Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Just got home from FedUC and see snow on the ground here-

I actually ran out of room in my "little blue book" with all the thoughts and notes from the conference. Very productive, all in all.

I reckon I can probably share a few more of the thoughts going through my mind...

I followed some of the Enterprise Architecture track today... SAIC gave a presentation on DHS and their notional architecture, which was interesting, and applicable to where we are and where we want to be over at EPA. Their model consists of a foundational layer of geospatial data, harvested via ETL, consumed via web services, et cetera - essentially static data. Next, an OLAP layer, of analytical and modeling tools, and finally realtime, streamed and dynamic data. These are to then plug into an enterprise service bus, for consumption by clients which can make use of the BPEL, flows and integration platform provided by ESB.

We currently need an integration framework as well - we have been pursuing a few things in deconstructing and decomposing EnviroMapper into constituent parts, aligned with functional needs, to get them ready for this type of thing, but is ESB and BPEL really ready?

Now, here, Mark Eustis from SAIC is viewing OGC as the world's "virtual service bus". Is this really true? Are OGC services really up to the challenge - and further, ready to be plugged into ESB? Some say no. Time shall tell.

In another Enterprise GIS session, an application was demoed, using ArcGIS Server and IBM WebSphere Process Server as the ESB. ESRI does have ESB in mind for AGS, however here we are still ESRI-proprietary, which doesn't look good for mix-and-match map services in a dynamic application. What about WFS-T and transactional services?

I see I have much to learn about ESB. Seems exciting, but is it really ready for primetime? Our own pursuits of an integration platform are on hold in the meantime... but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still focus on build-out of services and look at the possibilities as things continue to mature...