Glen Thompson and I were fortunate to attend the ESRI Developer’s Summit in Palm Springs last month. In addition to being a great excuse to get out of the rain here in Seattle, the Dev Summit provides a great opportunity to catch up with our friends from Redlands and see what’s new with ArcGIS.

Those who missed it can look over the presentations.

One way to think about an event like this is in terms of what’s cool and exciting and what’s getting the “business as usual” treatment. This year what’s cool and exciting is most definitely client-side web mapping. We’re talking Flex, Javascript and the newly released Silverlight API for ArcGIS Server. These were accompanied by cheering, contests, prizes and “Playful” (?) references to glitzy, “silverlighty” (get it?) applications.

There were no contests or prizes for the backend stuff on which Glen and I spent most of our time. Of particular note, GDAL is definitely on the rise here. GDAL is the open source project that (among other things) provides the ability to convert between raster formats. Principal maintainer Frank Warmerdam presented a technical session on “Custom Raster Format Support in ArcGIS through GDAL”. Guys, start thinking about migrating those Erdas Imagine / RDO extensions to GDAL. The writing is on the wall.

And, speaking of items that will eventually need migrating, I gave a short talk on “Implementing a Custom Image Server Raster Format.” It describes the technical architecture of the project and includes some server benchmarking work that we did in Seattle highlighting the impact of using Express Server with ArcGIS Image Server Extension.

ESRI is even hosting a video of the presentation.

Thanks, guys!

Lizard watchers will have noticed the recent LizardTech announcement regarding the Express Server sale to North Carolina. I spent an afternoon pointing Google Earth over there and reflected about the need for better public access for public GIS aerial imagery.

Like most people (certainly most people who read LizardTech’s blog) I’m really excited by the advent of feature-rich GIS clients like Google Earth and very extensive base map that they make available for free, non-commercial use. That said, there are lots of different kinds of imagery you might want to view and Google can’t provide them all. (For an interesting introduction to some of what’s behind the Google Earth base map imagery, see this Google Earth Blog posting.

Despite the availability of free or nearly free commercial data from Google, there are myriad public programs that acquire new imagery each year.

• USDA’s Aerial Photography Field Office runs several image collection programs the best known of which is probably the National Agricultural Image Progam (NAIP) which provides farm-related orthophotos
• USGS’s National Aerial Photography Program (NAPP) supports various federal agencies
• The National Geodetic Survey’s Aeronautical Survey Program supports aerial photography of Airports

That’s a by-no-means exhaustive list of federal collections programs. There are similar programs that work at the State and Local level. In general, there’s a very good reason for this: no single base map, even one as well-funded and maintained as Google’s, can hope to meet everyone’s needs.

Happily, most of that publicly-acquired data is publicly available for little or no cost to US taxpayers. The rub is the means by which it’s made accessible.

In many cases you can view maps via a web application like this NAIP 2006 Viewer and this MDOQ Viewer hosted by USDA’s Geospatial Data Warehouse. That’s great for basic access and a pan-and-zoom style of data discovery but limits the user to exactly what web application has built for you. For most non-trivial work, it’s not what you need (for example comparing / aggregating diverse datasets).

More frequently, you download the data or have it mailed to you on a DVD. Like this. That’s OK if you’re not in a rush and you have industrial strength GIS tools and the necessary technical sophistication to use them. Even then, you’re stuck with this same problem for every public dataset you need to access. Consider briefly that each of those datasets are frequently bigger than 1 gigabyte in size.

What we need are better tools and better integration. Increasingly, Google Earth is being picked as an easy, relatively inexpensive ($400/year for commercial use, free for personal use) tool and OGC standards like WMS are serving the integration need.

All of that brings me back to the the North Caroline site. Randolph County is a growing community. If you want to see the latest growth (here from 2007), you’ll need to ask the locals, it is not in the Google Earth base map, which shows this:

Here’s the same area, again inside of Google Earth, using the WMS feed from NC OneMap.

Try it yourself: Click this KML file to open it in Google Earth (Note: In Firefox, you’ll be asked first whether you want to open or save the file).

Directions magazine explored the question of the commercial data Google publishes as a public trust. My view is that, by making their real public data accessible via a common WMS interface, North Carolina has made it, well, really public.

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.

I recently got back from a short vacation with friends and family in Hawaii. Although I’ve been part of the LizardTech Engineering team for many years, I’m relatively new to the geospatial industry, so you’ll forgive me if wax a little misty here.

One of the things that made this trip particularly memorable for me was geocaching all over the Big Island.

My wife and I found one cache that brought us through an ancient petroglyph site. Others of us found a cache placed by a 6th grade class near a 100-foot seawall. There were others… all of them at sites conveniently close to us but uncrowded and beautiful. I’m grateful to the locals who posted these, becoming private tour guides and sharing their intimate knowledge of beautiful places close to their homes and their hearts.

I’m continually struck by how small a place the world has become. From our living room at home, we get online and look at the road from the airport to the rental home we’ll be staying in. The aerial image shows the roadway, the round-abouts, the beach, the pool and the rooftop over our suite. When we arrive in Hawaii - 2000 miles from home - we walk, for the first time, through a brush trail looking for a 10-inch package and find it as easily as (well, with no more frustration than) if it were a box of Christmas lights in the garage.

This is just the fun side of it, but “better living through geospatial technology” is a worthy goal and we at LizardTech are proud to pursue it.