed by Google and will they own a copy?
• Will “Big Iron GIS” users even want to expose their data to Google and the web?
• Where’s Microsoft in this? ESRI + Microsoft makes for quick and easy GIS. Does (ESRI + Microsoft) * Google = Cloud Geoprocessing? Or, Google using Microsoft server and database platforms?

Getting back to ESRI users exposing data. Some of those users don’t let that stuff out of their command line. A friend was telling me today that cities in his region are ultra resistant to sharing data with other cities. So, how does Jack get his users to expose their data?

That’s what I really want to know.

The typical ESRI user “is an expert.” Or, at least in their own mind; and they typically don’t want to be usurped in anyway. Their Matrix gets turned off like that doll house by SAP. You may get a county to do something, but local sites are going to be a pain in the butt to turn onto the web by ESRI. Unless it’s ESRI’s responsibility in the pre-nup to bring in the “trusted interlocutors” to Google.

Something is askew.

On a side note: I spoke with Lisa Parks, who spoke yesterday about slippy map makers framing spatial media context, today. She has a grad student tracking the changes to the Google license agreement almost daily. That is because it changes almost daily.

In honor of Where 2.0, I figure I’d make the connection to all that the paleos like Jack Dangermond and Don Cooke and the like were once neogeographers about 30, 40 years ago. To illustrate this I’ll try to bring up some interesting facts from the past about neogeographers of the 60’s and 70’s and maybe older.

First person to be highlighted is Edgar Horwood from the University of Washington and first URISA president. Dr. Horwood created a card mapping and tape mapping computer program. Prior to 1960, Harwood offered the first academic course utilizing computer processing and geographic information.

Interesting thing about Horwood is that he has a series of “short laws” that every paleo and neogeographer should know:

1. Good data is the data you already have
2. Bad data drives out good
3. The data you have for the present crisis was collected to relate to the previous one
4. The respectability of existing data grows with elapsed time and distance from the data source to the investigator
5. Data can be moved from one office to another but it cannot be created or destroyed
6. If you have the right data you have the wrong problem and vice versa
7. The important thing is not what you do but how you measure it
8. In complex systems there is no relationship between information gathered and the decision made
9. Acquisition from knowledge is an exception
10. Knowledge flows at half the rate at which academic courses proliferate

I’ve planned my escape from the ESRI Nunnery to attend the Where 2.0 conference for tomorrow! I’ll be breaking out posing as an ESL student and driving the five or six hours in Jack’s Volvo—with Jack! We’ll talk about 9.4 for awhile. I’ll stroke his hairs to soften him up to talk to him about Google, Microsoft, and the small businesses who are trying to cache in on the use of geography. Then we’ll practice his joint talk for Where. I’ll be John Hanke and he’ll be… Well, Jack. It should be fun!

I’ll of course have to go cold turkey outside of Redlands. Being without the dialysis machine’s steady flow of Kool-Aid to keep me alive will be interesting. I think I’ll pack my bags with instructor-led training manuals to keep me going. Perhaps I could rig a get up like Darth Vader, or one of those liquid breathing rigs from The Abyss to sustain me?

Truth be told, I really have to get crackin’ on finishing my final paper to graduate from the Nunnery’s fortress-like bunker walls. It’s like pulling teeth. No need to pose as an ESL student, I write like one! If you see someone sitting with a bunch of books strewn across a table with a “WWJD: What would Jack do?” t-shirt on. That’s probably me. Stop by. Say hello. Move on. I have work to do.

Oh, and don’t forget! Dave Bouwman is buying drinks with his ESRI Dev Summit earnings for anyone who wears an ESRI t-shirt or looks like James Fee in the Marriott bar.

Here at the ESRI Polytechnic Engineering School for the Blind, we have a weekly colloquium where we (the students) and the ESRI staff meet to hear interesting presentations every Wednesday. Today’s colloquium was a presentation from another resident of The Gulag, Dr. John Kimerling of Oregon State fame, presented Dotting the Dot Map. Beware: there’s a dose of math with funny symbols in this one.

I point this one out because it is rarely in the geoblogosphere we get techniques in cartography, especially with ESRI GIS technology.  Fortunately, there’s the ESRI Mapping Center for those with the ESRI crutch. They even have a blog!  I would reference the site quite often for the power GIS user who makes maps as it is chalk full of goodies (scripts) and tricks to get the most—cartographically—out of ArcGIS. As for the mega-cartographer, I would reference information aesthetics, John Krygier’s Making Maps: DIY Cartography, Tom Patterson’s Shaded Relief, and even Edward Tufte’s Ask E.T for more tips and techniques for cartographic and information visualization.

On the same note, and I don’t know if you feel the same way, but it seems as if there is little “art” in our science these days in the GIS and map services world.  It could be just me? I’m writing more design and project documentation these days.

So, I went back. Back to the Kool-Aid stand that is the ESRI DevSummit. I got smarter, I got excited, I got even more hooked on the Kool-Aid.

First I’d like to note that I’m a geographer, not really a programmer, but… I learned a lot at the DevSummit and I got a lot of crazy ideas for my post-Redlands life. I did realize that to understand the mechanism that is ESRI GIS you can be a dope like me, but to develop the mechanism it’s hard work. I guess any development is really. Putting up with the client/user’s griping and complaining, their clueless ideas and so on. I commend a lot of developers for putting up with that crap, and most other geographers should too.

So, yes, my first DevSummit opened up a new world to me. One that f’in nuts! Still, I like building things, designing things, seeing the happy smiles of users. So, I think I’ll not only keep up with the tech and the processes that are new in buttonology, but also keep up with the tech that makes working with GIS “so fun.”

Bottom line: ArcGIS Server 9.3… F’in rocks. It’s off the hook, fool.

Side notes:

1) Jeremey B. said he should have made a “HTTP Goodness” t-shirt. I mentioned they would probably sell like hot cakes at the UC or next year’s DevSummit. I also recommended that he make “GET” and “POST” shirts too.

2) I spent the afternoon in the Microsoft Lounge charging my laptop, doing some homework, and found myself consulting with Ed Katibah and a Redlands alumn from back East. I tell you, that Ed sure is awesome. Always fun to chat with, always a ball of energy. Though I felt kind of bad about holding him up from his FAQ work that he did for the Microsoft SIG. I told him though that he’s lucky he hasn’t suffered from “Adult Onset Internet ADD” like I have. That’s what GIS and blogging will do to you.

3) The Flex API for AGS was “demonstrated today. Slick, slick, slick. In the three weeks that they’ve worked on it, it has some great visualization capabilities in the browser. The interesting thing is that you can not only build web RIAs but you can also export your work to Adobe Air for a light weight desktop app. Licensing? No clue. It’s built to mimic the AGS 9.3 JavaScript API, so any changes to either one, the other should be updated as well. So, a pretty nice presentation layer for the Flex/Flash folks. BTW: The Flex API isn’t in beta yet. Notice I said they worked on it for three weeks? So, Flex and AWX devs/designers will have to wait.

4) Congrats to Dave Bouwman. He won second place in the Code Challenge. Just think if he would have reminded us to vote for him?

Today the Summer Camp was blessed with a visit from Dr. Michael Goodchild from UC Santa Barbara. He was in town to speak at our colloquium w/ ESRI on VGI and what it means, but our class got to spend an hour with him discussing what else he’s been working on besides VGI. And no Andrew, I didn’t give away all your VGI secrets.

It sounds he’s interested in re-visiting how we do metadata. It depends upon VGI and the state of current technology from what he alluded to. He spoke of tags and ontologies and how the technology already describes what the data is for really well. What metadata today really doesn’t tell us—if we ever bother to look at it or write it—is how it has been used, what it’s good for, and how uncertain it is. And he went on to talk about how accuracy is out dated for today and how uncertainty is really what we’re wanting to know. So he sees the change in the world and wants to apply it so the rest of us really aren’t living in a world of paleo-metadata standards.

The other thing he spoke of was really about gazetteers, and he speaks of changing how we look at naming places. It takes a bit of VGI to do this. He and I went on about the First Law of Geography in terms of how persons volunteer the information around them. He speaks of involvement, ownership; I brought up the human need to justify our existence. What I should have recommended was the use of “Generation M: Me, MyMaps, MySpace” in his talks to describe this, but he’s the doctor… I’m not. BTW: I used that in a talk at the UC about two or three years ago.

We got on the topic of social networks and space and that was really interesting. Again, the First Law came up and I brought up the “compulsion of proximity” (pg. 257) about how people flock to like people. He also talked about how early mapping of social networks geographers would distort the physical space, but that really doesn’t represent the connections well and is kind of a poor—but fun—use of visualizing information via geography.

It was an hour well spent. Actually, he made me wonder why I was at Redlands getting a Master’s versus getting a PhD at Santa Barbara. He did praise Redlands as one of the best programs for what it is, with being a year long and having the resources that ESRI provides. Redlands might be the only year-long program? Also, he recommended talking to another one of his students who was working on something similar, so that is always helpful.

Then later this afternoon it was time for his presentation at our colloquium. It went really well. Jack was there for those of you who care. He went into a number of things that the whole social software world discusses, but with the focus on geographic information. He talked about the difference between authoritative versus assertive sources in mapping. Brought up how Don Cooke calls himself a “paleogeographer,” but how the only difference between him and the neogeographers is that their shirts are untucked and his isn’t. He used Open Street Map, Wikimapia, and Google Earth as examples.

Overall, Dr. Goodchild gave a good presentation about where the geospatial world is and asks what’s going to happen next and how is it going to effect us all.

I apologize that this post doesn’t capture everything, but it’s something.

Now, where is that UCSB application form?

Since it is that time of year and since everyone is doing it. I might as well list my top ten dumbest predictions about our world for 2008. If they become true, I’m heading to Vegas with Dave Bouwman’s profits this time next year.

10) Election Maps. It’s election year in the States and once again we’ll be hosed with “red vs. blue” thematic maps. These maps will polarize the country early on with predicted areas of support for candidates and bringing out the nastiness of who’s right, wrong, left, up, and down.There will also be a few mashups of election supporters with breakdowns of where obese folks, intelligent designers, and Oprah/NASCAR moms are.

9) OSHA. OSHA will step in to ban the Wii and GIS. Especially after James Fee has his Wii Bowling accident before Where 2.0 and becomes unable to spell GIS anymore, let alone blog about it. GIS is banned because is causes blindness and hairy palms.

8) Maps is bad. Once the non-western world melts down during the spring thaw, a number of baddies use [Google] maps for no good. Causing knee-jerk reaction by a number of governments to ban or highly regulate mapping. Especially China, who takes out WorldView-2 right after launch.

7) WorldView-2 Stuns GeoEye’s New Bird. Months after China whacks WV-2, WV-2 parts whack GeoEye’s new bird by having it’s debris scratch GE-1’s lens. Bill Gates secretly de-orbits GE-1 onto Sergey’s secret island Googleplex.

6) FOSS4G and the ESRI UC announce plans to combine in 2010. That’s after a prisoner exchange during a TC211 meeting.

5) Jeff Thurston discovers that GLONASS is really a space weapons system. Only because he watched a special on TV, then formed a rescue party that rescued a number of GLONASS engineers from captivity in Siberia. If he would only do that for Manifold users too

4) GooglePhone knows more about you than you do. Google releases the GPhone with its partners and eerily signs you up, books your car, room, and flight to attend Where 2.0 even before you own your GPhone. On a sad note, Glenn is tasered by his N95 when it discovers he decides to think about writing a comparison piece between N95 and GPhone.

3) Acronym soup! VGI, SDI, ESRI, FOSS4G, WTF? 2008 is the year we get acronym’d to death. It starts in DC with the ESRI FedUC and ends when SlashGeo stops with its sloppy seconds.

2) Surveyors reclaim the Earth—only because the lawyers let them. Dusting off the old chains, someone lobbies in DC hard enough to enact licensing for all geo professionals after a rash of high profile court cases that affect senators and representatives and the earmarked buildings, parks, and bridges named after them.

1) Nom de plumes. From me, to the Fake Steve Coast, to Fake Ed Parsons and the soon to be Fake James Fee. The fakes get unmasked; I stop posting b/c too many folks know who I am—and, yes, I will have to kill you; and everyone starts fake <insert name here> blog. On the bright side, in August, the Fake Jack Dangermond hosts the Fake ESRI UC and gives me my fake grad skool diploma.

Didn’t I mention this was a bad list?