Surveying, Mapping and GIS

I've been delinquent on updating my blog- lots of stuff going on, fortunately most of it good. A little while back I attended the MetaCarta Users Group meeting with Dave Catlin of the EPA Geoservices team, we presented the Window To My Environment prototype that features deep integration of MetaCarta search technology. We're finally also working through some of the agency bureaucracy to move the MetaCarta appliance toward a production environment and allowing it to be populated with real data, as opposed to the months-old canned data we had been using to date. We did a trial crawl with the unit, and it behaved quite well- EPA National Computing Center staff had evidently been worried about it running rampant and consuming all available bandwidth, crashing servers, et cetera. We can tweak its crawling behavior quite well, though...

One of the comments at the MetaCarta Users Group was that it was an interesting and unusal thing to have EPA and CIA in the same venue presenting together. At any rate, some creative seat-of-the-pants flying involving wi-fi to VPN to remote desktop connection and we were able to demo the application live, in addition to the PowerPoint material (aside from applications live in MetaCarta's shop, everyone else's presentation was canned...)

The MetaCarta team had a number of great things they shared at the Users Group meeting. One of the things I thought was pretty exciting was the new ArcGIS functionality, which can provide temporal views of the data, when used with Tracking Analyst. There were a few presentations which show DoD and Intel applications of the technology in analyzing message traffic, to provide near-realtime spatial and temporal data mining and display capabilities. Great stuff. What became a running bit from one presentation to the next was the obligatory example of IEDs in Iraq...

They also discussed MetaCarta labs - some public betas of various MetaCarta experiments. More on those later, but they are doing a lot of fun stuff with Google-style AJAX. I hadn't realized it but Schuyler Erle, coauthor of Google Maps Hacks is now working with MetaCarta as well...

I apparently also missed a chance to meet face to face with GeoMullah, of the Fantom Planet blog... Have had some discussions with him since, on Open Source solutions.

Some previous MetaCarta-related posts:

• Architecture, MetaCarta and other stuff....
• Back from FedUC
• ESRI Federal Users Conference Tomorrow...
• Feedback wanted
• ESRI Federal User Conference
• Pitfalls of Appliance-based Technology...
• Map Symbology
• Viva Las Vegas!
• EPA Environmental Symposium in Las Vegas