Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Still decompressing from the EPA Environmental Symposium in Las Vegas... Red eye back to Dulles yesterday, and drive back to PA, ended up awake for almost 40 hours straight.

A great show, I ended up jumping from one person and conversation to the next, hoarse and out of business cards by day's end, with folks asking plenty of questions about the various projects and applications we were displaying at the show.

MetaCarta
The integration of MetaCarta into Window to My Environment was definitely a major hit. Got a lot of great feedback, with folks plugging in their own ZIP codes and getting document hits back from the MetaCarta appliance for their own neighborhood.
http://www.metacarta.com

Geospatial Metadata / Data / Services Architecture
Another project that sparked plenty of discussion is the Geospatial Metadata, Data and Services Architecture project that I am working on with Wendy Blake-Coleman as EPA's champion, Fred Broome and Phil Magrogan from Lockheed-Martin, Jessica Zichichi from Perot Systems, along with plenty of others who have provided excellent input and support, including Brenda Smith, Dave Catlin, Dave Wolf, and Eugenia Naranjo (EPA), Tim Richards and Qi Dai (CSC), and many others. The As-Is diagram usually quickly sends people fleeing- it is indeed very complex and cumbersome, however that characterization is also true of the real-world situation. We are still ironing out some of the kinks of the To-Be architecture- many functional issues still need to be addressed.

EnviroPDA
This is the mobile mapping application we developed for EPA Office of Environmental Information some time ago, to bring EnviroMapper functionality to a mobile platform. Of course the HP folks were plenty interested, as were the Blackberry folks... by show's end there were versions running on both platforms. Also, plenty of interest within EPA... as usual, just have to find funding and proper homes for these things...

GeoData Service
This is an OGC-compliant Web Feature Service (WFS) that we developed atop an existing Oracle application, to allow users to query and drill down into Oracle facility data directly from ArcGIS desktop. I was pleased to see Sam Bacharach from OGC again, having met him at the Pennsylvania Digital Government Summit earlier in the year. The GeoData service was particularly apt for service in Katrina response, however it revealed some issues with the underlying Oracle infrastructure that still is awaiting redesign.