I will be speaking at the WebMapSocial Meetup tomorrow, hosted by Google at their Mountain View facility. I will be following presentations by NASA WorldWind and BrightKite.
If you are in the Bay area and want some free dinner with other geo-types, come by for some fun.
The WebMapSocial Meetup is organized by Catherine Burton of Endpoint Environmental LLC.
I presented the movie below as part of a presentation at the Safe Software FME User Conference. We had a great time and the Safe crew put on a marvelous show.
The movie shows WeoGeo scaling up to 64 Safe Software distributed FME Engines in the production of tile caches from a world-wide elevation database. The FME Workspace script was created by Dmitri Bagh, and processed on WeoGeo’s FME Constellation built on Amazon Web Services.
The scaling occurred automatically, spinning up FME Engine AMIs, and then shutting them down when the job queue was completed. This is one of our first examples of bringing scalable processing to difficult geospatial tasks.
Examples of the tiles created by Dmitri’s script for Virtual Earth (Bing Maps for Enterprise) and Google Earth can be found here.
Panel 1 (upper left hand corner) refers to the total number of engines in the constellation processing job.
Panel 2 (upper right hand corner) refers to the total constellation utilization percentage. The constellation is polled and when the utilization exceeds the pre-set threshold (50% in this example), it increases (doubles here) the number of engines until it reaches the pre-set maximum number of engines (64 here). The downward spikes occur when each new set of engines are added.
Panel 3 (lower left hand corner) is the average job processing time. There is an increase in velocity when the number of engines exceeds 16, which may be a function of increased overhead costs on the FME Core or bandwidth to the database.
Panel 4 (lower right hand corner) is the total number of jobs completed. 2000 jobs were submitted for this test. The job completion rate accelerates until the maximum number of engines are brought on-line.
I was invited to present at the Texas GIS Forum by the Texas Natural Resources Information Systems on the topic of the GeoWeb. It was a great session, that also included Dave Bouwman and Kirk Kuykendall.
Dave’s talk dealt with the technology required to help GIS programmers be more responsive to the needs of a larger, less GIS-focused, web community. It included the most slides that I have ever seen in 25-minute talk (140!). What struck me the most about his talk was the level of web expertise that had to be acquired before beginning to address the location or GIS issues that would best serve an end user of the web service. It makes me wonder if there might be a need for a middle-ware solution between the producers, who have high value geo-content but do not have Dave’s web expertise, and the consumers of that content. In some respect, I think that is part of what Dave’s organization provides.
My talk focused on a theme that I have been developing for the last couple of months, which is how should we index and search all the hidden geo-content that exists within the deep web storage networks of the world. Indexing and discovering this content would make the jobs of millions of professionals, who create GIS and CAD grade content a whole lot easier, as well as opening the information to a lot of other uses. My slides may be found below.
We had a great session on the possibilities and challenges related to dark geo-content on the internet. Amber Case at Hazelnut Tech Talk has a great summary of the session. You can also find the slides I used here.
One of the take home messages that I got from this session is that the problems we see in sharing and accessing geo-content are felt by many others. I hope to contact a few of the participants to help refine the problems and hopefully “illuminate” some possible solutions.
We’re headed to WhereCampPDX on Saturday. It is an event that everyone in the office has been looking forward to attending. This is exactly the type of event that prompted our move across country.
We hope to lead a couple of sessions. The first is by Scott Becker entitled, “Intro to Open Layers, a Free Open Source JavaScript Mapping API”. Open Layers is a powerful JavaScript API for web-based mapping that provides a multitude of tools for the geo hacker, including support for many tile formats, vector data, a drawing API, as well as support for various open data standards like GeoRSS, GeoJSON, GML, KML and more. This session will attempt to introduce the participants to these capabilities and spark ideas for what they might be able to create using them. To view Open Layers in action, check out our WeoGeo Marketplace (www.WeoGeo.com), which has recently undergone an upgrade from KaMap to Open Layers.
Our other session will be led by me: “Illuminating the Dark GeoWeb”. Valuable geocontent is stored in databases, network storage drives, and desktops. These are not accessible to search engines spidering the web making the geocontent undiscoverable. This session will be an open-ended discussion on how to develop tools to index these data, as well as how to motivate the owners of the content to make these data available for discovery and sharing.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there.
I am trying to synthesize my thoughts on the GeoWeb 2008 conference, as well as things that have been coming at us since the Safe Software press release. One of the thoughts that continues to rise to the surface is that the GeoWeb is not an independent section of the internet, but rather a niche location in the web; a niche section that perhaps is being rolled into its core.
I think I heard a similar statement from Ron Lake at the GeoWeb conference (“The GeoWeb is the Internet”). James Fee has picked up the theme in a recent post. The comments to that post seem to have echoes of the neogeography vs. GIS clashes. Yet, there does not appear to be any of the vitriol associated with this thread compared to past debates. Maybe we are moving past the divisions and into the realm of synergy between the different focuses of the groups.
And then bang, you see an announcement by ESRI and Microsoft Virtual Earth offering Virtual Earth products inside ArcGIS Server. Talk about a fusion of GIS and neogeography. You will have to purchase a Virtual Earth license, so it fits within Microsoft’s tradition licensing revenue model, but still, Virtual Earth is more about the future of yellow pages advertising than about GIS or GeoWeb services. At least according to Microsoft’s Vincent Tao at the Location Intelligence 2008 conference.
So where do we go from here? The internet is “evolving”. It started out as a robust means of communicating and sharing supercomputer resources (see ARPANET). It has become a ubiquitous communication, processing, and storage array that touches nearly every aspect of our daily lives. In its evolution to date, it has rolled through many businesses (e.g. telecommunication, financial, advertising, etc.), upending their business models, to create new services, products, and business opportunities. I think the spatial industry is just the next industry to overwhelmed (shaken? stirred? smashed?) by the evolution of this omnipresent technology in our lives.
Location awareness is just the next information stream to be absorbed by the massive data ingestion services that reside within the internet. If you own a mobile phone, your position on the planet is already trackable to within meters (see Enhanced 911). New business models are started daily on using these feeds as new Location-Based Services (LBS). As a consumer, geo-spam is a concern, but you can always turn-off the buzzer. But new models built on real-time crowd dynamics or “mobbing” offer a whole new approach to targeted marketing and advertising (see Peter Batty’s presentation at GeoWeb as an example).
Would you have seen this coming 10 years ago? It’s clear Microsoft did not see Google coming, and they had some very smart people trying to predict the future. I think we in the spatial data industry are facing the fertile grounds that lead to similar revolutionary technologies. Such environments lead to the classic innovator’s dilemma for business organizations – how do we maintain our current revenue stream, while creating new, faster growing opportunities so that we do not end up as the last maker of horse drawn carriages?
We have a packed week with presentations at GeoWeb, participation at OSCON, and a sponsorship at FOSCON. Our own Brian Artiaco will be competing in the FOSCON Live Coding Competition. I’ll try to keep blogging through GeoWeb, but if it happens it will be short and sweet.
Looks like a party is going to break out at GeoWeb (see links to Peter and James’ posts). I’ll be there for the sessions, and we’ll be showcasing WeoGeo during the Exhibitor Reception on Thursday 5:20 to 7:20 PM. Registration ends today.
Buy me for a beer and I’ll talk your ear off about monetizing your geo-knowledge. Buy me two and I promise not to say a word!
I was out of town last week. I’ll try and catch up on a number of subjects this week.
One of the reasons I was out of town was that I was invited by AWS to present at their StartUp event in Boston.
A copy of the presentation may be seen on Slideshare.net (or just click on the image embedded above). It was a great event, and I enjoyed sharing the stage with the talented people from AideRSS, Praxeon, and Geezeo. It was good to interact with others who are building (and bootstrapping) new web services using AWS.
I truly believe that utility computing is going to change the way businesses get started and (eventually) operate. However, we are going to have to build systems that are organic in how they handle resources, i.e. scale up and down as a function of load. In addition, these systems need to be self-healing by automatically addressing processor and storage outages.
The importance of self-healing will be evident in the next post.
I have been a traveling extensively over the last couple of weeks, so I am a bit behind in my entries. Last week I was at the Location Intelligence (LI) Conference and the Web 2.0 Expo. I met Andrew Turner, who gave the most lucid and informative talk on Neogeography that I have ever heard at Web 2.0 Expo. He and Mikel Maron gave a longer workshop on the subject at LI (missed that one, but I was at the Expo with the AWS crowd). One of our guys attended and said that it was excellent as well.
We spent some time with these guys, moving back and forth between the conferences, and showed them the private beta of WeoGeo. What struck me about the conversations was how quickly we meshed on the subject of maps, Web 2.0 applications, and neogeography. What was really amazing was how many coincident lines of thought that we had in common. It was as if we were all tuned into the same psychic hotline. We were nearly completing sentences for each other.
We as a group came from vastly different locations and backgrounds and have never met each other. Yet we had such similar thoughts on the same subject that it strikes me as something to notice. Now it is clear that we were a self-selecting group, since we were attending both LI and Web 2.0 Expo; one would expect some amount of coordinated thoughts. It was so enjoyable just to sit and talk maps and neogeography that I didn’t pay much attention to the coordination of our thought.
What really caused me to focus on this “group” think from people who never met, was the post from Adena Schutzberg. Adena was tremendously busy at this conference. When she wasn’t leading a session, everyone wanted a piece of her time. I was one of the fortunate ones to get a couple minutes with her. The post she wrote about us (and me) was awesome. How she got this in that short of a period of time suggests to me (and amazes me) that she is tapped into the same hotline as the Andrew, Mikel, and I.
Which brings me to the title of this post – these incidences (as well as some others) suggest to me that our field – geography, mapping, neogeography, whatever you want to call it – may be approaching a point of supersaturation. This is the point in a chemical solution where the input of a very small seed causes the whole solution to change state and create something beautiful and solid, where before there was nothing but a slurry of potential. I think that neogeography may be in this state of supersaturation. I don’t know what will cause the crystallization of our field into something new and beautiful, but I look forward to that event.
I would really like to thank Adena, Mikel and Andrew for their wonderful posts. We will work very hard to achieve the potential that they have expressed for our ideas and WeoGeo.
