Surveying, Mapping and GIS

One of those key philosophical notions that circulates among many stewardship and advocacy groups is to think globally, act locally - The same notion can be applied in best practices in solutions architecture, requirements development, and coding principles, where it applies to so many things - in terms of true enterprise architecture and integration approaches, in terms of data stewardship, and for public sector agencies, in terms of transparency and open government.

Each and every day, folks craft queries for accessing complex data, they write business logic for analysis and so on - and more often than not, they then wrap it up with a nice glossy user interface.  MVC and many other best practices applied, check...  But here is where another key opportunity to really open things up is lost.

Let's take the example of state or federal agencies - many of them are doing great things, in terms of publishing datasets (Open Government Intitiative, Data.gov, Geospatial One-Stop, State Cartographers' Offices and Clearinghouses, and so on).  They are doing great things in terms of reporting tools, web queries and lookups, and mapping and visualization tools.  But...  As wonderful as all of these efforts are, imagine how powerful it would be if these could be linked and integrated, from agency to agency?  Imagine, for example, applications pulling in data from NOAA, NASA, EPA and other agencies?  Imagine state environmental agencies pulling in information from federal environmental agencies - the power of open government and transparency begins to multiply and become more and more powerful by orders of magnitude.

So what are we talking about?  Web services and APIs.  Not even anything complex, it could be as simple as REST and JSON, as in the space of public-facing applications, for a vast majority of data-centric or analytical applications, we are generally talking about read-only, non-transactional, nonsensitive data.  Why web services or APIs?   Isn't something like publishing datasets to Data.gov enough?  Publishing datasets to someplace like Data.gov is fine - but consider this - if someone downloads your data and integrates it into their own standalone application, what control do you then have over it?  Precious little.  When you refresh your database afterward and post a new dataset, is there any assurance that they will come back and get a fresh copy and keep up to date, or do you begin to incur a liability of your data being out of sync as it is represented in someone else's public-facing application?  Absolutely.

If, on the other hand, you post an easy-to-integrate RESTful service or API, you make it far easier to have your data current.

Criticisms?  Yes, there are many, but we can look at those as well - some might push back and say, "is there sufficient bandwidth and infrastructure for hosting those web services?"  The mere fact of web services in and of themselves generally incur no more new bandwidth or infrastructure demand than the public-facing web applications that you are already building.  So if that's really a concern, then maybe you shouldn't be building ANY applications.  The argument is generally a red herring.

Security concerns?  Same deal - you are already exposing the data and business logic via your web applications - if you think the web service poses new security concerns, then perhaps you haven't adequately thought through your EXISTING security.  So another red herring.

"They will come and take all our data!" - Again, why would they, if they know they can grab it dynamically and that you will be assured of their reliance on them by continually posting data refreshes?

What about poorly-behaved queries against your web service that might bring your database to its' knees?  Same thing - those are things that really should be handled in the logic for your existing application.  Better yet, think ahead a bit more and provide options - query filters, such as by a data attribute or domain, bounding boxes for geodata, and so on.

So - in conclusion, this type of thinking can up developers' approaches to how they deal with security, queries and filters, and so on, and generally tighten things up - but in the meantime, also provide a tremendous opportunity for data sharing and integration, whether within an agency, company or office, fostering collaboration across departments and programs, or outside of one's own organization, fostering collaboration across agencies and levels of government, across industry, academia and so on.

An individual organization can try all they like to anticipate all of the public's thoughts, needs, interests, they can try to walk in their stakeholders' footsteps - but ultimately, one can never fully anticipate all possibilities, and there are a lot of bright people out there with many untapped ideas - so why not open it up and facilitate that larger collective brainstorm of ideas by providing services ready to integrate?  Let's take things like the Open Government Initiative and other good things ongoing in government and elsewhere to the next level - dynamic, services and resources oriented architecture...

Here's another exiting bit of news - my firm is teamed with CGI Federal on USEPA's Software Engineering & Specialized Scientific Support (SES3) Contract, and we just got word that our team has won EPA's Central Data Exchange (CDX) task. This is very exciting news, CDX and the Exchange Network serve the community via facilitating exchange of a wide variety of environmental data between federal, state, tribal and other partnerships - it is a partnership that has proven itself to be tremendously effective and a great model for other types of data exchanges as well.

What I am particularly excited about is in leveraging the infrastructure that has already been built toward more robustly supporting geodata services, and ultimately toward enhanced reporting, metrics, analytical capabilities, and other capabilities to support feds, states, tribes and others in informed decisionmaking toward environmental policy and stewardship.

As such - we also anticipate we will be looking to grow as a company, and will be looking to hire additional technical gurus with capabilities in data exchange, data management and data flows, particularly if you have prior capabilities and knowledge of EPA's Exchange Network and CDX, and/or geospatial technology.

If you are interested, drop me a line at dsmith (at) synergist.tech.com

I was just in a conversation with a friend of mine - I found that he's been wrestling with some homebrew code for managing large aerial photos - and the usual issues of performance, memory management, caching, and multiresolution data came up. A number of useful resources in the Open Source community are available in that arena, and I thought I would share some of them:

OSSIM - Open Source Software Image Map

http://www.ossim.org/

From the OSSIM site:

OSSIM is a high performance software system for remote sensing, image processing, geographical information systems and photogrammetry. It is an open source software project maintained at http://www.ossim.org/ and has been under active development since 1996. The lead developers for the project have years of experience in commercial and government remote sensing systems and applications.

OSSIM has been funded by several US government agencies in the intelligence and defense community and the technology is currently deployed in research and operational sites. The name OSSIM is a contrived acronym (Open Source Software Image Map) that is pronounced “awesome” – the acronym was established by our first government customer.

Another interesting effort ongoing is the Open Aerial Map project, spearheaded by the prodigiously prolific MetaCarta map ninja and OpenLayers/TileCache developer Christopher Schmidt:

OAM - Open Aerial Map

http://openaerialmap.org/

From the OAM site:

This project is an attempt to gather data from various free and open aerial imagery datasources around the world, and use them to create a single, coherent open world view.

If you are interested in seeing your data here, please email crschmidt@crschmidt.net.

Both of these sites contain code repositories, documentation, and other community resources are available, such as IRC chat channels.

I finally got around to upgrading my mobile platform. I had been toting around my Motorola cellphone, iPaq, Holux GPSlim 240 bluetooth GPS, and all of the associated iGo tips and other associated cables...

I looked at a number of units, Blackberries, Treos, Nokia N95 (very nice), along with the Samsung BlackJack (BlackJack II coming soon), Motorola MotoQ and others - but ultimately narrowed things down to Windows Mobile, as I have a lot of software for that platform (ArcPad, navigation, et cetera) - and Windows Mobile can run your selection of Java VM as well - best of both worlds.

Yesterday, I ended up getting the HTC TyTn II (also known as AT&T Tilt and by a few other names) - and I'm pretty happy with it thus far. It's the only Windows Mobile unit that I came across to feature BlueTooth, WiFi, 3G Data, and integrated GPS. It also has a 3 megapixel camera to boot.



I'm still looking to pick up a nice big MicroSD card, so I haven't yet loaded it up with a lot of stuff, but I have been playing with Google Maps Mobile, Microsoft Live Search Mobile (Virtual Earth), and Mobile GMaps on the Esmertec JBed JVM that ships already installed on the HTC unit. Notably, when I went to Esmertec's site, I was greeted with an Android info page, so I may be looking at gPhone apps as well.

Pretty nice, so far! I am looking forward to developing some things that take advantage of this new platform...

I am looking forward to attending the EPA GIS Workgroup meeting coming up in Boston. This time around, the spring meeting will be in Boston, at the Omni Parker House Hotel, May 15th to 18th.

It will be good to refresh some contacts and make some new ones. We are hoping to make some further inroads in the EPA GIS community, combining our present USEPA geospatial expertise and SDVOSB status to reach out and support USEPA regions and other USEPA program offices. For me, it's also another opportunity to go and visit with my relatives in Massachusetts.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I was just finishing reading one of the books in the "Head First" series that Kathy Sierra developed, namely Head Rush Ajax by Brett McLaughlin.

This is a fun read. It really makes Ajax very easy and accessible, with a fun dialogue, irreverent and entertaining style, and plenty of practical examples and online code to work with. I have been playing with Ajax code since around November of 2005, but largely just hacked my way through most of it, brute-force-style, without any coherent source of information, other than the school of hard knocks.

As such, I figured there might be a few areas where I might grumble through the but given there were a lot of things that I already knew, but on the other hand I still learned quite a few nuances and new things while reading this book.

The book presents Ajax in a good, progressive way, with bite-sized yet savory nuggets, which all contribute to a soundly filled tummy full of Ajax. Unlike many of the technical tomes I digest routinely, this one didn't put me to sleep. It was deceptively simple in how the book followed a linear progression, with each piece building upon the one before it - it's not at all written "reference-style" with disconnected globs of information as so many other technical tomes tend to be.

True, some parts of the book were still perhaps overly "nØØb"-oriented (for me at least) and overly rich with "greasy kid stuff" but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The way that the book tackled otherwise sticky topics, such as navigating and managing the DOM was nice, as were the ways in which a request is sent, processed and received. All in all, the presentation was quite robust, with no meaningful detail omitted.

The only downsides: 1. The emphasis on JSON toward the end. I have expressed my bias and concern regarding JSON before, mainly as I still cling to the paradigm of not only server-to-client communication via XML, but also server-to-server communication. 2. It had a PHP focus - I don't deal much with PHP, mainly .NET and Java.

As an aside, two things I'd like to see some objective study someday on:

• How truly bloated is XML, compared to JSON? Seems JSON can suffer from its share of bloat as well.
• How much is JSON supported on the server side. Not just libraries for generating JSON, but also libraries for parsing and processing JSON? What languages? Seems to me that generating JSON might be the easy part, even doable through XSLT transforms - but parsing?

But I digress... I'd definitely recommend the book for anyone just beginning to dip their toe into Ajax - all you really need is the most basic understanding of JavaScript and perhaps some CSS and HTML. Head First Labs supplies the pizza ;^) Well done, Mr. McLaughlin.

Paperback: 446 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
(March 28, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596102259
ISBN-13:
978-0596102258
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 8 x 1.1 inches

Though I wasn't able to attend ESRI DevSummit 07, I did get some good feedback - my own people report on the continued push toward web-based GIS and server-based GIS and SOA, with SOAP, REST, JavaScript and AJAX APIs being made available, along with tremendous demand from the .NET developer community.

I also scoured the blogosphere and scavenged together a set of posts and resources - dig through these, as there are copious notes, slides and podcasts to be had.

In no particular order:



Very Spatial 3/28: Dev Summit Overview "VSTV Episode 12": http://veryspatial.com/?p=1486

Very Spatial 3/28: Daily Podcasts: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1485

Very Spatial 3/26: Daily Podcast talking to DevSummit Attendees: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1478

Very Spatial 3/24: Standards and Interoperability Podcast: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1475

Very Spatial 3/23: ArcWeb Services Podcast: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1473

Very Spatial 3/22: ESRI Support Team Podcast: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1471

Very Spatial 3/22: Keynote Session Podcast: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1468

Very Spatial 3/21: Keynote Comments: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1466

Very Spatial 3/21: Gartner Keynote: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1463

Very Spatial 3/20: Plenary Session Podcast: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1462

Very Spatial 3/20: Plenary Part 2: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1458

Very Spatial 3/20: Plenary Session: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1457

Very Spatial 3/18: Preconference Podcast: http://veryspatial.com/?p=1453

---

Steve's Little World 3/28: On participating in a VS podcast: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/if-you-want-to-hear-what-i-sound-like/

Steve's Little World 3/23: Final Day: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/final-day-and-still-in-palm-springs/

Steve's Little World 3/21: GeoDB Replication: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/geodb-replication/

Steve's Little World 3/21: Web Service API to ArcGIS Server: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/web-service-api-to-server/

Steve's Little World 3/21: Turbocharging GeoDB interactions: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/turbocharging-geodb-interactions/

Steve's Little World 3/21: .NET and Java SIG: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/net-sig/

Steve's Little World 3/21: The Gartner Talk: http://myesri.blogspot.com/2007/03/update-from-dev-summit.html

Steve's Little World 3/20: Enterprise Applications with the GeoDB: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/20/enterprise-applications-with-the-geodatabase/

Steve's Little World 3/20: .NET Mobile ADF: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/20/net-mobile-adf/

Steve's Little World 3/20: .NET Engine Application Development: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/20/net-engine-application-development/

Steve's Little World 3/20: First Night: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/20/going-to-the-dev-summit-and-first-night/

Steve's Little World 3/20: Plenary Session: http://thesteve0.wordpress.com/2007/03/20/plenary-session/

---

ESRI News Feed 3/15: ArcGIS Explorer Best Practices Podcast: http://www.esri.com/news/podcasts/audio/speaker/devsummit07-mark-dara.mp3

ESRI News Feed 3/14: ArcGIS 9.2 3D Visualization Podcast: http://www.esri.com/news/podcasts/audio/speaker/devsummit07-tam-nathan.mp3

---

Dot Without A Net 3/24: Dev Summit Day 3 Overview: http://priour.wordpress.com/2007/03/24/dev-summit-final-day/

Dot Without A Net 3/22: Day 2: http://priour.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/dev-summit-continues/

Dot Without A Net 3/22: Day 1: http://priour.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/thoughts-on-dev-summit/

---

It Is What It Is 3/25: .NET versus Java: http://www.palladiumconsulting.com/blog/sebastian/2007/03/who-was-at-esri-developer-summit-not.html

It Is What It Is 3/21: SQL API and Data Access: http://www.palladiumconsulting.com/blog/sebastian/2007/03/esri-sde-stgeometry-and-re-unification.html

It Is What It Is: 3/21: It's not Crap Anymore: http://www.palladiumconsulting.com/blog/sebastian/2007/03/esri-developer-summit-2007-its-not-crap.html

---

Rise and Shout 3/29: Developer Summit slides are now available on EDN: http://myesri.blogspot.com/2007/03/dev-summit-slides-on-edn.html

Rise and Shout 3/26: Dev Summit Summary: http://myesri.blogspot.com/2007/03/dev-summit-summary.html

Rise and Shout 3/21: Update: http://myesri.blogspot.com/2007/03/update-from-dev-summit.html

Rise and Shout 3/20: Plenary Session: http://myesri.blogspot.com/2007/03/arcgis-server-takes-stage-author-server.html

Rise and Shout 3/20: Dev Summit: http://myesri.blogspot.com/2007/03/2nd-annual-esri-developer-summit.html

Rise and Shout 3/19: It's Time: http://myesri.blogspot.com/2007/03/it-time.html

---

Dave Bouwman 3/22: Dev Summit Wrapup and SIG presentation: http://blog.davebouwman.net/2007/03/23/DevSummitWrapup...

Dave Bouwman 3/20: Plenary Session: http://blog.davebouwman.net/2007/03/20/DevSummitPlenarySession...

Dave Bouwman 3/14: Blogger Meetup: http://blog.davebouwman.net/2007/03/15/DevSummitBloggerMeetup...

---

James Fee 3/25: Dev Summit ArcGIS Server Code Challenge Results: http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2007/03/25/arcgis-server-code-challenge-results/

James Fee 3/21: .NET SIG: http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2007/03/21/esri-dev-summit-net-sig/

James Fee 3/20: Dinner: http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2007/03/20/esri-developer-summit-2007-dinner/

---

The Unofficial ArcBlog 3/25: http://gis.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/esri_2007_devel.html

---

The Memory Leak 3/23: Defense SIG: http://ambergis.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/esri-dev-summit-defense-sig/

The Memory Leak 3/21: ArcGIS GeoProcessing: http://ambergis.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/esri-dev-summit-ags-geoprocessing/

The Memory Leak 3/21: DevSummit Day 1: http://ambergis.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/esri-dev-summit-day-1/

---

The ArcPad Team: 3/28: On participating in a VS podcast: http://arcpadteam.blogspot.com/2007/03/1152-minutes-of-fame-its-very-spatial.html

The ArcPad Team: 3/22: Hello: http://arcpadteam.blogspot.com/2007/03/esri-developer-summit.html

Many thanks and kudos to all who shared with those of us who couldn't be there. I am certain I probably missed a few, but this provides an excellent roundup. Also, there is a post from Directions Magazine 3/22: Directions Magazine didn't attend, but nonetheless deserving special mention - Adena also pulled together an excellent collection of articles and items: http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2435&trv=1

No, I was not able to attend... Getting the occasional bits and pieces of information from the DevSummit.

For those folks who are attending, say hi to Xiuzhu Yang, a good friend of mine and very talented developer that I have been working with for the last year on EPA projects.

Another very talented guy that I cross paths with, also at the DevSummit this year is Vincent Zhuang from SAIC, author of Programming ASP.NET for ArcGIS Server.

After a great meeting this afternoon, I am looking to rehash some of my previous MetaCarta work. Looks like some of the previous kinks that I was running into with using a SOAP call to the HeadNode service originally developed on MetaCarta 3.0.1 have been worked out in newer versions (we are currently standing up two boxes with 3.7), and further, it may be a good opportunity to look at the JSON API that MetaCarta has developed.

I am also anxiously awaiting some of the document focus and other enhancements that MetaCarta has coming down the pike later this year. Other things I'd like to look at are streamlined, enhanced and more-focused document crawling.

We currently have several positions open in SynTechGp:

---

Industry Job Title: Software Quality Engineer Sr

Required skills: Excellent Communication skills, Experience- CMMI Environment, Oracle PL/SQL

Desired skills: Experience with Test Tools, eg. Test Partner

Specific Job Description: Must be skilled at assessing project/client needs and coordinating project development form inception to deployment. Must have excellent communcation skills.

Standard Job Description: Develops, modifies, applies, and maintains standards for quality operating methods, processes, systems and procedures. Provides coordination and guidance in preparation of technical appraisals of programming languages and systems, computational software and related technology, and the integration of computers into the overall functions of scientific computation, and data acquisition, transmission, and processing. Ensures that corrective measures meet acceptable reliability standards.

Develops overall operating criteria to ensure implementation of the software quality program according to project, process and contract requirements and objectives. Ensures that project and process control documentation are compliant with requirements, objectives and/or contract. Reviews software design, change specifications, and plans against contractual and/or process requirements. Reviews include applicable specifications, materials, tools, techniques, and methodologies. Performs or directs verification of software requirement allocations, traceability, and testability.

Security Clearance: Other

Typical Minimums: Bachelors degree from an accredited college in a related discipline, or equivalent experience/combined education, with 5 years of professional experience; or 3 years of professional experience with a related Masters degree. Considered career, or journey, level.

Work Location: Arlington, VA

---

Industry Job Title: Business Appl Prgrmr Sr

Required skills: Informatica ETL tool (v7.x), Oracle , C, Perl, and Korn Shell, Strong understanding of OLTP, dimensional modeling exp., optimizing large data loads, UNIX Solaris scripting, PL/SQL programming

Desired skills: PL/SQL web tool kit, Business Objects, Cognos, SQL Loader, Configuration Management, TOAD

Specific Job Description: Design and develop transformation processes to load data from source to target. Develop and tune ETL mappings and sessions Code and document scripts and stored procedures for data warehousing processes. Performance and tuning of ETL tool for parallel loads and cache optimization Document ETL processing systems. Work with business transformation teams to define and derive application integration requirements. Maintain knowledge of Enterprise Application Integration, planning, design, analysis and methodologies. Familiarity with administrative tasks within Informatica platform such as stopping/starting Informatica repository and server processes, performing code migration, backup and restore of Informatica repository, and security administration. Strong SQL programming and stored procedure development skills process oriented focused on standardization, streamlining, and implementation of best practices. Sharing knowledge by effectively documenting work. Maintain expert level of knowledge in area of expertise. Develop and maintaining a thorough knowledge of the assigned applications, functional areas or projects. Work with the team to ensure the quality of coordinated business functions.Respond quickly and effectively to production issues and taking responsibility for seeing those issues thru resolution. Participate in project planning.Participate in design and maintenance of enterprise architecture.

Standard Job Description: Plans, conducts, and coordinates programming application activities. Writes business applications computer software that contains logical and mathematical solutions to business problems or questions. Develops statements of problems, designs systems and programs, and writes programs in computer language for solution by means of data processing equipment. Applies knowledge of computer hardware and software, subject matter to be programmed in business applications, information processing techniques used, and information gathered from system users to develop software. Corrects program errors, prepares operating instructions, compiles documentation of program development, and analyzes system capabilities to resolve questions of program intent, output requirements, input data acquisition, programming techniques, and controls.

Security Clearance: Other

Typical Minimums: Bachelors degree from an accredited college in a related discipline, or equivalent experience/combined education, with 5 years of professional experience; or 3 years of professional experience with a related Masters degree. Considered career, or journey, level.

Work Location: Arlington, VA

---

Industry Job Title Programmer Analyst Sr Stf

Required skills: Documentum, Documentum Web Publisher, Documentum Content Server, Documentum Administrator, Documentum Content Intelligent ServicesDocumentum Foundation Classes, Web Services

Desired skills: JAVA, Oracle 10i

Specific Job Description: Experience in all phases of Software Development Lifecycle from requirements analysis to implementation and support of computer application systems using available and current technologies. Three to four years of experience in the administration and development of content management applications using Documentum Content Server. Experience in the design and development of Documentum Content Server-based applications using such tools as Documentum Administrator, Application Builder, Business Object Frameworks, Documentum Foundation Classes, Workflow Manager, WebTop/WDK, Desktop, DQL, DMCL, Java/J2EE, DocBasic, Visual Basic, XML, XSLT, XHTML. Other tools used include Oracle 9i Database and Application Server, Apache, Tomcat, Oracle JDeveloper, SQL, Java Script, VBScript, Visual Studio, ASP, .NET, Lotus Domino, Lotus Notes, Web Services and AJAX. Must be experienced with Documentum Web Publisher 5.3 SP3 or above. Must be able to create SOA compliant Web Services.

Standard Job Description: Builds and codes applications and/or modules using languages such as C++, visual basic, ABAP, JAVA, XTML, etc. Provides patches and upgrades to existing systems. May design graphical user interface (GUI) to meet the specific needs of users. Prepares operating instructions, compiles documentation of program development, and analyzes system capabilities to resolve questions of program intent, output requirements, input data acquisition, programming techniques, and controls. May build add-on modules using application program language.

Security Clearance: Public Trust

Typical Minimums: Bachelors degree from an accredited college in a related discipline, or equivalent experience/combined education, with 14 years or more of professional experience; or 12 years of professional experience with a related Masters degree. Considered an expert, authority in discipline.

Work Location: Arlington, VA

---

Industry Job Title: Business Process Anlyst Sr Stf

Required skills: CMMI Level 3 familiarity. 10+ years SDLC experience. Team lead experience. 7+ years requirements engineering experience. Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Specific Job Description: Leads Requirements Team for a major Federal Program. Responsibilities include implementing CMMI Level 3 processes, mentoring team members, refining Requirements Engineering processes, developing System Requirements specifications, facilitating Requirements and Design sessions with stakeholders and technical staff, translating business requirements into technical requirements, etc.

Standard Job Description: Analyzes business and technical processes to formulate and develop new and modified business information processing systems, such as production and inventory control systems, financial tracking systems, marketing and human resources systems. Represents the business unit to define requirements and business cases for the technology developments. Coordinates with business and technology teams, ascertaining system requirements, such as program functions, output requirements, input data acquisition, and system techniques and controls. Requires knowledge of e-commerce tools, computer system capabilities, business processes, and work flow.

Security Clearance: Other

Typical Minimums: Bachelors degree from an accredited college in a related discipline, or equivalent experience/combined education, with 15 years or more of professional experience; or 13 years of professional experience with a related Masters degree. Considered an expert, authority in discipline.

Work Location: Arlington, VA

---

These are all positions on a multi-year federal program. As software contractors on federal programs, all applicants must be US Citizens or hold US Permanent Resident Status.

To apply, email your resume to dsmith (at) synergist-tech.com

It is my position that the W3C should extricate itself from further direct work on SOAP, WDSL, or any other WS-* specifications and redirect its resources into evangelizing and standardizing identifiers, formats, and protocols that exemplify Web architectural principles. This includes educating enterprise application architects how to design "applications" that are "native" web applications.

It appeared that there are also a few drawing a line between "World Wide" and "Enterprise"... Or suggesting that W3C should abandon aspects of their pursuits and leave it up to industry.

Certainly the geospatial community will need to sit up and take note of where this leads... Having written my own WFS and WMS services and clients from scratch, though I am still no Web Services guru, I still had to wonder about the wisdom of the approaches being used in the whole paradigm. Are the current OGC standards really in line technologically with the vision that was originally expressed by Tim Berners-Lee? I think not. Are they compatible with some of the security and other needs of the community? I think not. Not the end of the world, but certainly much iterative refinement to get us where we ultimately need to be.

Stefan Tilkov at InfoQ provides a good roundup of many of the position papers. Will we see some simplification and resolution to the ever-emergent convoluted forest of Web Services and Standards?

---

Technorati tags:
analysis, applications, ArcGIS, career, careers, developer, DoD, geo, Geospatial, GIS, j2ee, Java, job, jobs, map, mapping, maps, Military, Perl, Python, security, spatial, Vienna, Virginia