January 18

Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week I bring you another batch of responses to my geospatial industry survey, including one by Matthew O'Connell, CEO of GeoEye, and a review of an ESRI Press book on the use of GIS for environmental management; also, a mention of an article on the dwindling budget for Earth observation and a small clarification. Plus, a large compilation of news items from press releases.

After writing this newsletter for nearly two years, starting this week I include my last name, below.

— Matteo Luccio

Geospatial Industry Survey

Here's a second batch of responses to my industry survey questions. I will have many more next week. Please send me yours!

1. What are emerging as the biggest drivers and the narrowest bottlenecks in the delivery of interactive maps and location-based services, including local search, to consumers?

   1. Matthew O'Connell

      GeoEye is a key provider of imagery to Microsoft Virtual Earth and Yahoo. Obviously, as technology has changed so has the mapping industry. People are now used to looking at satellite imagery maps or some type of hybrid version. They expect it and in the future they will expect to see more current data than what's available now on many of the search engines. Since your questions deal with consumers, I think the search engine that can boast they have the most accurate and most current satellite imagery married with the most functionality will be the victor and attract the most eyeballs. As to bottlenecks, for feature rich content it will always be the size of the pipes that will be the limiting factors. Regardless, the number of people using these engines will increase. In July 2006, according to a comScore study released last fall, 63 percent of U.S. Internet users—some 109 million—used a local search engine, up from 43 percent in July 2005.

   2. Randy Johnson

      Right now we are seeing an increased interest in oblique imagery. In our latest deployment of our interactive mapping service, we have created a link to the oblique images that we had contracted earlier in 2006. This link allows the user to view every square inch of the county via an angled aerial photo, which reveals more information than the more typical straight down aerial photo. This application also gives the user more freedom to control the visible layers and labeling, thus delivering exactly what the user is looking for. As users become more GIS-aware, through such tools as Google Earth and Local.live, delivering applications that they can control more will be what they are looking for in the future.

   3. Joydeep Chakraborty

      I believe the improved hardware capability and their standardization, along with robust GIS software applications and emerging standards such as OGC, will be the key drivers. The bottlenecks or rather challenges will be the quality and accuracy of the data and information and, of course, the limited availability of skilled professionals.

2. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the pace of development of the NSDI? Are you involved in the process?

   1. Joydeep Chakraborty

      We are optimistic about the pace of development of NSDI. Lately some good work has been done; however, standardization of such diversified data always remain a challenge. RMSI is not directly involved in the process, however we observe its movement closely.

3. Which sector of the geospatial industry do you think will grow the most this year? Why?

   1. Matthew O'Connell

      Since 9-11, the Defense and Intelligence sector has grown most dramatically. Almost half our revenues come from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. We have an excellent relationship with the NGA and their NextView program is a superb example of a successful public-private partnership. This community of users will grow with the availability of high-quality imagery from next-generation commercial imaging satellites. We expect overseas markets to continue to be strong as nations see the value of having access to imaging satellites for their economic and national security. Commercial markets are more scattered, so the cost of sale is higher. But the search engines have created an awareness of "all things geospatial" that advertising dollars could never buy. The search engines have given the commercial markets a persistent tail wind.

   2. Joydeep Chakraborty

      Health GIS—tracking trends in health care with GIS. Decision support systems—legacy decision support systems integrated with modern location-based services. Online gaming—a new concept, where the games in which terrain-based maps are used will use real-time GIS-based maps.

4. How is your company / agency benefiting from the greater availability of satellite imagery?

   1. Joydeep Chakraborty

      RMSI has a dedicated group for delivering Geospatial and Engineering solutions. The data is one of the key components in these solutions. There used to be many solutions that faced feasibility issues because of availability / cost or the time it takes to acquire the data. Easy availability allows us to propose and deliver such a solution to a larger audience.

5. Have you switched to 3D or begun to use it more? Is it enabling new applications for you?

   1. Randy Johnson

      We have not enabled 3D yet. We just started a project for multiple addresses that has a phase where we intend to use 3D. 3D would be used to render the vertical component of the multiple dwellings (apartments, condominiums, townhouses, etc.).

   2. Joydeep Chakraborty

      To some extent, yes. Over the recent past, we have developed some 3D applications for some of our clients. However, these applications were limited to simple mapping and querying capabilities. I believe that advanced GIS functions in the 3D space is still at its nascent stage and will take some more time to reach its potential.

6. Are you planning to access large amounts of CAD data from your GIS this year or to migrate CAD data into your GIS?

   1. Randy Johnson

      We are not planning on accessing/migrating any CAD data into our GIS at this time.

   2. Joydeep Chakraborty

      Yes, definitely. We are seeing an increased trend of CAD to GIS migration, particularly in areas like facility and space management.

7. Have you implemented any open source solutions? Do you plan to do so this year?

   1. Randy Johnson

      We have not implemented any open source solutions at this time, but it always remains an option.

   2. Joydeep Chakraborty

      RMSI has made constant efforts in providing cost effective solutions to its customers. One of the recent open source implementation at RMSI was a WebGIS application using UNM MapServer API's. We do intend to continue implementing open solution this year as well as long as it benefits our customers. We also have implemented a 3D application for our client, based on a NASA WorldWind-like open source API named WW2D Plus One. While the use till now (in most cases) was limited to parts of the applications, with the maturing of the open source community, our efforts will be to deliver more and more applications that are built on popular and mature opens source solutions.

8. Are you satisfied with the coverage, accuracy, update frequency, and cost of commercial street centerline data? Do you expect any major improvements this year? Do you expect to make any major changes in how you acquire this data?

   1. Randy Johnson

      Currently the Hennepin county Surveyor's office is developing our own county street centerline data set. It is expected to be finished in the second quarter of this year. This data set has long been overdue and we are very excited for its release.

   2. Joydeep Chakraborty

      We are not very satisfied with the street data altogether. The availability in some parts of the world is reasonable, though. If we a want to deliver solutions across the globe we expect the consistent data in terms of coverage and accuracy. The cost is another bottleneck for these data. There are only a limited number of takers for very good data. If we want the applications to run on every desktop and want the user to expect it as default and as a part of OEM then we are pretty far off.

9. In what ways do you expect geospatial technologies to contribute the most this year to solving global problems, such as climate change?

   1. Matthew O'Connell

      One of the biggest contributions imagery can make may be in helping to understand the geographical component to national security issues and imagery can help the developing world stay informed on such issues. Another may be climate change. We have some 255 million square kilometers of map-accurate IKONOS and Orbview-3 imagery in our archive. In understanding the impact of climate change, older satellite imagery at 1-meter resolution can be compared to newer imagery to see any changes. I saw an image of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa and there isn't much snow on it anymore. Imagery is only one small element in helping understand how climate change may impact changes on the ground. Imagery may be like the canary in the mine and be an indicator or queuing tool for those studying these issues. Vanishing snow pack can be measured and mapped, multi-spectral imagery can help us understand how fast permafrost may be melting, imagery can 'see' more open water where sea ice used to be, and even map tree lines and then - over time - see how those lines change with regards to elevation. For years satellite imagery has helped monitor, measure, and map the underwater coral reef habitat using IKONOS since scientists have documented 'seeing' some 90 feet under clear still water like in the Caribbean or South Pacific. Coral reefs are very delicate ecosystems and are impacted by changes in water conditions such as acidity and temperature. Finally, commercial imagery may even play a part in verifying what countries may be claiming regarding global carbon credit trading.

   2. Joydeep Chakraborty

      It is widely accepted that GIS and related technologies will play an important role in global change research. Remote sensing will clearly be the most important source of data for global change research, at least within its physical dimensions, because of remote sensing's potential for high spectral resolution and uniform coverage of the surface of the Earth. GPS is clearly important to all kinds of field observation. The importance of GIS, on the other hand, can only increase as global change research becomes more data- and computation-intensive, as it moves from studies of single processes to integrated modeling, as it struggles to link human and physical processes, and as it places more emphasis on policy formulation and decision-making.

10. Which conferences and trade shows do you plan to attend this year? How far in advance do you plan these trips?

    1. Matthew O'Connell

       Our two biggest shows are the Twenty-Seventh Annual ESRI International User Conference, June 18-22 in San Diego, California, and GEOINT 2007 Symposium, October 21-24 in San Antonio, Texas. But we are also scheduled to attend many other smaller shows. Given the cost, logistical concerns, and the importance of getting hotel reservations we have to plan these far in advance.

    2. Randy Johnson

       We usually send several employees to the ESRI Annual International User conference each year. We plan for this when we create our budgets in the spring of the previous year.

    3. Joydeep Chakraborty

       The Annual ESRI International User Conference and Map India. These trips are planned two to three months in advance, because, in addition to attending these events, we also participate actively in them by showcasing some of our technology implementations.

11. What do you expect to be the next really big thing in GIS data or applications — of roughly the same import, say, as the introduction of TIGER files?

    1. Joydeep Chakraborty

       The next big thing in the space of GIS applications will be the return of the thick clients over the Web. In the early years of the Internet revolution these were considered bad, as the bandwidth and client processing power were limited. But, with the emergence of cheaper hardware and ample bandwidth, these applications seem all set to make a return. Also, thanks to the emergence of such technologies as AJAX, Webservices, Flash/Flex, etc., these new age avatars are not only going to add power to Internet/Intranet applications but also add more ease of use, thanks to the simplified UI. For example, look at such applications as Map24 and Microsoft Virtual Earth's 3D plug-in.

12. What are Europeans doing better with regards to geospatial technology than North Americans?

    1. Joydeep Chakraborty

       Apart from consuming the applications, there is a lot of work happening in the enterprise GIS arena to make GIS as hub for successful analytics.

13. Has Google Earth become a de-facto standard? If it has, is that good or bad? Why?

    1. Matthew O'Connell

       Although Google Earth has received most all the attention in this area, you can't overlook Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo, and others. Mapquest was launched in 1996. It is humbling to think just a little more than 10 years ago we had no notion of using the Web for geospatial applications. I have a background in investment banking, communications, and the cable television industry. It took 38 years for the radio to attract 50 million listeners; 13 years for television attract 50 million viewers and only four years for the Internet to attract that many users. No one could have predicted the rapid rise of the Internet. One great advantage our industry has is that geospatial products can easily flow over the Internet since they are both based on digitized pixels of information. Google Earth was released in June 2005 and has been the race horse to beat ever since. Last July Google was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary so the company and its products have become part of our culture. But, don't count out Yahoo and Microsoft Virtual Earth. A comScore study last fall reported Google had 29.8 percent of the market for local search and Yahoo has 29.2 percent.

    2. Joydeep Chakraborty

       The best thing that Google Earth has done is to deliver the wonderful world of imagery and maps to most of the desktops. This tool is not only perceived as a geospatial tool but also taken as a leisure tool. We agree that what users want to see in their geospatial application is based on what Google Earth looks like. However, as far as technology is concerned, it is still far from being a de-facto standard. It is good as it is going to increase the public participation in GIS through features like Google Earth community and Digital global coverage. One of the great usages was when Google Earth participated in the U.S. election this year by allowing people using Google Earth to get them registered for voting.

14. What do you expect to be your thorniest legal issues this year? Liability? Copyright? Privacy?

    1. Matthew O'Connell

       Big issues for us and many other companies with far flung operations are export control laws which dampen on our ability to be agile and flexible. We once waited nine months to get a license to export a piece of hardware to replace a piece already on-site in a ground station in a foreign country that is a strong U.S. ally. We also have asked the government for a waiver on the current licensing constraint that will prevent us from delivering half-meter imagery from out next-generation satellite to customers immediately. Current rules say that we have to hold such imagery for 24 hours before making it available. Another issue is government competition. We believe a lot of people in the U.S. government now realize that imagery from the commercial sector is the most cost-effective mapping solution for the U.S. government, in part because the U.S. government benefits from the commercial industry's investment in Wall Street-backed commercial imaging satellites. We provide a critical outsourced support to the Defense and Intelligence community for high-quality, map-accurate satellite imagery. Future U.S. government land imaging systems should focus on technology and capabilities that U.S. commercial imagery companies can not or choose not to provide.

    2. Joydeep Chakraborty

       Copyright and privacy.

15. Scientific American, Technology Review, and the New York Times, just to mention a few of my favorite publications, almost never mention GIS specifically, even when talking about GIS-related topics. Why do you think that's the case? Do you expect awareness of GIS to significantly increase this year?

    1. Matthew O'Connell

       Awareness of GIS will increase at an exponential rate. Thanks to the search engines, the Internet, GPS, and commercial imaging satellites, people are using forms of GIS as part of their intellectual toolkit for understanding the world. In 1948 Harvard University dumped its geography program. But just last spring, Harvard established a Center for Geographic Analysis run by an eight-person faculty steering committee composed of GIS pioneers. At Harvard, geography — and GIS — is back and in a bigger way enabled by technologies never dreamed of 60 almost years ago. It is predicted that the early decades of this new millennium will present daunting challenges to the international community. According to a recent U.S. government report, by 2015 the world's population will hit 7.2 billion with 95 percent of the growth occurring in developing nations. There will be many mega cities with populations of 10 million or more and three billion people will live in water-stressed nations. As these conditions develop, I see a need for more current and accurate geospatial information so that critical decisions can be made to manage issues affecting humanity and preserve the changing face of our planet.

    2. Joydeep Chakraborty

       Most publications prefer not to use the term "GIS.". This could be because the common person often does not relate to the term, and in many cases, it is often confused with GPS. With the GIS sector poised to witness another year of growth, one does expect the level of awareness about GIS to grow, though not significantly, as the impact of the growth might still not be apparent in daily life, at least for this year.

John Brandes

As always, representing Agfa, a supplier of aerial film to the mapping / GIS industry, I have a difficulty in answering GIS surveys since aerial films do not "fit" into the typical questions being asked. However, let me give you some reflections from my position as Manager of Specialty Products, Agfa Corporation, selling aerial film products to the North American market.

First of all, I do see an opportunity for major growth in demand for GIS information. Global warming, fact or fiction, will continue to demand data for ongoing investigation. The recent situation in Greenland with diminishing glaciers will need constant re-mapping as this activity progresses. The NY Times stated only today that Greenland could be losing up to 80 cubic miles of ice per year, equal to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps. All this could have great impact on ocean water levels with resulting impact on coastlines throughout the world. Expanding population, demographic changes, economic and political changes will all have an impact on the Earth's surface and the atmosphere above it. So, no doubt the demand for GIS information will be growing.

From my perspective, representing Agfa Specialty Products, Aerial Imaging Films, I am tasked with supporting an "unglamorous" product line in a very fast moving technological environment of a rapidly changing digital evolution. However, I do not back down on the conviction of the present level of performance and quality of image that silver halide film technology continues to deliver. It is a proven fact that in the area of archiving, a situation that digital technology flees from, silver halide film is king. Flexibility in extracting data from film is also proven. Whether the image is from aerial films 50 years old or imaged yesterday, the image can be printed photographically, scanned electronically, converted to digital files and incorporated into any present software used today. That is something that will be highly unlikely for any digitally acquired raw file image 50 years from now.

Film imagery, unlike a digital image, does not need software to interpret the ones and zeros comprising the data acquired on a CCD. The latent image on the film after exposure and chemical processing is visible and archivally permanent, accepted in a court of law as an original document, as a record of the scene captured on the film. One can say both imaging technologies require processing to see the image, but only the silver halide film image does not require a software to interpret the data, a process that leaves the digital image data open to manipulation, simply to view it and further to print it. The original film, once visible after processing is a visible record, archival for 500 years according to present ANSI specifications for silver halide films.

In the environment of fast moving technologies, I consider it important that we don't eliminate proven technology before its time, in our haste to advance to the next level. The principle of silver halide film technology may be over 160 years old, but it is no less as advanced, a technology of today. The recording of our Earth's changes should in many cases be recorded with proven archival importance. Before photography, we had only documents written, drawn or painted, all important historical records we look back to today. With the photographs of the last 160 years we have improved that ability to record history. Until we have a proven archival technology to replace film, we should not hasten its demise in unjustified statements like "film is dead." It is alive and well and doing an outstanding job.

Book Review: GIS for Environmental Management

Robert Scally, GIS for Environmental Management
(Redlands, California: ESRI Press, 2006)
Paperback, 187 pages

Local government planners, biologists, geologists, conservationists, and others increasingly rely on GIS to manage land use, identify and prioritize targets for protection and restoration efforts (see my piece on this topic in last week's issue), monitor change in land coverage, and justify and document policy decisions. Often GIS is the only practical way to comply with complex environmental regulations over large and diverse areas.

This collection of twelve short case studies, culled from an initial pool of 200 candidates, showcases some of the most innovative GIS environmental projects created by governments, businesses, and nonprofits. It covers a broad spectrum of environmental management challenges—from protecting biodiversity in Madagascar, kelp forests along California's coast, wetlands in upstate New York, and trees in New York City, to identifying the source of the dust plaguing an urban area straddling the U.S.-Mexico border, to reducing the risk from unexploded ordnance in West Virginia's wilderness. The book also discusses the people and organizations that conducted each project. In most cases, they were cooperative ventures between federal, state, and local agencies, often with the actual data collection and analysis contracted to academic research centers, nonprofit conservation organizations, and/or private businesses.

Written in a journalistic style interspersed with brief quotations from one or more of each project's principals, the book describes the interplay of data collection, subject matter expertise, and sophisticated spatial analysis that they used to meet specific environmental challenges. These brief, self-contained case studies serve as both a survey and teasers. Each one briefly describes the key features of the area in question, the goals and limitation of the project, how GIS was used to solve environmental problems and/or meet legal mandates, and the principal findings.

The author pays much attention to human factors and inter-agency cooperation. On the technical side, for each project he specifies the data sources and layers, the hardware used for field data collection (such as tablet PCs or PDAs loaded with ArcPad), the software used for display and analysis (mostly from ESRI), and the final product. He explains, in context, such techniques as gap analysis, prediction algorithms, and kriging. The book is also a useful survey of some of the lesser known varieties of environmental challenges.

While change detection is the technique most discussed throughout these studies, each chapter highlights a particular technique. For example, a chapter on wildlife management in California goes into great detail on the use of Microsoft Access SQL and ArcGIS to develop geoprocessing models.

As usual with publications for ESRI Press, the plethora of beautiful maps and remotely-sensed images is one of the book's most striking and useful features. For example, in a chapter on the redevelopment of brownfields in an urban area in England, a five-page sequence of maps shows the use of GIS as a "time machine," to trace decades of change in land use. Unfortunately, due to space limitations, maps are often shrunk to the point that legends and notes are too small to read.

Occasionally, the book is synthetic to the point of obscurity. For example, the case study on air pollution along the U.S.-Mexico border does not explain how inferring emissions from certain mapped sources—such as paint factories, restaurants, auto body shops, and drycleaners—differs from directly measuring airborne dust. In the case study of kelp along the California coast, the lead researcher, Paul Veisze, is quoted as saying "We were literally trying to stay ahead of the storms because they would come in and rip out the kelp we were trying to survey."—leaving me to wonder what the point was of mapping something that was about to change. In the case study on urban forestry in New York City, the author states: "Because of the shadows cast by tall buildings, most aerial and satellite photos often inaccurately depict the street tree population." Yet, on the facing page, he quotes one of the study participants, Dave Nowak, as saying just the opposite: "We had high-resolution digital images flown for all of New York City at the start of the project and produced cover maps for the three neighborhoods."

Despite these minor flaws, the book is a valuable addition to any GIS library.

Briefly Noted

The January 16 issue of the New York Times ("Science Times" section, page D4) carried an article by Andrew C. Revkin titled "Scientists Warn of Diminished Earth Studies From Space." Here are the first four paragraphs:

Department of Corrections

Last week, in my article about Microsoft's deal with GlobeXplorer and DigitalGlobe's purchase of the company, the word "announced" in each of the two bullet items, coupled with the order of those two items, was misleading. While my headline correctly indicates the sequence of events, the announcements occurred in the opposite order, on January 8 and 9.

» Back to our GIS Monitor JAN 2007 Issue