Our director of Engineering, Michael P. Gerlek, attended and participated in GeoWeb 2009 in Vancouver last week. The annual GeoWeb gathering is a forum for new ideas and technologies that help shape the discussion of what it means to bring geospatial support into the Internet. 

Michael trio’d up with Galdos’ Ron Lake and the OGC’s Carl Reed for an all-day, tag-team relay session called GeoWeb 101. Each of the three presented about different technologies underlying the geoweb.

Other presentations throughout the week proved interesting, too. Michael’s “trip report” was published by GeoConnexion. Here’s the link:

http://www.geoconnexion.com/geo_online_article/GeoWeb-2009-Trip-Report/322

As we mentioned some months back, LizardTech has been involved with the GeoWeb conference series for a number of years.  Our own mpg is on the program committee again this year and has asked me to remind you that GeoWeb 2009 is only a couple short weeks away.

There is a special focus this year on the intersection of GIS with the urban modeling and building design communities.  As the past few posts on this blog have shown (here, here and here), LizardTech is now a player in the LiDAR and 3D GIS space so we’re excited to see more people learning about and working on this “industry convergence”.

On the first day of the conference, mpg will also be part of team presenting a workshop informally titled “GeoWeb 101“:

“Do you have a clear understanding of the GeoWeb? Do you know where it is headed? Can you see business opportunities? Do you see it impacting the delivery of government services? What is the GeoWeb anyway? Is it more than Virtual Globes? What standards and technologies does GeoWeb include ? How does BIM fit in? What is the connection between SDI and the GeoWeb? What is new about neogeography? Everything to always wanted to know about the GeoWeb but were afraid to ask, GeoWeb 101 is the perfect introduction to GeoWeb 2009 – Cityscapes. The course will be taught by leading experts in the field, including Ron Lake (Galdos), Carl Reed (OGC) and Michael Gerlek (Lizardtech).”

Consider joining us at this annual event in sunny Vancouver, British Columbia and be sure and say hello.

The “Call for Presentations and Workshops” for GeoWeb 2009 has just been announced. The theme of this year’s conference is “Cityscapes”: the geography of urban environments, BIM-CAD-GIS convergence, 3D modeling.

LizardTech has been fortunate to be involved with this conference for a number of years now, and so we’re once again looking forward to July and another fun week with our neighbors to the north.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending GeoWeb 2008 on behalf of both LizardTech and OSGeo. The conference was once again in Vancouver BC, at my favorite business hotel and conference venue. I’ve attended this conference for a number of years now, and it gets better every passing year.

Just a few highlights:

• The underlying theme running through the week was the integration (confluence? convergence?) of the GIS world with the worlds of CAD and BIM (building information model). Architects typically operate at a different scale than we’re used to, but increasingly they want to be able to envision and model their buildings in the larger urban landscape that we can provide for them. Kimon Onuma and his BIMStorm work demonstrated this integration very well. Going the other direction, traditional GIS folks are looking to things like CityGML to be able to improve the fidelity and add that 3rd dimension to their own models.

• I moderated a one hour discussion on Open Source Servers, ably assisted by panelists Paul Ramsey of Clever Elephant, Justin Deoliveira of OpenGeo, and Bob Bray of Autodesk. The attendance was good, and we had some good questions and discussions about the pros (and sometimes cons) of working in and with open source software.
• On behalf of Cody Benkelman of Mission Mountain Technology, I also presented a cool paper on using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service and Google Earth to solve a real problem for a real customer. I tried to get across two main ideas. First, Turks and Turk-like things can be seen as “outsourcing for the Web 2.0 generation”. Secondly, and possibly disconcertingly to some, complete “automation” is not always the best answer – us geeks think of it first, and yes, it’s usually the right move – but not always. Contact us for reprints.

• Dr. Michael Goodchild gave a great workshop on Data Quality – a topic which quite honestly sounded pretty dry and uninspiring, but which turned out to be both educational and interesting. He convinced me that LizardTech’s viewers are displaying lat/long incorrectly, at least from a data quality perspective.
• Michael Jones of Google keynoted again this year, and he once again made everyone stop and think deeply about the human impact the geo community can – and does – have on the world. Not the kind of talk you can summarize easily, you just had to be there.
• This year the conference held its first Student Competition. The competition required use of open source software for the projects; OSGeo was one of the sponsors and as such I was one of the judges. First prize went to Tobias Fleischmann (Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Germany) for “Web Processing Service for Moving Objects Analysis”, which was built using deegree. Second prize went to Tran Tho Ha and Nguyen Thi Thanh Thuy (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) for “e-Collaboration for DGPS/GPS data distribution and receiver device evaluation”, which used PostGIS, MapScript, and OpenLayers. Congratulations to both winners!

• GeoWeb is also famous for being scheduled during Vancouver’s annual “Celebration of Light“, an international

  

  fireworks competition held several evenings high above English Bay. As in previous years, the conference’s evening reception was turned into a sunset dinner cruise, after which we all went up on deck to oooh and aaah at the pyrotechnic ballet.

Finally, just for kicks, I’ll offer the following bits of geotrivia I collected during the conference:

• “A GPS with a bullet hole in it is a paperweight. A paper map with a bullet hole in it is a paper map with a bullet hole in it.” (attributed to the US Marine Corps)
• Tobler’s First Law of Geography: “Nearby things are more similar than distant things.”
• city furniture (noun): features of the urban landscape such as park benches, bus shelters, street lamps, etc
• “The amount of metadata needed for a piece of data varies with the ‘social distance’ from me to my data consumer.” (Michael Goodchild)
• For Amazon’s web services, 85% use the REST API and 15% use the SOAP API. (quoted by Satish Sankaran, ESRI)
• On the Vancouver transit system today, 100 of 144 bus routes are under detours, due to 2010 Olympics work. (Peter Ladner, Vancouver deputy mayor)
• Thirty percent of all 911 calls are not associated with a street address. (Talbot Brooks)

GeoWeb 2009 is already being planned, and will include special emphasis on both cityscapes and 3-D modeling.