Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Over the last few days I have been working with a great newly released metadata editor tool developed by our good friends over at Innovate!

It's based on the Coeur d'Alene Tribe "3-Tab" editor, and provides a customized environment which is database-driven and customizable for an Agency's needs, as well as highlighting some elements which are not mandatory for FGDC CSDGM compliance, but which are mandatory for Agency profile compliance above and beyond FGDC requirements.

The tool integrates seamlessly with ArcCatalog and also provides a validation tool, to ensure compliance with the Agency profile.

Tab 1: Basic Dataset Information

Tab 2: Quality, Coordinate System and Attribute Information

Tab 3: Distribution & Metadata Information

In just a matter of minutes, it's fairly easy to generate a complete, compliant metadata record, which passes validation in metaparser (mp).

It warms my heart to see that a headline story today is in how Google Earth has been working to expose the violence and bloodshed in Darfur.

This part of Sudan has been suffering horrendously in the midst of conflict, with denial from the Sudanese government - and thanks to the efforts of the folks at Google, the violence has been put front and center, with imagery depicting destroyed villages and lives, people displaced, and worse.

From one of the news articles,

Using high-resolution imagery, users can zoom into Darfur to view more than 1,600 damaged or destroyed villages, providing what the Holocaust Museum says is evidence of the genocide. Sudan's government denies that genocide is taking place.

In addition, the remnants of more than 100,000 homes, schools, mosques and other structures destroyed by janjaweed militia in Darfur, Sudanese forces and others are visible.

"When it comes to responding to genocide, the world's record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most," said Holocaust Museum director Sara Bloomfield in a statement.

Ogle Earth carries some of the details: http://www.ogleearth.com/2007/04/darfur_webcast.html

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...

I was delinquent in posting this pic from the 2007 ESRI FedUC...



A group of colleagues from the USEPA contracting world - From left to right: Myself, Jessica Zichichi (Innovate!), Jack Dangermond, Claudia Benesch (CSC - Agency Central Support) and Catherine Harness (CSC - GeoData Gateway Lead)

This was the reception at the Organization of American States - and yes, that is a map on my necktie...

A provocative title for the post...

The FedUC conference wrapped up with an excellent lunch (aside from the staple in my veggies)... and a great presentation from CW4 Michael Harper of the USACE Topographic Engineering Center on Buckeye, DAGR and other interesting things going on there... may merit a separate post.

The good Doctor provided, as he so often does, a great Q&A session as a wrap-up. Some of the bullets from that discussion

• East coast tech support is coming - ESRI is standing up a tech-support team in North Carolina, to offer expanded AM hours, beginning at 6AM. Additionally, they may investigate the possibility of better search capabilities in the online tech support material, via Google.
  
• ESRI continues to work with the University of Redlands, with the 1-year Masters program - potentially to be expanded to similar programs at George Mason for those of us working in the DC area. The DC area is a hotbed of geospatial activity, with good talent scarce.
  
• Mr. Dangermond described some interesting things he has going on internally, to provide real-time financial reporting on the state of ESRI - which, no surprise - are geo-enabled. Being able to get this kind of reporting is an area of interest which I have no doubt will grow in other firms with a broad geographic reach.
  
• In conjunction with FedUC was the first Classified ESRI GIS community meeting, attended by 300 or so - featuring discussion of applications in the TS/SCI NOFORN arenas. Typically the pitfall is stovepipes, but being able to get cleared personnel together to discuss topics of common interest will be a boon to the DoD/Intel community.
  
• ESRI is trying to bolster its Java support, with their Java team growing and building better support for Java classes.
  
• The Geography Network is to be overhauled, and replaced with a more robust, more collaborative version.
  
• 9.3... Saving goodies for last. The 9.3 beta is scheduled for sometime this summer, probably around the Conference. Some improvements in the hopper for 9.3 include interoperability and OGC, improvements to ArcGIS Server, Mobile Applications development support, and addressing stability and known issues with 9.2. They are also looking at PostgreSQL.
  
• A next iteration is probably a year to year and a half away yet. Here, the focus will be simplification of the user interface, support for multiple views and multiple documents, and capability of storing all types of geofiles in a geodatabase - such as metadata catalogs, and so on.