Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Along the historic maps vein, another ancient map receiving a lot of press of late is the Tabula Peutingeriana - this one I find tremendously fascinating, being a view of the Roman world of nearly 2000 years ago. As a kid, I grew up in Germany, near Roman ruins of the Limes Germanicus and other features, and as such, I have always been fascinated with all things ancient.

Presently, the Tabula Peutingeriana is being added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register as an important artifact, and, given its extreme fragility, was recently placed on public display for one day in Vienna on November 26th.

The Tabula Peutingeriana is a copy of a Roman cursus publicus, which was a schematic roadmap of roads, cities and other features as developed and used in the Roman Empire. There are no longer any known copies of the original Roman cursus publicus charts, however the Tabula Peutingeriana is believed to have been transcribed from an original one by a thirteenth-century monk in Colmar, and consists of a number of sheets with schematic diagrams showing stops along routes, very similar to a modern-day subway map.


As such, it displaces many features to fit the route rather than attempting to be cartographically correct, and as such, it does not represent latitude and longitude in a conventional sense - instead accomodating the routes and features along them first and foremost, resulting in a very long, skinny map generally oriented west to east.

The geographic extent of the map is staggering, spanning the British Isles to India and Sri Lanka, showing what would have been trade and military routes, the infrastructure and cultural exchange that would have gone on in Roman times.

One of the things that I was playing around with over the weekend is trying to match up features as shown on the Tabula Peutingeriana to modern features - one of the tools I was playing around with is Microsoft Research's MapCruncher for Virtual Earth:

While I wouldn't expect MapCruncher to be able to rubbersheet a schematic map such as the Tabula Peutingeriana to a conventional map, it has nonetheless given me many insights just in being able to match up ancient designations and routes to their modern counterparts in a managed fashion, and it has made for a fun rainy (or snowy, as the case may be) day project.

Posting live from EPA's Environmental Symposium in St. Louis - One of the things that's being discussed there is a challenge put forth by Bill Ruckelshaus, former EPA Administrator, who is now heading up the Puget Sound Initiative, to clean up this natural resource that forms a big part of Northwest Washington State.

As part of this, they established a wiki, and are having mashup camps to rapidly get as much content relating to Puget Sound and its' environment as possible:

In a few short hours, I was able to develop a Virtual Earth mashup, which performs MetaCarta searches against EPA and other federal and state documents, pulls in EPA Toxic Release Inventory for Washington State as a KML layer, WMS layers for USGS Wetlands and Land Cover (NLCD), as well as NHD layers showing streams and impaired waters.



There is also a great OpenLayers-based mashup builder and other tools - anyone interested in improving the environment in the Puget Sound area will be encouraged to participate as things move forward.

I also built a standalone version here: http://www.synergist-tech.com/Demo1/PugetSound.html

It's been a very busy few weeks, so I haven't had much chance to post... things going on with Virtual Earth, ArcIMS Route Server and GDT/TeleAtlas, survey-grade GPS data collection, emergency response, logistics, modeling and simulation, and plenty of other things flying around.

It's all fun stuff, but I always enjoy rolling the sleeves up and getting dirty... doing the AJAX thing, mashing various web services with Virtual Earth's V5 API via pure JavaScript clients as various proof-of-concept applications.

Here's one quick app: Virtual Earth and the NASA MODIS WMS server:

Here I'm showing the VE and MODIS side-by-side, both views refresh dynamically. The next step will be to explore the "Roll Your Own Tile Server" approach to seamlessly getting custom WMS content directly into VE.

The next one was even more fun: Virtual Earth and the MetaCarta JSON API:All pure Web 2.0, neogeo, slippy AJAXIAN goodness, "Look, Ma! No "SUBMIT" button!!" Type in your query, (searching for documents about toxic substances here...) and it fetches results from the MetaCarta appliance and sprays them back into the VE map view. Pan, zoom, and instantly you get new stuff popping up. All self-contained in a few k of DHTML, CSS and JavaScript, no Java, .NET, Ruby, Python or other infrastructure needed. Both written in a total of about 2.5 hours, just noodling around in the APIs without any real thought ahead of time.

ESRI International User Conference 2007

Plenary Session, 6/18/2007 - Continued

Here continues my posting of notes from the UC... I left off with enhancements through the 9.2 SP 3, SP4 and 9.3 releases...

Imagery

ArcGIS Server will bring improved support for imagery, to allow more sophisticated processing and hyperspectral imagery. Tools from ERDAS and Leica systems will be able to work with imagery hosted on ArcGIS Server.

Raw imagery will be able to be sent directly to a web service.

Web Mapping

Web mapping tools will improve, with Ajax Map Tips, and transparent tools (such as for navigation).

ArcGIS Mobile

ArcGIS Mobile is a new set of components as a lightweight alternative to ArcPad, which allows integration with GPS, connected and disconnected editing.

ArcGIS Explorer

ArcGIS Explorer and ArcGIS Online continue to evolve.

Open Standards and Interoperability

Toward expanded support for Open Standards and Interoperability, a REST API for ArcGIS Server is being developed. Additionally, stronger OGC support is being pursued, along with improved ability to support mashups in Google and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

CAD Interoperability

ESRI Continues to develop and enhance ArcGIS for AutoCAD, and is pursuing improvements to support the CAD->GIS Workflow. In polling, 50% of ESRI users indicated they also use CAD software.

I wonder if ESRI is pursuing complete, if simple, CAD capabilities, to obviate the need for CAD packages for more casual users.

Other Notes:

Continued support for mashups is being pursued. Additionally, Replication within ArcSDE is being developed and expanded, to support work within an organization, where multiple departments must be coordinated.

ArcGIS Explorer and ArcGIS Online

Bernie Szukalski gave an overview of ArcGIS Online. ArcGIS Online makes a number of ready-to-use resources available to ArcGIS Explorer. These come in the form of prepublished map services and documents, which can be saved as .lyr files, and then consumed within ArcGIS Explorer. These include resources such as 1m US imagery, 2.5m SPOT imagery, and a number of other other data assets.

The ArcGIS Online site provides links to a number of online resources. Additionally, user data assets can be brought in. In an ArcGIS Explorer demo, USGS topos were brought in and draped over topography. Additionally, the Swipe tool allows users to swipe-drag layer visibility status to examine changes.

Another demo showed an ArcGIS Explorer task to perform ALOHA modelling of a toxic plume in ArcGIS Explorer. Here, a user could create a custom task to allow the user to specify a point and supply parameters, and then fetch and overlay the resultant plume.

Another ArcGIS Online feature discussed was online data delivery, using DataDoors technology, or via FTP or DVD.

Another new technology being promoted is the availability of ArcGIS Data Appliances. Here, ArcGIS data could be deployed in the field to remote locations, or deployed to secure environments residing behind an enterprise firewall. It was noted that currently ESRI is the leading provider of demographic data.

Other new technologies:

• ArcWeb Services - continues to be developed and expanded


• Geospatial Portal Toolkit - a new release is coming on the horizon


• JTX - for Workflow management

ArcLogistics

ArcLogistics was demonstrated by Carl Terry, which allows users to perform more sophisticated, rules-based routing and logistics than conventional routing tools such as ArcIMS Route Server and others offer. For example, ridership rules, appointment times, vehicle capacities and other parameters can be entered to build optimized routes. Terry stated 15-30% savings could be almost instantly realized for enterprises through the use of this type of logistics optimization.

Tech Support, Training and Education

Nick Frunzi gave an overview of efforts ongoing in customer support, training and other areas - he cited demand as resulting in a gap in support that was seen with the release of 9.2. Toward mitigating and improving customer support, his team is adding 30% more staff, and embedding support staff with developer teams to provide more robust domain expertise. As other new embedded support capability, diagnostic reporting and crash analysis is to be released in 9.3 products.

One piece of particularly exciting self-service support news is that in the next month, the internal ESRI knowledge base would be made available, in an online support center.

So overall, how is ESRI Doing?

15% growth this year...

(To be continued...)

I don't always post about some of the things that we are working on, and perhaps I should do so more often.

I had some mixed feelings about recently seeing the Google Maps mashup that TerraIMS recently put up, showing EPA Superfund sites in proximity to a given address.
http://www.terraims.com/webservices/superfund.php



EPA has, for many years (in some instances, dating back to 1999), already had a number of community-oriented web mapping applications which deliver a great deal of information on EPA regulated sites, EPA cleanup activities, and so on - For example, one flagship of USEPA Office of Environmental Information is the venerable Window to My Environment - which, among other things, provides a great deal of information on EPA regulated facilities, watersheds, local and state resources, and the like at a community level. Window to My Environment currently gets well in excess of 50,000 hits per day.

Another excellent application which provides a lot of detailed information on environmental cleanup activity at a local level is the USEPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER) Cleanups In My Community application.

These are just some of the web mapping projects that I have been involved in lately - there are actually several more EPA EnviroMapper applications available at the EnviroMapper StoreFront - and we are currently in the process of overhauling the core infrastructure of these, to migrate from legacy ASP/VBScript platforms to reusable component-based design, web services, and the ability to host some of these applications in an Oracle Portal environment, and integrating MetaCarta searches, among other things. We also have been doing some preliminary explorations in making EPA data available as KML for Google Earth, presenting some of our own Google Maps mashups (similar to TerraIMS), all of which are working wonderfully thus far. Unfortunately some of these enhancements are still in prototype, and others are only available on the EPA intranet.

So what of TerraIMS? Great work they did - but my concern isn't constrained, nor in any way specific to this particular mashup. The concern I have is with the description of the effort:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently released its National Priority list of Superfund Sites in XML format. We converted the XML data and integrated it with a database and then mashed things up a bit. Users enter an address and it is geocoded on the fly, enabling a distance query to be processed against the EPA data in the database. This mashup allows anyone to quickly and easily find the nearest Superfund Sites to their home address or a location of interest.

From this description, it sounds like they essentially have performed an extract of the EPA data, have massaged and processed it, and then do their mashup. The business case isn't tremendously compelling, as these maps and data are already long available, so it appears to be a mashup just for the sake of doing a mashup.

Fortunately Superfund data isn't tremendously volatile, however it nonetheless raises the question of other potential applications, of currency, completeness and accuracy of data utilized in mashups. Herein lies potential liability. If one uses a third-party mashup as a decision support tool, they would need to know to track back to the original source to ensure that the data they are viewing in the mashup is current, complete, and accurate...