Last week, some of us went south to Palm Springs to escape the rain and enjoy the company of the crew from Redlands at the ESRI Developer Summit. Much of the conference has been blogged about elsewhere, but I did want to share my observations of the talk on OGC capabilities in ArcGIS Server 9.3.

Satish Sankaran, Yinqi Tang and Gary MacDougal gave a very exciting discussion and demonstration of ESRI’s implementation of OGC Web Services. The quick and dirty is that at 9.3, ESRI has exposed considerable out-of-the-box support for all three of the main OGC specifications and demonstrated interoperability using non-ESRI clients and servers.

It might be worth starting with a little background. For a long time, if you wanted to use ESRI software to access server-based data you really had two choices: use ESRI clients (like ArcMap and ArcCatalog) to access data served from ArcGIS Server or use a web browser client to access the data as a read-only image from ArcIMS. I’m setting aside any discussion of the (client side) Interoperability Extension, which requires an additional license and which I’ve never seen.

If you had another application which could really benefit from content in ArcGIS Server, that was an integration task. More specifically that was your integration task. Similarly if you had an ArcMap-based geo-processing workflow that could benefit from integration with a non-ESRI content provider, well, that was your problem too.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (of which both ESRI and LizardTech are members) exists to publish freely available specifications that allow geospatial applications to talk to each other. The three most commonly used OGC specifications are:

• Web Map Service (WMS) for serving custom maps into web pages. Typically these are small JPEG image “tiles” that make up your map.
• Web Feature Service (WFS) for serving features (vector data like roads, borders, pizza shops) from your dataset into another geospatial application that can interact with them at much more controlled level than a read-only map. Think of WFS is as serving GML over HTTP. An OGC extension for this is WFS-T (T for “transactions”) which allows remote editing of data.
• Web Coverage Service (WCS). Like WMS, this provides a means of accessing raster data. However, here the service is optimized for sending to another geospatial application, rather than a simple web service.

At 9.3, there is significant support for all of these.

WMS

ArcGIS Server’s WMS support is extended to the current version 1.3 including support for Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD). SLDs are part of the WMS specification and allow customized symbology for features. The demonstration here included an OpenLayers web page client rendering a map (with user-selected symbology) served from ArcGIS Server via WMS. That was pretty good, but really, only a marginal improvement.

WFS

The previous 9.2 Data Interoperability extension will continue to provide WFS support to the Desktop Clients. However, at 9.3, “Simple Features” support comes out of the box (without the extra license). On the server side, 9.3 includes a WFS server and if your back-end store is SDE then this includes WFS-T support. What that means is that if you use SDE, non-ESRI clients (who speak WFS) can edit your geodatabase. Stop for a minute and think about that.

The demonstration here showed again the Open Layers client. This time it accessed the parcel data stored in ArcGIS Server via WFS. It corrected some of the parcel boundaries and this was reflected in the same GDB accessed via ArcMap. Frankly, I was pretty impressed.

WCS

WCS support is totally new in 9.3. The demonstration of server support showed the Open Layers client rendering a 4-banded Modis image served from ArcGIS Server via WCS. More interesting to me was the client demo where ArcMap read a dataset via WCS from ICDES and did some sort of raster-based geo-processing on it (I can’t remember exactly what it was). Very, very cool.

Whether or not you believe “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa,” ESRI’s support for this sort of interoperability can only be seen as good news for GIS and for ESRI.

My family (Donna, Ian, and Maya) and I were fortunate to spend two weeks in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. We spent the first week at the Hotel Sotavento on Playa De Ropa and the second week at the Hotel Krystal on the beach at Ixtapa.

This image of our trip in ArcMap will open a new tab or window.

Our first week we swam and snorkeled at both the beach and pool, went fishing and caught a fairly large needle fish, which strongly resembles a barracuda, and snorkeled again at a nearby reef. Ian and I sailed on a Hobi Cat in very strong winds. The kids also climbed and explored on large rocks off the beach. Body surfing and boogie boarding were a big part of our beach experience here. Donna and Maya perfected their surfing techniques.

Up the beach at Ixtapa, the hotel was a more “American style” resort with lots of snowbirds escaping winter in the upper Midwest. The surf was a lot higher at this beach so boogie boarding was more dangerous. On our last day the waves approached twelve feet high and they closed the beach.

A highlight was our day trip to Isla de Ixtapa. We enjoyed fantastic snorkeling at three different beaches. Ian spotted a small moray eel in the sandy swimming beach and we followed it for some time with masks on. He and I also made a jungle trip to the top of the island, following the trails of small deer and rabbits. Our afternoon ceviche lunch – fish or shrimp cocktail “cooked” in lime juice and served in a dish with salsa and other goodies – was interrupted by a dozen sting rays jumping three to four feet out of the water in choreographed lines as if herding fish.

Stopping at a wildlife sanctuary back on the mainland we photographed huge crocodiles and turtles as well as birds and iguanas.

In town we got a good look at the street life of Zihuatanejo, where people live a lot differently than they do at home. The kids got to see how food and transportation are handled in countries that do things differently than ours. We hope to return in the future and explore some of the volcanoes that are just inland from the beach resorts.

Last Tuesday evening, LizardTech hosted a party at GameWorks in conjunction with our participation in the GITA conference. I couldn’t attend the party, but several of my fellow Lizards did and the report is that a good time was had by all. Thanks to all who stopped by.

Here is one of our favorite photos from the evening. As editor of Geospatial Solutions Online, Cyrena Respini-Irwin is an old friend of LizardTech. She has reviewed a number or our product releases in recent years. Here she is blasting away at indiscriminate evil alongside our own marketing coordinator, David Calabro.

We’ve always known her aim is true.

Several of us Engineering Lizards walked up to the Convention Center on Tuesday to show support for the hardworking Sales and Marketing Lizards who were manning our booth and to have a look around. The first thing I noticed was what a blue conference it was. Every booth and banner seemed to be a cool cerulean, with the single, vibrant and very red exception of Oracle’s digs.

The theme of this year’s GITA conference was “Infrastructure Solutions”, so there were a lot of “geospatial solutions” companies offering data integration software and services. I saw the word “conflation” so many times I looked it up later.

Crowlike, I’m drawn to the shiniest objects in a given environment, so I ended up spending the most time with the very amiable representatives from an Italian company called Abaco. My eye was caught by a CAD image of the Duomo in Milan spinning in 3-D on their monitor. Abaco was showing off its DbMAP® Web 3D product, a set of tools for building three-dimensional representations using existing bidimensional GIS data.

The thing that arrested my gaze was that when the perspective dropped down into a piazza and you were looking at the sides of the buildings, the facades were correct, peeling paint and all. Not like other products I’ve seen where the elevation view is blank grey or the roof of a building dribbles over its flank like a Dali clock. I asked how this was possible, and they showed me how they manually grabbed image data from oblique aerial photos and applied it to the raised buildings in the 3-D creation, skewing and stretching via what I assume to be complex algorithms (the kind we in the imaging industry bench-press every day before breakfast).

Seeing this, my first thought was, wow, that might be fine for a hilltop village like Civita di Bagnoreggio, but adding a facade to each building by hand would be untenable for Rome, let alone some sprawling city like Phoenix. It was explained to me that in the suburbs, you would apply facades randomly from a palette—only in familiar areas like the downtown or famous landmarks would you apply the actual facade. Fair enough.

Still, invoking the adage that the coolest stuff is seldom the most useful stuff, my second thought was, who would be going to so much trouble creating virtual land- or cityscapes that they would need such a tool? Tourism boards, for one, I was told, and though the sales guy listed other customers of theirs, I didn’t catch those because the bubble above my head filled up with an image of how perfect such models would be for the website of any municipality that relied on tourism for its economy.

The other coolest thing was at our own booth, where Lizards Jim and Robert showed me the HistoricAerials.com website, which uses our Express Server software to deliver aerial image datasets spanning decades and enables viewers to toggle between years at any given location.

In my hometown of Bellevue, WA, for example, I could zoom into any spot in the city the way it was in 1964, then click to the years 1968, 1980, 1990, 1998, 2000 or 2006, seeing the city develop before my eyes. And with the haunting “dissolve” feature enabled, each year gave slowly away to the inexorable erosion of time as the next year in the set gradually supplanted it. The images above show the effects of nearly half a century on one piece of earth.

I doubt the product spec ever called out “haunting” as an intended feature, but I’ll tell you this: I stayed up late that night toggling between 2006 and 1964 and watched farmhouses in the center of town giving way to Bellevue Square Mall, and Uncle Harold’s hobby shop, where I got my first bike, dissolving beneath a mayhem of skyscrapers.

Bellevue images courtesy of HistoricAerials.com. Duomo image courtesy of Abaco Group.

Just a note to let folks know that LizardTech will be hosting a party at GameWorks in conjunction with GITA‘s Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference 31 taking place in Seattle March 9 – 12. It’s our way of saying “Welcome to our town”.

The party is from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 11. We’ve reserved space on the second floor near the bar. LizardTech will provide food, two drink tickets per person and game cards for those interested in a little sport.

GameWorks is at 1511 Seventh Avenue, kittycorner from the Washington State Convention Center.

So after you’ve visited us at Booth #321 at the show on Tuesday, head on over to GameWorks and loosen your floor badge with the Lizards. We look forward to seeing you there.