Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Seems a post on All Points Blog regarding NeoGeography has unleashed a flurry of posts relating to "paleo" versus neo and a whole lot of other issues.

I think I have a slightly different of a take on it... I view the two as sort of a Venn diagram, with each representing expanding spheres, with an equally expanding area of overlap and merging between them.


Note, my little 5-minute Visio diagram is not by any means intended to be comprehensive... But the fuzziness and overlap is fully intended.

I do not view them as "in competition" - each has its own stakeholders and requirements, and between the two there is a considerable area of commonality. The exciting thing about neogeography, however, is that it's about empowerment and putting tools and capabilities into the hands of the public, which previously would have been inaccessible. Additionally, it's about fusion and collaboration - which benefits both communities.

And along the whole NeoGeo theme, I will leave with this:

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.