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

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?

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.