It is an oft-invoked stereotype that engineers prefer to work alone in dark caves, and there’s certainly some truth there. Here at LizardTech, for example, each development team member works in a well-ventillated but cozy and earthy burrow that our ops team constructed to individual specifications out of papier-mache. Some of these workspaces have convincing stalactites, or narrow entrances lined with lichens. A few are strewn with bones.*

But in mass emergences similar to those of the 13- and 17-year cicada, engineers periodically gather together in high-energy events called “code sprints”, which last several days and whose purpose is to resolve bugs, churn out new code, share information and ideas, and dispatch untold wedges of pizza. Ethnologists now suspect that a form of socialization is also carried on.

In March, LizardTech will be cosponsoring such an event in Toronto hosted by OSGeo. A couple of lizards will be attending and will work on GDAL/MrSID performance issues. Please consider joining us there!

*By contrast, our sales team is housed in a single, large spherical room partially filled with rubber balls and water toys.

Seriously, image of New Mexico’s Lechuguilla Cave courtesy of Wikipedia.

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.

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.

If you were to look under the hood of GeoExpress 7 – and the rest of our products – you’d find that LizardTech, like a lot of other companies in our industry, relies on open source software. In our case, we’re experts in compression and wavelets and geospatial imaging, and so we spend a lot of our R&D dollars in those areas. But for the stuff we’re not experts in – like reading the GeoTIFF format, parsing XML, and handling projection systems – we find better value relying on open source solutions.

As someone once said, though, “the gift economy ain’t free”: there’s a moral imperative to give something back.

Since Michael P. Gerlek has already blogged about the second birthday of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), I thought I’d mention that in addition to his day job running part of our engineering team, Michael helps support the open source community by serving as editor for the monthly “Open Sources” column in GeoConnexion magazine.

Under the auspices of OSGeo, he has worked with many of the leaders of the open source geo world to shepherd nine 1000-word articles into print so far, with several more queued up for future issues.

The following links open PDFs.

#1 – Welcome to Open Sources by Michael P. Gerlek

#2 – The OSSIM Project by Mark Lucas

#3 – BigTIFF by Frank Warmerdam

#4 – A Virtuous Circle of Collaboration by Chris Holmes

#5 – The Gift Economy Ain’t Free by Howard Butler and Chris Schmidt

#6 – Open Layers and TileCache by Schuyler Erle

#7 – MapBender by Arnulf Christl

#8 – GRASS by Malte Halbey-Martin (to appear in the March issue)

#9 – MapServer by Steve Lime (to appear in the April issue)

LizardTech is happy to be able to be a sponsor of OSGeo and support its staff on projects like this.

LizardTech isn’t in a position to be able to do the 20% Google thing, but over the past couple years here I have been fortunate to be able to spend a little of my time “giving something back” to the GIS community.

Back in February of 2006, I had the chance to spent a cold and windy day at an airport hotel in Chicago in a meeting with a couple dozen luminaries from the open source and activist wings of the geospatial world. The open source ecosystem for our industry was getting more attention and traction, and people were starting to form some sort of organization which could serve as a clearinghouse for these development efforts, promote the use of open source in industry, champion the use of free and open products in education, and so on. By the end of that day, the domain name “osgeo.com” had been registered and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation was born.

As a for-profit company, LizardTech and others have lots of reasons to support the open source movement. Esteemed coauthor Matt Fleagle and I wrote an article about this very topic last year.

This past year, OSGeo has seen the birth of a number of chapters, based around communities of regional interest or common language. The Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source (CUGOS) formed here in Seattle last spring, meeting every month here at our offices in Seattle – it’s nice to have a chance to meet other open source geo folks face-to-face for a change, instead of just trading emails and IRC messages.

We Lizards were also very fortunate this year to meet the up with the OSGeo tribes at the FOSS4G conference in Victoria. I and four other LizardTech engineers went up north for the week, and we all came home with a much better appreciation of the broad set of libraries and applications we can build on, as well as the people who work on them.

Speaking just as an individual, it’s been a great privilege to get to know and work with the people from across the globe that make up OSGeo – smart and principled people all, but with a refreshingly diverse set of backgrounds, skills, and passions.

For many years, LizardTech has relied on open source software as one of our strategies for more effective development of robust software. I’m proud that we’re able to associate ourselves with OSGeo, and we look forward to another year of collaboration and growth with the Foundation.