Surveying, Mapping and GIS

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

"Liberate The Data"

A Web 2.0 Success Story: Apps for Democracy

I touched on this during my presentation:

• “Smarter, Better, Faster, Cheaper: Pick 4” – Vivek Kundra, District of Columbia CTO



• The District of Columbia published an Open Data Catalog: GeoRSS, XML, KML and other data types



• They then posted a contest and allowed the public to build applications, built on their Open Data Catalog



• RESULT: In 30 days: 47 new applications for the web, facebook and mobile clients, over $2,000,000 in development at a cost of $50,000 = over 4000% ROI



• http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/

The Web is the Platform

As a potential future paradigm, web-enabled connectivity binds together disparate resources, across EPA program offices, regions, labs, both horizontally and vertically, by transparently supporting access to data, analysis and resources:

For external stakeholders, those EPA resources then similarly become transparent, as part of the "EPA cloud" on the web, whereby the public, whether academia, industry, state or other government alike can access available resources toward supporting their own business requirements, whether watershed stewardship groups, regulated reporting industry, ecology research in academia or others:

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

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?

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.

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Just got home from FedUC and see snow on the ground here-

I actually ran out of room in my "little blue book" with all the thoughts and notes from the conference. Very productive, all in all.

I reckon I can probably share a few more of the thoughts going through my mind...

I followed some of the Enterprise Architecture track today... SAIC gave a presentation on DHS and their notional architecture, which was interesting, and applicable to where we are and where we want to be over at EPA. Their model consists of a foundational layer of geospatial data, harvested via ETL, consumed via web services, et cetera - essentially static data. Next, an OLAP layer, of analytical and modeling tools, and finally realtime, streamed and dynamic data. These are to then plug into an enterprise service bus, for consumption by clients which can make use of the BPEL, flows and integration platform provided by ESB.

We currently need an integration framework as well - we have been pursuing a few things in deconstructing and decomposing EnviroMapper into constituent parts, aligned with functional needs, to get them ready for this type of thing, but is ESB and BPEL really ready?

Now, here, Mark Eustis from SAIC is viewing OGC as the world's "virtual service bus". Is this really true? Are OGC services really up to the challenge - and further, ready to be plugged into ESB? Some say no. Time shall tell.

In another Enterprise GIS session, an application was demoed, using ArcGIS Server and IBM WebSphere Process Server as the ESB. ESRI does have ESB in mind for AGS, however here we are still ESRI-proprietary, which doesn't look good for mix-and-match map services in a dynamic application. What about WFS-T and transactional services?

I see I have much to learn about ESB. Seems exciting, but is it really ready for primetime? Our own pursuits of an integration platform are on hold in the meantime... but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still focus on build-out of services and look at the possibilities as things continue to mature...

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Scott Guthrie discusses the planned Microsoft AJAX roadmap, for providing improved "ATLAS" support for developers who want to pursue robust Asynchronous JavaScript and XML in their ASP.NET applications - it comes with multiple pieces, which have now been officially named:

• Client-side support - Microsoft AJAX Library - consisting of JavaScript components to support any browser, and any backend system.
  
• Server-side support - ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions
  
• And a Controls toolbox - ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit - these are free, shared source controls and components.

These pieces are anticipated to be released before the holiday season, and will be followed by updates to Visual Studio which will provide many enhancements, including IntelliSense support for JavaScript, debugging and WYSIWYG support for these components.

We anticipate developing quite a few more AJAX-oriented applications, and are excited to see more tools to enable us in these pursuits...

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The scrappad blog posts about a matrix of ArcWeb APIs that was recently published by ESRI - unfortunately the original link posted on scrappad is broken, but I was able to locate the document here:

http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=knowledgebase.whitepapers.viewPaper&PID=20&MetaID=1183

The table lists functionalities, and if they are currently supported by SOAP, REST, OpenLS, J2ME, and JavaScript APIs. It is interesting to note that virtually everything is supported by SOAP, followed by JavaScript, with REST, OpenLS and J2ME bringing up the rear.

As things move forward, it will be interesting to see how these geospatial web services play with regard to BPEL, orchestration and other emerging SOA efforts.

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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...

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Tomorrow morning I'm boarding my flight to head out to San Diego for the 2006 ESRI User Conference - I am looking forward to getting away for a few days, and am looking forward to the conference. Quite a few friends and colleagues will be there once again... It will probably mostly be EPA-centric for me (you may find me helping out at their booth at several points), as a majority of my work is still focused on their projects. 85 people representing EPA, from program offices, to regions, to some of their contractors like CSC will be attending.

It's been a few years since I last went... I usually end up swamped with too many things on my plate, or with other competing events going on. So this time I end up hitting both FedUC and the regular UC in the same year. I am also expecting to see several of my other friends from MetaCarta and other companies and organizations there - and am also hoping to make some new friends and contacts.

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I have several interesting things cooking in the next few weeks –

One we just had a kickoff for - Agency Best Practices, which follows much of what I have already been doing in Geospatial Enterprise Architecture, but which is all the more serendipitous in light of the Geospatial Line of Business effort by OMB. I have already been working on a concept of operations for transitioning to and implementation of reusable, distributed service components for geospatial business (SOA and other enterprise-level solutions). My previous effort will be expanded and merged with efforts by other Domain Experts in other arenas, such as Portal/SSO, Service-Oriented Architecture, ETL, and other technologies. I’m putting a draft together for May 15th.

The other is to perform another MetaCarta integration, this one to geo-enable a repository containing 50 million documents, for MetaCarta-powered geocoding and mapping. I will likely follow a similar model as the previous integration project, using ArcIMS and existing enterprise mapping as the base with a query interface, perform the SOAP call to the appliance, parse the response and plot them on an acetate layer. This one will be a new J2EE implementation from scratch, as opposed to the previous one, which was an integration into a legacy ASP/IIS-based application.

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It's been a very busy week.... many back to back meetings, and a lot of fast and furious typing, multitasking, teleconferencing and a few brainstorming sessions which have left me drained.

Among several other things that went out the door, we did submit a private-sector response to the Geospatial Line of Business RFI today. My public-sector counterparts have been quite harried as well. They have also been ordered by OMB to collect a variety of data on their geospatial business. Agency-wide data calls are being made to collect up data by the 15th.

I have also heard that some key agencies were alienated and somewhat uncooperative due to the OMB "bull in a china shop" approach. However, the public face and cooler heads have, for the most part, prevailed.

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There are some indications that the Geospatial Line of Business may yet be a rocky place where consolidation will find limited purchase. One puzzlement/worriment is that even as the RFI responses have been submitted and OMB is looking to agencies to compile information on their geospatial assets and business, still no answers to the questions submitted at the Industry Days session or in the Q/A period subsequent have been posted on the OMB website. There are also some other questions about the legality of the approach...

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A few people have been asking me for a debrief on the Geospatial Line of Business meeting yesterday at the JW Marriott in DC. Mixed feelings on the event. With regard to Agency people, there were a few of the regular movers and shakers, and a considerable number of Agency geospatial figures completely absent - and of the ones I spoke to, I got a mixed response. Some were unconcerned and coolly interested, some very nervous, others very skeptical. There was an odd industry turnout - several of the key players that I often work with in the rarified air were there, but others conspicuously absent. Their response was similarly mixed. Sure, lots of "what's in it for us?" But many doubts and trepidations.

My own key concern is that Geospatial business is horizontal, as opposed to vertical. I also had some not insubstantial doubt that the task at hand and its full ramifications was fully grasped by those responsible for this endeavor.

With regard to the meeting itself, I unfortunately missed part of the first section - I unfortunately got in a minor collision on I-270 on the way down. Two cars behind, a driver failed to notice the slowdown in morning rush hour traffic and rammed an Acura RSX into the backend of my workhorse Subaru. Fortunately nobody hurt, I was able to get cool heads to prevail over the definite rage potential, and everyone was able to get the information they needed to deal with this another way, on another day.

Fortunately I didn't miss much of the meeting. The initial presentation mainly was a rehash of the PowerPoint that I presented in my last post. This was followed by Q&A session. There were many questions, but only sketchy answers. There were several questions on what the resultant direction would be - a samping:

• Whether a Center of Excellence approach would be taken - the answer to this one was that they had looked at this, and it held some good low-hanging fruit, but that it was not entirely satisfactory and wouldn't strictly be emulated
• What kind of approach or form of acquisition would be taken, such as a specific contract vehicle - no decision yet
• Minority business participation, et cetera - will be a factor
• Sponsorship - sustainability would be key

Ultimately they were trying to stress goals of business process re-engineering, standardization, sharing, and culture change. Lofty goals. But little in terms of approach - which is the purpose of the RFI. Interoperability was indicated to be a key driver.

There were also some questions submitted, but unanswered -

• What exactly do you mean by "geospatial" - traditional GIS or anything with a geo-component, such as address databases, lat/long values in a database, or locational references...?

They did recognize the need for many areas of Agency geobusiness to continue in place even with consolidation. They also indicated that the results will show up in the President's Budget submission for 2008 - keep your eyes peeled next February.

They do promise to post the questions and answers online. The formal Q/A period goes until 4/21/06. Following this, read the RFI closely, read closely the Vision, Goals, and Objectives section, and provide a best response. There will be limited ability to assess a huge volume of responses, so if possible try to consolidate responses with others, such as helping the agencies, industry/nonprofit organizations or joint responses by the major private sector players. I had already intended to respond and have already been contacted by a couple of key people... I may have parts of my response feeding into others' response.

They are providing a template and some guidance - they are allowing an additional 20 pages to be submitted, to bring the total to 30 pages, not including cover and TOC. Submittal of current best practices is encouraged, with Agency approval.

The current point for dissemination of information is here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/c-6-8-glob.html

Whether or not this comes to fruition, this is definitely still a very big deal... And it IS most definitely about consolidation and budget cuts. "No further expenditures on existing business will be made."

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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

I'm hoping to get together with other movers and shakers there... I am definitely interested in tracking this, working on it and providing input wherever possible, particularly as I have already been engaged in Agency-wide Geospatial segment and Enterprise Architecture work since last June. I have a good idea of what opportunities and pitfalls may be encountered.

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The announcement went out yesterday morning - President Bush has nominated a new CIO for EPA, to replace Kim Nelson, who left late last year. The new CIO is Molly O'Neill, who has been heading EPA's Environmental Council of States (ECOS) efforts within the Exchange Network for bringing data in from the states. To date, Linda Travers had been filling the post as acting AA. Hopefully O'Neill will bring her experience in what's involved in integration of data from external sources toward further supporting ongoing efforts for internal integration and SOA.

I have been working extensively on the Geospatial side, toward mapping and modelling as-is and to-be architectures for the entire horizontal sector of Geobusiness across EPA. "Line of Business" is becoming a major issue within OMB these days, and Geospatial processes may be part of that equation. I also has been preparing for a presentation on MetaCarta to Linda Travers - this may now become my introduction to the new CIO instead.

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I'm not going to the EPA GIS Workgroup meeting after all - my dance card filled quite rapidly these last few weeks, including far more pressing EPA geospatial business. I have quite a few other interesting appointments this week to take their place, including a large Homeland Security project... We also just got done submitting a major proposal for the Navy... There's a lot going on as people get new dollars allocated and new plans for '06-'07 worked out...

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Haven't posted in a while - not because there's nothing newsworthy, but rather because there's been too much going on...

At any rate, one of the larger pieces of news I've been sitting on is that EPA's Geospatial Information Officer Brenda Smith has left the agency for other pursuits. I had the pleasure of working with Brenda quite a bit over the last six months, as we have been developing the agency's Geospatial Data, Metadata and Services Architecture. Brenda had great vision and helped to consolidate a number of efforts, and toward steering the agency toward SOA and some of the geospatial direction coming from OMB.

Currently word is that EPA is looking to replace her with someone from the outside - and hopefully Wendy Blake-Coleman and our team can help get the new GIO back up to speed without much loss of momentum.

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Our EPA GIS Center of Excellence team did manage to get a couple more people aboard, they are starting in two weeks, but we still have room for one more GIS developer.

The main thrust of the work involves GIS web applications (such as ArcIMS-based apps), along with GIS web services (OGC WMS and WFS) and GIS database development (Oracle 9i/10g / Oracle Spatial and SDE 9.1 environment)...

A full description is available here.

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I'm going to go to the EPA GIS Workgroup meeting in Annapolis in a few weeks - March 28-31. Should be interesting, and I have a small part in some of the things being presented. Some of the topics will be Emergency Response, looks at geospatial activities in other agencies - NOAA and NGS, some commercial stuff (ArcGIS Explorer, Google Earth, TeleAtlas, ArcWeb, GlobeXplorer...) A big focus will also be SOA. Looking forward to it...

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