Talking about Content Management

OK, lets be honest, talking about content management is about exciting as talking about metadata, or XML, or Canadian fiscal policy. I mean really, who cares about managing your information in ways that make it discoverable, usable and most importantly sharable.

Oh right, maybe this stuff isn’t as boring at we thought. I’ll tell you what is the most boring thing in the world. Watching your desktop search strain to find data on your local drives with wacky search strings like water.*. Think about how you find GIS data on your hard drives? Search or browse. Heck, you might even go back to an old project and try and find the dataset that was stored in my MXD or other map document.

Now this doesn’t mean that using search tools to find data isn’t valuable. I know many folks that use Google Desktop Search to index their GIS files. It just isn’t efficient and it sure as heck doesn’t allow you to share it with multiple users. Using these private search indexes is just like putting the data on your desktop, sure you can find it, but no one else can. It gets to the core why content management of geospatial data is so important and why it is actually really fun to talk about.

WeoGeo’s approach to content discoverability is to use the one thing that makes finding maps simple. A map! If I want to find hydrography layers in Wisconsin, I pan/zoom to Wisconsin and then search for hydro tags. If I want a worldwide country boundary layer, I zoom to the world and search tags for country. If I want to find demographic data from Arizona, I geocode that in my WeoGeo search and zoom right to that area.

WeoGeo manages content using maps

Textual based search is horrible at finding spatial data. Does “washington” mean the state, which of 31 counties, which of almost 50 cities and the countless lakes, islands, streets, neighborhoods and other place-names? A map allows you to narrow that down to the Washington that you are interested in and not have to parse though hundreds of records for other “Washingtons”.

Sharing Your Geo-Data

OK, so we’ve all got these issues finding data on your hard drives. That is part of the problem though. Sharing this data amongst your peers is hard as well. Not everyone has that GIS data hard drive mapped, the VPN is problematic and slow causing off-site users to not have access and it is too large to email to your clients who want to see it. This makes it very hard to get the most value out of this dataset because you are fighting to share it as much as you are fighting to find it.

What a content management system such as WeoGeo brings into play with our web-based front end is a simple way for many people to access the same dataset from many different places. Across the hall, across the building, across the state and across the world. With user access controls, you can set which datasets are available to which users. Grant rights for your clients to gain access to your geodata, but see only those datasets that they are supposed to see. No worries about them rummaging through your FTP site looking for proprietary information that shouldn’t be seen.

Add users and give them access to datasets

Geo-Formats In and Out

One of the greatest fears I always had with archiving data was will it be usable in the future. I just found a CD the other day with a ton of Corel Draw documents on it. Nothing I had on my laptop could read those old .cdr files despite claims from the software package that it could. What about GIS data? I’m pretty sure that your shapefiles and GeoTIFFs will be readable in the future, but what about more obscure data formats? Will you be able to read that vector or raster format in 10 years? Who knows right? But WeoGeo has the industry standard on reading proprietary data files under our hood. Safe Software FME drives all our data format transformations. Safe FME allows WeoGeo to transform data stored in our Library to any format they support. So if you need to get your data out of Integraph MGE, because your company no longer supports it, into Autodesk SDF format, you can do that with FME and WeoGeo. Protecting your archival, system of record, datasets from obsolescence is just as important as making sure that you can find it.

Content Management Within Your Workflows

There are tons of content management systems out there and for good reason. Companies want to keep control of their data because they can get more value out of it than they would storing it on DVDs in your desk drawer or on a DLT tape at Iron Mountain. Neither of those methods is a form of content management and neither makes your data discoverable or shareable.

What sets WeoGeo apart from most content management systems is that we are first and foremost a GEO content management system. We are designed from the ground up to allow you to manage all your geo-content; whether it be shapefiles, ERDAS or anything that has a reference to place (PDF, Word documents, video). We’ve also worked hard to integrate WeoGeo into your workflows with our new WeoGeo Tools for ArcGIS and our WeoApp which runs on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Using content management shouldn’t be hard or require lots of training. We’ve made it as simple as “upload to WeoGeo” and “browse WeoGeo” to get data in and out of our content management system.

WeoGeo Tools for ArcGIS in action

Your return on investment putting your data in WeoGeo will be realized quickly when you no longer have to spend hours finding your data or invest in expensive, closed, proprietary content management systems. You can start using WeoGeo for Content Management today for free and see how it can change how you manage your geodata.