FANTOM PLANET

That time of year is fast approaching as the largest gathering of GIS folks happens. That means it’s time for the ESRI Users Conference Geoblogger Meet-up. Google has graciously offered to sponsor again this year. So, I have a few questions for you.

1. 1. Is anyone going?
   2. If you are, have any suggestions for a venue in San Dog?
   3. Does Tuesday night work for you? (I know you’re all big on the Tennis Tournament.)

Let me know via the comments.

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.

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.

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?

Hey if millions of people aren’t having an edit war on this, then I might as well be the one who starts it. . .

Wikipedia defines GIS as:

A geographic information system (GIS), also known as a geographical information system or geospatial information system, is a system for capturing, storing, analyzing and managing data and associated attributes which are spatially referenced to the Earth. GIS is referred to as geomatics in Canada.

In the strictest sense, it is an information system capable of integrating, storing, editing, analyzing, sharing, and displaying geographically-referenced information. In a more generic sense, GIS is a tool that allows users to create interactive queries (user created searches), analyze the spatial information, edit data, maps, and present the results of all these operations. Geographic information science is the science underlying the geographic concepts, applications and systems, taught in degree and GIS Certificate programs at many universities.

Geographic information system technology can be used for scientific investigations, resource management, asset management, Environmental Impact Assessment, Urban planning, cartography, criminology, history, sales, marketing, and logistics. For example, GIS might allow emergency planners to easily calculate emergency response times in the event of a natural disaster, GIS might be used to find wetlands that need protection from pollution, or GIS can be used by a company to site a new business to take advantage of a previously underserved market.

It’s not so different than from what is in all of our textbooks. It says nothing about neogeography. Huh?

That doesn’t mean that neogeography isn’t GIS. The definition of GIS itself above is as a system, but can mean a science, or a service. Data in, gospel out. Same would hold true for neogeography applications and knowledge using the systems, the science and the services. I hear often enough from certain people in town that the web mapping applications that neogeographers build aren’t GIS and their data isn’t reliable. It’s all about the right tools for the right job folks, and it’s the right data for the right job too. As Tim O’Reilly once said, “It’s about the data stupid.”

We know our media is changing, but know that some things will remain the same: the geoid as an equipotential “lumpy potato”, Tobler’s First Law of Geography, and people will always say they like maps when you tell them you’re a geographer. I suggest we as GIS and geographer folk understand that change is happening otherwise. If you’re not down with change, get your acetate out and exacto knife and go start a hobby and preserve that lost art.

It has always been about the story of human life. Mine, yours, and the Fake Ed Parsons. (BTW: When the Fake Ed was at OS, he wrote the story of human life.) And we better damn well work together to help us tell it together. It does us no good to dump software packages into the deepest darkest collection of cubicles and say, “This is GIS, this will make your life so much better.” Then leave with no training and no discussion about sustaining a GIS. Employees with spatial info will blow it off, and it’s already been blown off inside the home. That’s why building the canvases of geography around the world are important. Google Earth, Virtual Earth, Yahoo maps, just to name the big guys. The likes of OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia, and Flickr and others where we’re mapping our communities and mapping our lives. Yes, this is great stuff. We need to let it grow and understand it, and not to kick your grandma off of Google Earth while she’s mapping her life’s story because “she’s not a geographer.”

(Written from the ESRI infirmary using Jack’s laptop.)

The National Center for Geographic Information & Analysis at UC Santa Barbara is partnering with Los Alamos National Labs and the Vespucci Institute to hold a two-day workshop in December to address research initiatives about “Volunteered Geographic Information.”  Dr. Michael Goodchild is leading the workshop to discuss with a number of others interested in VGI.

I guess it was a matter of time before there was academic research into this area and a meeting other than Where 2.0 to show off the goods.  I guess GIS or geographic information as a media is pretty important to study. Especially when it comes to the have’s and have not’s in this world when it comes to access to tell stories about themselves. I wish I could go to watch, this would be a pretty good meeting to be at to see what comes from all of this.

Living in Redlands for two months already has been. . . uh, an experience.

If you’ve consumed any sort of news media this week, you’ve seen that we’re experiencing some fires here in California. The news sparked my parents to call last night, and others to email this morning, to see if we’re ok. Supposedly, the East Coast media machine is making this look like California is going to burn off into the ocean or something. They’re probably right, which sucks for the nearly 300,000 people displaced by the fires already.

At least the wind has shifted and died down this morning.

“Well, mom. I’m ok. Here’s a map.”

Now, I have a final to take.

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.

You have to see this clip from the Daily Show!

One can never say that they dislike a conference. For one, it gets you out of the cubicle farm for a few days. I’m at ASPRS this week in Tampa and the weather is pleasant, the people friendly. . . and I’m somewhat disinterested.

Nothing new really jumps out anymore to nab my attention. Photogrammetery suites are advanced, yes. Camera/LiDAR systems are schweet. I finally learned what Intergraph does well. And, ok, Microsoft does photogrammetery.

The most interesting conversations I had today were with DigitalGlobe and GeoEye folks and getting their response to the NGA Director’s comments about commercial satellite imagery. I guess everyone’s first takes were, “Holy-holy-holy crap!” Then everyone realized the commercial providers aren’t going to “out” American assets to make a buck. There are laws that they abide by, but there are even situations that the commercial providers see something and say, “let’s hold off on this product for release.” So, it’s good to know at least someone is using common sense.

. . . Then of course the commentary on the All Points Blog post about this subject was interesting. . .

On one note, Microsoft Photogrammetery and Virtual Earth are quite visible here. Demo showings are just as frequent as Spiderman-3. This kind of presence also tips us off to another visible thing on the expo hall floor: The Absence of Google Earth.

As we’ve read today, the GE Team, of course, had more important things to do. Like, launch their new blog. Welcome to the club.

Michael Jones, the CTO of Google, noted that GE’s user base is approximately the tenth most populated country coming in with 200,000,000 users in the world in his keynote. Today we also learned that about 8 million of those users are Dutch. But an interesting point to bring out of left field is: if GE is the world’s tenth largest country, what is Adobe Reader?

Don’t let the GeoPDF marketing team catch on to that, we may soon all be the victims of a similar rhetorical question.

Then again, we could all fall victim to bad jokes like, “If people in Poland are called pols; then are people in Holland called hols? And can you see those 16 million holes in Google Earth?”

Finally, the my point is that it has been an interesting day and I cannot wait for Where 2.0.

Tomorrow’s schedule: I’ll think about “WWGD” and will conduct a survey and mapping expedition to map local Hooters restaurants in VE and MyMaps.