Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Having a five-year-old in the house, I usually snag any little conference goodies, such as the LizardTech lizards, yo-yos, and other things of interest... And ESRI never fails to please with a few goodies of their own at the User Conferences.

One interesting one is the Mapping for Congress book, published by ESRI press, it was distributed in the conference bags at sign-in. In usual case-study style, they present a gallery of interesting maps that were developed in response to various Congressional inquiries and toward exhibits and policy development by the Library of Congress Congressional Cartography Program. Plenty of great studies toward support of public policy, social justice and other areas to be found in this book.

Another one that I grabbed at the conference was GIS for Homeland Security, which in a vest-pocket size, provides a good high-level overview of various initiatives, Homeland Security Presidential Directives, and other ongoing efforts toward preparedness and response. A great feature of this book is the extensive glossary, which provides over 30 pages of definitions and explanations of the various terms, definitions and TLAs (three-letter acronyms) that one encounters in the Homeland Security arena.

What appears to be a real gem that was handed out in the conference bags is Standards for Success: GIS for Federal Progress and Accountability which as a sort of follow-on to Measuring Up: The Business Case for GIS - it is of particular interest to me, as it presents many federal geospatial projects - and here, the business case needs to begin getting aligned with the OMB GeoLoB, Agency Blueprints, FEA, CPIC and other directions. This book doesn't appear to touch on these directly, but does provide a high-level overview that is spot on, when it comes to streamlining business, collaboration, business logic and decision support, and optimal use of resources.

Going to have to read that one in a bit more detail.

Still unwinding from the ESRI User Conference - I had meant to post during the conference but there just wasn't enough time, from the daily activities and parties after.

Now, I still have a few hours to kill in San Diego before my flight, and am finally taking it easy. The Conference was a lot of fun - Though being in that mode of hundreds of intense 5-minute conversations over the course of the day can tend to put one in an odd state of mind - by the end of that day, you can scarcely remember who you talked to, or about what... And too much going on, at a frenetic pace. I had to step out of quite a few sessions to support a few ongoing things with our federal customers, so it was definitely a working vacation...

At any rate, a lot of old friends, colleagues and adversaries at USDA, EPA, other agencies, as well as CSC, Perot Systems, Lockheed, Jim Knudson, my MetaCarta buddies, Chris Cappelli from ESRI and others from PA and elsewhere, as well as many excellent and interesting new contacts made, and as always a lot of excellent intel and takeaways - I did get a brief chance to talk to keynote speaker, Senator Bob Kerrey, now of the New School such as Kim Ollivier, who is the father of the New Zealand national Transverse Mercator grid, and some who I've known for years but never actually met, like Mike Binge - he and I have been on the same side, preaching the Surveying and GIS message for years, and often diametric opposites, busting each others' chops on political issues...

The biggest thing for me - some of my main customers were there... And though there's plenty of excellent showcasing and eyepopping demos, sometimes one has to put the brakes on and use a cautious and critical eye. We are currently in the midst of going from just ArcIMS in our shop to Geospatial Portal Toolkit and ArcGIS Server for Web development, (yay, great new toys!), but there are still some questions and concerns that linger, with regard to placing too much dependency on some of the more granular out-of-the-box ESRI pieces that these ship with, for map viewers, for instance - with developer ADFs not yet completely standardized and harmonized, not all versions of map viewers standardized, and the very distinct possibility in some instances of an ESRI update rollout breaking our apps where we have plugged them into our customizations.

The good news is that the new architecture I have been developing decouples components anyways, so I will be more able to plug in some robust ESRI pieces rather than reinvent the wheel, and this strategy also reduces potential breakage and/or makes the breaks much simpler to fix, and the second half-full glass is that a more standardized and harmonized ADF is coming coming, and not necessarily terribly far off. I think the ESRI team has come quite a ways.

So... on to ArcGIS Server...

Tomorrow I'm going to try and attend the Geospatial Line of Business session in DC. This is rapidly approaching and rapidly becoming a huge issue with many of the folks I work with in the Agencies. Truly, this could be one of the biggest shakeups in Geobusiness currently going on in Federal governments. Essentially, the intent and implication is consolidation of Geospatial activities across agencies. Agencies which are inefficient or ineffective at supporting an identified Line of Business may find themselves no longer engaged in that Line of Business, to have that work subsumed by a more capable Agency. What is a Line of Business? In most instances, it is a vertical sector of the Agency's business. However, in some instances, it is a horizontal sector, such as Geospatial business.

The intent is in improving efficiency and effectiveness, and in raising the bar to provide geospatial centers of excellence in government. The potential upside of this is improved interoperability and a breaking down of historical stovepipes. The potential downside is that it may rip the guts out of some agencies and introduce a new layer of bureaucratic abstraction.

Care must be taken...

The FBO notification can be found here: http://www2.fbo.gov/spg/GSA/V/VC/GSV06PD00089/listing.html

Some additional supporting documents and items of interest can be found here:

• PowerPoint deck from March 16 Kickoff Meeting
• FGDC Presentation
• GAO Findings on Geospatial Inadequacies


• Congressional Hearing and Testimony on Geospatial Reform

"Not Sexy but Necessary" - In Technology/Commerce/Society, Dr. Roy Spencer writes about the ebb and flow of the US earth observation program, along with advances in earth satellites by the Japanese and ESA.

Spencer cites a change in focus in US efforts, going from NASA's dominance in earth observation toward a rekindling of effort at missions to the Moon and Mars, thus decreasing emphasis on earth observation. Along with this, a shift from series of earth observation satellites to single-satellite efforts to launch new technologies- which doesn't necessarily give scientists the continuity of observations from a consistent platform that they need.

He says "not sexy, but necessary"- the novelty of some of the technology has worn off, and the time to achieve payoff on some of the earth observation satellite efforts has made them less receptive by Congress. Hopefully this is not the case- with the ability to perform climate research via satellite, in the wake of Katrina's devastation, I hope this will be a new selling point.

GIS Day is a grassroots event that formalizes the practice of geographic information systems (GIS) users and vendors of opening their doors to schools, businesses, and the general public to showcase real-world applications of this important technology. The event is principally sponsored by the National Geographic Society, the Association of American Geographers, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, the United States Geological Survey, The Library of Congress, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett–Packard, and ESRI.

GIS Day is part of the National Geographic Society's exciting new initiative, Geography Action, which is a year-long initiative encompassing key educational achievements such as GIS Day and Geography Awareness Week. Each year this initiative will have a different focus. The theme for 2005-2006 is "Migration: The Human Journey." In addition to events such as GIS Day and Geography Awareness Week, there will also be many worldwide activities supporting geography action, with their goal being to engage people in learning and caring about geography.