Surveying, Mapping and GIS

The last few months have been hectic, with a lot of proposal writing and other things flying around - and as I continue to redefine and revisit and look toward new types of approaches and ways to tackle problems in architecting geospatial solutions, I have been making an effort to poke around and look at alternatives. Some of the major drivers for alternatives are licensing costs - Oracle is certainly not cheap - and the others are technical, finding fast and easy ways to publish and interact with geospatial data, provide interoperability and consume it in a wider variety of clients, e.g. OGC Web Map Service, KML, GeoRSS and the like...

So of late, I have been digging deeper with a stack consisting of PostGIS, GeoServer and GeoWebCache - and I must say I am impressed with what I'm seeing so far:

Here, hundreds of thousands of facilities points, being served up by PostGIS and GeoServer, and published as a tile layer in GeoWebCache. Firstly, the production ArcIMS/Oracle boxes I've been using would be struggling to render this much data quickly. Secondly, it would take a custom tile server or other middleware to get them into Virtual Earth - yet here I was able to get these results, start to finish, in less than an hour.

Same data in Google Earth as KML, again GeoServer provides some very interesting and compelling out-of-the-box functionality...

Again, the question I have been asking myself is in what the solution needs to look like - and here, we can have some hybridized approaches, depending on how static or dynamic the data is, and how much analysis we want to do, perhaps with products like GeoWebCache and GeoServer serving base data and tiles, and ArcGIS Server 9.3 providing modeling and analytical capabilities. This coming year will be interesting, to say the least...

I am just now making my way back on the Metro back from the reception at the National Geographic, tacking together some unfiltered notes from earlier in the day- my meeting was punctuated by outside meetings in Alexandria and Fairfax, so I managed to get in about 1.6 sessions, and got back just in time to find that the EPA Q&A session was shut out by the passionate Bern Szukalski.

Nonetheless, I attended the "What's New in ArcGIS Server 9.3" session this morning, hosted by Dave Wrazien.

Dave touched on a number of things slated for release, and which gave me some cause for interest, most notably the new APIs

Some bullet points and excerpts from my notes:

Effort is being made by the Server development team to reduce server roundtrips and traffic, via AJAX requests and the ASP.NET approach

A number of JavaScript enhancements have been made to improve the user experience, with an expanded JavaScript library, providing feedback and visual cues ala Flash and Silverlight, such as informative progress bars, pixel-zoom and fade-in zooms as the next zoom level loads.

In terms of OGC interop, AGS 9.3 features support for:

WMS and SLD: 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.3 / ISO19128
WFS 1.1, GML 3.0, WFS-T 1.1
WCS 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1

The REST and JavaScript APIs are probably the most exciting for me. Here, Dave highlighted integration opportunities for VE, Google, Yahoo and others, along with functionality for basic map display, navigation, querying, geocoding, and geoprocessing. Later on, there was mention that the JavaScript API makes use of the REST endpoints.

With respect to platform support, some of the highlights mentioned were

JDK 5.0
PostgreSQL/PostGIS
DB2 and Z/OS
SQL Server 2008 (to come in a service pack release)

In terms of usability, the aim in 9.3 is for fewer button clicks, enhancements to the web map viewer, streamlined processes and a simplified UI.

Improvements to Server Manager are likewise on the horizon for 9.3, with wizards to simplify:

Access Control
Cache Management

Along with a Mobile Management Console and a Web Map Migration Utility.

Cache Management makes some significant strides, allowing static datasets to be prerendered- and in the Mobile Management Console, improvements driven by user use cases allows opportunity for populating mobile devices with lower server and communications overhead. Additionally, while 9.2 only provided mobile developers with an SDK, 9.3 provides templates and other resources toward jumpstart.

More to follow…

A flying paleobeastie in the lobby of National Geographic...