December 6

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Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week, I profile four companies that provide geographic data and/or services via the Web. I also point you to an ESRI FAQ about support for Windows Vista and to an NPR story about one consequence of GPS-based vehicle navigation. Plus, 34 press releases.

— Matteo Luccio

ESRI Support for Windows Vista

According to ESRI, with ArcGIS 9.2 SP 4 it now supports Windows Vista for ArcGIS Desktop. For the details, see this FAQ.

Web-Based GIS

GIS continues to shift from desktops to servers and, from there, it is being made increasingly accessible via the Web to people throughout large organizations and to the public. Four recent announcements provide a snapshot of this transition:

1. Azteca Systems, Inc., a provider of GIS-centric management solutions, released the Cityworks Metrics Web Service API, an extension toolkit that provides developers a supported Web service to interface external data collection systems for the purpose of generating work orders on equipment and facilities.
2. The James W. Sewall Company — a provider of geographic information management for municipal government, utilities, forestry, and the natural resource industry — has released a new version of webFRIS 3.6, its web-based geospatial solution for the forest industry. webFRIS is a real-time, enterprise geospatial solution that allows users to access a centralized database via the Web without the need for specialized software or hardware.
3. Amazon has selected WeoGeo Market — a website that allows people to store, search, and exchange high-resolution CAD and GIS maps — as one of seven finalists for the Amazon Web Services Start-up challenge.
4. York Region, in Ontario, Canada, selected Latitude Geographics' Geocortex Essentials as the foundation technology for six Web-based planning decision-support applications and views to be used as a regional atlas for planning and monitoring sustainable development of the region.

You can find the complete announcements in the "News Briefs" section, below. I discussed each of these announcements with a representative of each company.

Interview with George Mastakas, Director of Enterprise Services, Azteca Systems

Public works and utilities organizations in charge of infrastructure, Mastakas explains, need to track the work orders that they perform and collect cost data. Traditionally, Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) have included an asset database. "For example, if you are in charge of maintaining waterlines, you would define every single line segment, fire hydrant, and valve inside of this nonspatial, tabular database. So, the ability to do GIS was very minimal, because you would then have to define a GIS layer to represent that, and try to keep the two in synch." For this reason, Azteca developed a GIS-centric CMMS that leverages an ESRI geodatabase directly and allows organizations to track maintenance cycles and create work orders on their infrastructure assets.

Azteca provides both a Web-based server deployment and a desktop client deployment, which provides more geospatial functionality.

A trucking company, Mastakas says, might use the Metric API to track how many miles each vehicle in its fleet is driven each day, while a utility company might use it to monitor messages from a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system about the runtime hours of its pumps. Both companies might then use the Metric API to generate work orders for preventative maintenance that direct work crews to the assets' locations, as stored in a GIS.

Historically, Mastakas explains, CMMS came bundled with an asset database that included inflexible definitions for such assets as pumps, water mains, hydrants, etc. "As a user, I couldn't define the assets in a way that matters to me. The ESRI GIS database, on the other hand, allows the user to define an asset however they wish, call it whatever they want, include whatever fields they want, use predefined codes, do rules — e.g. a fire hydrant can only be connected to a water main or a fire hydrant line." So, rather than requiring an organization to take the assets it stored in a GIS and redefine them in a proprietary database, Azteca developed a work management system that is divorced of the asset database and keys off of an ESRI GIS database.

More and more organizations are shifting from a reactive maintenance model to a preventive or predictive one. They can set thresholds for such things as a pump's temperature, run time hours, load, etc. and have a SCADA system issue a notification when those thresholds are exceeded. Attaching those work orders to the assets in the GIS database completes the loop: "All I have to do is print the map, or download it to a field unit, and the next step is to go to the location and do the work," says Mastakas. "There was a connective gap that we recognized and filled."

Municipal governments are no different from consumers using Google Maps, Mastakas says, except that they are more powerful, in that they have their own data that they spend a lot of money collecting and want to leverage throughout the organization. The best way to do that is from a Web-based approach, where you can serve up the maps and let the users of the organization consume them in different ways.

"Historically, what folks have been able to do using the desktop, they can now do in the browser environment. From an organizational perspective there is a lower cost of ownership, because there is only a single point of maintenance and a lower cost of acquisition, because I don't have to buy a seat for every machine, I just have to license a server. Our system has a license model: on the desktop it is per computer and on the server it is per connection."

Interview with J. Randall Cercopely, Business Development Manager, Geospatial Solutions, James W. Sewall Company

James W. Sewall Company is a 127 year-old consulting firm specializing in engineering, forestry, aerial photography, and appraisal work. GIS, Cercopely says, is becoming more of an enterprise process within most organizations. While, in the past, there were few GIS specialists within one enterprise, now, people at all levels of the organization want to get their hands on the data. However, as many companies are finding themselves geographically dispersed, traditional desktop GIS applications make it difficult to share data throughout the organization, and most Web-based systems allow you to edit on your desktop and then post to a Web-map site where information can be viewed only but not edited. By contrast, Sewall's webFRIS "is a centralized, hosted Web-based solution. The data is standardized in a single database application, accessible via the Web. We host the data on our servers, in a secure facility in Atlanta, Georgia."

Companies give their data to Sewall, which then loads it onto its servers, normalizes it, cleans it up, and makes it accessible through the tools that it has built. Each user has a user-ID and a password that determines her or his privileges in the system. One person may have full editing privileges, while someone else may have only reporting capabilities or view-only rights.

"Most of our competitors," says Cercopely, "are desktop-oriented in their editing GIS features, and then they replicate or synchronize to a specialized server. Ours is on-line, Web-based, real-time editing: as soon as I make an edit and save it, anyone with access to the application can see it." Whenever someone is editing a feature it is locked, so that nobody else can edit it at the same time.

"Our niche is primarily state organizations, timber investment management organizations, and real estate investment trusts," Cercopely says. For these organizations, the ability to use an application to get a high-level picture of an entire forest, including revenue projections, is increasingly becoming a requirement. "In the past, the CEO requested such information from a GIS person, who might take four or five days to get to produce it. Today, managers are able to log in and get answers in real time."

WebFRIS works through a browser, so it is completely platform-agnostic. Companies can put their data online themselves, using a batch import/export facility, or ask Sewall to do it for them.

So far, Sewall has targeted forestry applications, Cercopely says, but the underlining technology is a GIS framework. "We can easily adapt it to utility, gas pipeline, and municipal markets. The WebFRIS application itself is built upon a proprietary framework called Laramie that we developed, in which we can build applications for other vertical markets and we are in the process of doing so."

To begin setting up the system, companies give their data to Sewall in whatever format they have it. "It is usually in multiple formats, from various geographic regions. We work with them to map all of their existing databases to a single database through a very intensive and detailed migration process. Depending on the state of the data, it can take anywhere from 30 to 90 days. We put the data into our format and make it accessible to them via the Web. The greater the number of acres, the lower the cost per acre, on a subscription model." There is also an initial implementation fee.

The application is as fast as desktop editing, Cercopely claims, thanks to a Java applet that cashed the information from the server onto the desktop, and includes a full suite of editing tools. The application enforces topology and business rules, as defined by the client. "When an edit is done, it has to conform to certain constraints and certain business rules. When a single edit is done, such as moving a vertex, five or six other things may occur in the background automatically, because of the logic that was implemented at the point of migration and configuration."

Sewall acquired the group that developed WebFRIS from MeadWestvaco, a large forest products company, about a year ago. "Up until that point we were strictly focused on forestry applications for the forestry market, but now we are rapidly moving and have landed a couple of clients in the municipal (counties and cities) and utility sectors."

Interview with Paul Bissett, co-founder and CEO of WeoGeo, Inc.

Potential buyers and sellers of proprietary geographic data have to list/find relevant data files, sort out IP and security issues, negotiate prices, transfer files across firewalls, and track the complex genealogy of derivative products. WeoGeo, according to Bissett, addresses all of these challenges. "We don't want to be a Web vendor so much as a Web enabler," says Bissett. "So, we built a site that allows providers to upload their content. We will manage the hosting or listing of that content in a way that allows other users or buyers an easy mechanism to discover it, customize it, and acquire it. It is not Google Earth, where you can zoom in to the Grand Canyon and see layers that someone else has put on top. What we want our providers to offer and we are facilitating is orthophotos of the Grand Canyon itself, perhaps combined with DEMs or some other topographic information. Users can then acquire these files and bring them into their own GIS or other spatial analysis tools that allow them to create a derivative product. Ours is a business-to-business exchange between buyers and sellers of quantitative mapping products for further derivative use. Consider us like an auto trader or an eBay."

The provider, Bissett explains, handles the pricing for these products. Users can download any product on the site and use it as they see fit. However, WeoGeo's IP management agreement specifies that the digital products on the site are provided with a single-use commercial license. If users choose to resell them, they must remand a royalty back to the original provider. "If you are going to resell it through WeoGeo, we take care of all of that ourselves." For example, Bissett explains, a user might download an orthophoto of the Grand Canyon, pay $50 for it, add all of the best camp sites in the area, and resell the product for $65. When someone else buys it, the original orthophoto vendor receives $50 and the person that added the campsites gets $15. Whoever bought the product for $65 might then add information on all the rapids in that stretch of the Colorado River and resell the file at a further markup — and so on. "The goal," says Bisset, "is to create a true exchange, where everybody's IP contribution is protected and value-added content creators can get access to base content."

"In the GIS business," Bissett argues, "people frequently can't get good maps and so the consulting shops just recreate the wheel every time. We would like to show that it is more efficient, once you create something, to put it up for sale. They can do it on a speculative basis or they can go search out the most popular products and start adding things to them."

One of the biggest problems with mapping products, Bissett points out, is their sheer size. "Nobody is going to turn over 100 terabytes," he says. "For one thing, you just can't push that through the Internet." The WeoGeo Server addresses that issue by allowing internal users or authorized external users to search an enterprise's map archive, while the actual file remains safely behind a firewall. In turn, this enables organizations to turn their geographic archives from a cost center to a revenue center. The value of a company's catalog of geographic products is further enhanced by its inclusion in WeoGeo's larger catalog. Companies, of course, can choose which of their files to include in the catalog.

WeoGeo was spun out about a year ago from the Florida Environmental Research Institute (FERI), which for the last nine years has been developing hyperspectral imaging technologies for the U.S. Navy and NOAA. "What we found in pushing these high-bandwidth maps through thin-net clients," says Bissett, "is that the technology to push those maps and to discover what maps were there was actually as valuable as the acquisition of the data itself."

For now, WeoGeo is little more than a proof of concept. "We haven't entered into open beta," says Bissett. "We expect that that will happen shortly and we'll allow others to put up content beyond our own content from the FERI and some private data customers. We have 40,000 maps on line, mostly topographic maps that we've acquired from state agencies that we are using to highlight the system's capabilities."

What does all of this have to do with Amazon? One of the biggest problems for a geospatial company that is considering the acquisition of hundreds of terabytes, or even petabytes, of data, Bissett explains, is how to build out the data center to host that data, process all of the order requests, and re-project the maps in, say, half an hour from the moment each order is received. "You have to spend a lot of money in hardware — a depreciating asset — that may or may not ever be used, plus all the expenses of either renting a co-location facility or building out your own data center. Amazon Web services offered us a way to do all of the development without buying the computers — using their farms instead. Amazon is pretty enamored with what we are doing and how we use their systems. We have a completely self-contained e-commerce system for arguably one of the most difficult digital products on the Web and have made it very easy and intuitive for the user as well as highlighting the advantages of using a utility computing system like Amazon's. For those reasons, I think, they selected us, out of 900 applications that they received." For a short video presentation by Bissett on WeoGeo's collaboration with Amazon, click here.

Interview with Steven Myhill-Jones, President & CEO, Latitude Geographics Group Ltd.

Latitude Geographics' GeoCortex product — which is now about 95 percent of what the company does — is a suite of products and services that organizations can use to deliver Web-based mapping using ESRI's ArcIMS and ArcGIS Server. "In broad strokes, we are one of the ArcIMS aftermarket companies," says Myhill-Jones. "We started out in 2000, hosting ESRI's ArcIMS. Then, very quickly we discovered that people don't want a host, but they liked our viewer. So we made the transition to being more of a software company."

"We capitalize on eliminating inefficiencies. Setting up an ArcIMS site used to be a $20,000 to $30,000 job. By developing a viewer technology that is all set up with a configuration file through the GUI, we've got it down to a couple of hours and clients can often do it themselves. Our focus has always been on developing horizontal-type capabilities, just for making life easier for people around ArcIMS."

"There's been a real shakeout in our industry over the last year or so, since the release of ArcGIS Server 9.2, [which allows] people to actually deploy a real-world server application. Suddenly, everyone was given a copy that has ArcIMS and is up-to-date on maintenance and a copy of ArcGIS Server. We were faced with this very disruptive next-generation technology. We realized that ArcIMS is really a subset of Web GIS technology, whereas ArcGIS server, being provided to everybody, makes available everything possible through ArcGIS desktop on the server."

One of the things that complicated the transition, Myhill-Jones says, was ESRI's release of ADF (Application Developer Framework) — the set of custom Web controls and templates that can be used to build Web applications that communicate with a GIS server. "ADF is to ESRI technology what .NET is to Microsoft technology. So we bet the company and we've done about 14,000 hours of development on developing a next-generation product — GeoCortex Essentials. Now we have a product that has everything that people need to be able to up and go with it. Given the free upgrade from ArcIMS to ArcGIS Server, many organizations are now implementing Server. I feel like the balance is almost tipped. We still do a fair bit of ArcIMS work and we are still licensing a lot of ArcIMS technology, but there is steadily increasing interest in ArcGIS Server. So that puts us in a pretty exciting position."

"I really believe in a business model that capitalizes on eliminating inefficiencies — such as building search and locate tools or doing database linking. With WebGIS there are many of these generic tools that people want to use over and over again. We found that by making it easier to create these applications, our clients end up creating more applications and they want to do more with the software, and then it drives things forward. Because we have licensed products — we do a lot of R&D and we develop these products — we make up for the fact that we are eliminating inefficiencies by licensing software."

"We also have an open IP model, which means that any development that we do for one client, we make available across our client base at no additional cost. It means that we are driven by innovation, not by recycling things that we've done in the past. Our clients tend to have far more sophisticated applications, because they put those dollars toward new things."

"Our clients want to stay closely aligned with what ESRI is doing, so we always make sure that we tightly integrate with what ESRI does. As a small firm of about 30 people, we are able to move very quickly and we provide products and services that ESRI really values. A lot of the initial successes with ArcGIS Server are going to come from folks that are running our technologies. ESRI is doing a ton of work to ensure that the performance of ArcGIS, at 9.3, will be equivalent to that of ArcIMS. I don't see a profound industry shift from ArcIMS to ArcGIS Server until the performance and the functionalities are comparable."

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