January 25

Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week I report on DigitalGlobe's deal to provide satellite imagery to Lowrance for display on its GPS receivers and on MapInfo's release of a new version of its GIS Component for MicroStrategy; I also bring you one more set of responses to my geospatial industry survey (more next week). Plus, the usual round up of news items from press releases.

— Matteo Luccio

DigitalGlobe Partners With Lowrance

The rapid, parallel growth in the popularity of high-resolution satellite imagery and of GPS- based portable navigation devices (PNDs) is generating demand for the former to underlay maps on the latter. High-res satellite imagery can be viewed via Google Earth, Microsoft's TerraServer and Live Search (powered by Virtual Earth), ESRI's ArcGIS Image Server, the Geography Network, TerraFly, GlobeXplorer's Image Atlas, MapMart, NASA's World Wind, and other such services. PNDs include handheld GPS receivers, car navigation systems, and GPS-enabled PDAs and cell phones.

To meet this demand and greatly expand the market for its satellite imagery, DigitalGlobe has partnered with Lowrance, a fifty-year-old manufacturer of marine electronics that has been making GPS-based navigation systems since 1992. DigitalGlobe will provide the satellite imagery for the Lowrance iWAY 600C. According to DigitalGlobe, which demonstrated the device at the recent International CES Conference, the iWAY 600C offers detailed satellite imagery of select metropolitan cities, NAVTEQ road maps with voice and visual navigation, more than 5.5 million points of interest, nautical charts for U.S. lakes and coastal waters, an MP3 player, an FM radio receiver, a picture viewer, a 5" high-resolution display, a touch-screen display, and a 30 GB internal hard drive.

DigitalGlobe has an exclusive contract with Lowrance to provide satellite imagery for the iWay 600C, which it describes in a press release as "the first portable navigation device to give drivers unparalleled access to the world's highest resolution commercial imaging system." While that is true, because DigitalGlobe's QuickBird currently is the only commercial (as opposed to military) satellite able to offer imagery with sub-meter resolution, some of Garmin's high-end products, such as the GPSMAP4208 and the GPSMAP4212, also use satellite imagery to enhance their vector basemaps.

Traditionally, DigitalGlobe's customers have received its imagery "as a solution put together on behalf of value-added resellers," says Michael McCarthy, the company's Senior Director of Business Development. However, he adds, "going into 2004, we started to get approached by companies that had non-traditional applications or uses for our imagery," and cites Google as "a good example" of this. "Our imagery started to be perceived as valuable in online mapping applications and, as is the case with Lowrance, off-line or on-board mapping applications. The imagery provided a contextual background to traditional vector maps." Now, consumers and enterprise users of electronic maps "are expecting to see imagery as a layer."

DigitalGlobe's deal with Lowrance, McCarthy says, is the beginning of a new distribution strategy and "has created the opportunity for us to forge partnerships almost as if we were working with OEMs, as opposed to a value-added distribution network."

When I asked McCarthy whether his company has similar deals in the works with makers of PDAs and cell phones, he acknowledged that it did, while declining to mention any specific manufacturers due to non-disclosure agreements. "There are many opportunities in personal navigation and location-based services (LBS)—which include wireless carriers and enterprise systems that utilize LBS as something integral to either business processes or their distribution."

On the technical side, is DigitalGlobe developing a new system to provide updated imagery to its customers? "As far as physical delivery of the images to any of the partners," says McCarthy, "we are going to do it in the way that makes sense for the partnership. We consider ourselves a provider of content, much like many of the OEMs might consider traffic, weather, or vector providers. Many of these partners may have some degree of sophistication in serving this type of data and they may want to take the data physically and manipulate it and do with it what they will. In other cases, we would like to prepare and pre-package the imagery, so that it can be served directly into their applications environment. I would say that our recent acquisition of GlobeXplorer greatly advances our ability to do that. We are trying enhance the asset and make it as robust as possible, so that we can offer a full Web service and flexibility to our existing and prospective partners with regard to how they would like the imagery to be delivered."

Will the average end-user be aware of who is providing the imagery? According to McCarthy, "it is going to be very similar to the way you see it in places like Image Atlas, GoogleEarth, or GoogleMaps, where you see attribution of data providers at the bottom of the screen and a copyright. We plan to continue to promote and build the DigitalGlobe brand and I think that we will be smart in the way we do that. We recognize that there is equity, at least in North America, with the GlobeXplorer name and even with the AirPhoto name. So I think that we plan to use those brands under the DigitalGlobe umbrella." DigitalGlobe's name will also appear prominently in the product literature, according to Chuck Herring, the company's Director of Marketing Communications.

Is DigitalGlobe also building its brand directly with the general public? "In a general sense, yes," says Herring. "I don't think that, for the foreseeable future, we view ourselves as serving the consumers directly, but having overall consumer awareness of our imagery is very important to us. When consumers use tools that may have our imagery in them, we definitely want them to know it is DigitalGlobe imagery." To McCarthy, his company's position as a provider of digital imagery is analogous to Navteq's position as a provider of street centerline data. Devices that use Navteq's vector data are branded as having "Navteq on board," he points out. "I think it would be a great goal for DigitalGlobe to have that same type of ubiquity."

Given the three to four years of lead time required for developing, manufacturing, and launching an imaging satellite, will demand soon outstrip supply? "We are already seeing that," says Herring. "In many regions, demand far outweighs capacity for what we can do. That's why you've seen us commit to two WorldView satellites. [Also,] where we can leverage the aerial capabilities we've just acquired, we will. It takes less of a lead time to be able to collect with those."

MapInfo Releases New GIS Component for MicroStrategy

Business intelligence (BI) systems and GIS come from different traditions and do different things. Ultimately, however, they are both decision-support systems, intended to help organizations see patterns, drill down to details, monitor change, and manage operations. Whenever business data has a spatial component, BI and GIS overlap. There are different approaches to integrating BI and GIS and creating what are sometimes referred to as geographic business intelligence solutions (GBIS). One approach is to build filters to import data from various databases into a GIS and then use it to analyze the data geographically. Another is to develop a GIS component for a specific proprietary BI system.

MapInfo, a provider of location intelligence solutions, took the latter approach when it partnered with MicroStrategy, a developer of enterprise reporting and analytic solutions, in September 2004. Yesterday, at MicroStrategy World 2007, in Las Vegas, MapInfo released the newest version of this integration, the Location Intelligence Component, which integrates its geographic querying and visualization capabilities with MicroStrategy's BI platform. It also "provides a bi-directional geographic interface—enabling users to move in and out of the data, whether they are generating maps based on reports or reports based on maps," according to a MapInfo press release.

I asked Jon Winslow, Director of Business Development for MapInfo, who was at the show, how the partnership between the two companies began. "A customer paid us to do an integration with MicroStrategy," he told me. Then, when MapInfo staff told them about the capability they had created, other customers asked the company to do the same integration for them. Pretty soon, Winslow explains, MapInfo "realized that maybe it was an idea in which we should invest some energy, time, and money, in order to see whether it could become an important part of our product line."

MapInfo has since found that "75-80 percent of all the people we speak to who have a business intelligence platform would like to have mapping," says Winslow. "In some cases they just want very simple things, but in many cases they want [what] we think of as typical GIS scenarios."

The GIS/mapping industry figured out years ago, Winslow explains, that people would want to take the geographic functionalities off from the desktop of a handful of experts and make it accessible across the enterprise. "So MapInfo built products like MapXtreme that help people deploy mapping applications all over their intranet or across the Internet." That, however, sometimes creates conflicts for large companies that have already invested a few million dollars to buy something like MicroStrategy to organize data that is in relational databases and distribute it in the form of reports and charts to thousands of internal users. IT managers, Winslow explains, often have a hard time understanding how GIS differs from what they have already set up. "To the IT person, who is trying to solve the business problems of an organization and may have to maintain a mapping application and a reporting application, it is frustrating, because it seems like a redundant effort," he says.

Predictably, Winslow goes on to say that, when told that a mapping component can leverage their large investments in business intelligence without requiring IT to maintain, learn to use two sets of administrative tools for, and train users on, two different applications, "the folks who are handling the infrastructure get really excited about it and the folks who have the business problems also get excited about it."

Of all the business intelligence software developers, MapInfo chose MicroStrategy as its partner because the two companies have many of the same accounts, says Winslow. Has MapInfo done other integrations of this kind? "We've done it on an ad hoc basis with different vendors before, for different customers, but we really invested a lot in productizing this MicroStrategy version, to get a lot of new features into it, to get all the QA built into it, to make it serve as not purely a professional services solution but in part as a MapInfo product line."

Is awareness of GIS growing among the top executives of large companies? "Sometime folks don't seem to be aware that they have a GIS department," Winslow says. "At the executive level, they are not necessarily thinking of this as GIS. Sometimes people are actually surprised by how much they are doing already in their GIS or mapping department." When they find out, "they become excited because, with this integration, they realize that they might be able to tap into a really important source of knowledge in their organization that they hadn't actually been tapping into and making as much use of as they should have been in the past." This, among other things, is good "for the people who are using the traditional mapping technology, because it brings them more front and center in the organization."

"That differs, of course, from sector to sector," Winslow ads. "So, retailers know that their real estate department [needs to work on location] and different public sector organizations live and breathe based on location—but sometimes companies and organizations don't realize how much they are already doing and [benefit from] seeing what they can do in terms of tying this to a BI tool. It makes them realize how much more they could be doing."

How do you differentiate your product from ESRI's Business Analyst or other similar packages out there? "None of the mapping companies really have business intelligence tools," says Winslow. "No one in our industry that I am aware of is really skilled at creating a general data mart and optimizing SQL queries. So, what we're doing with this location component for business intelligence doesn't really compete against the traditional mapping applications. It probably competes more with the toolkits that all of us have made available in years past to allow people to build customized, Web-based applications."

So, I pressed Winslow, what is fundamentally different about MapInfo's approach? If the focus of your application is strictly on mapping, then accessing corporate data via a relational database to create maps and simple reports works very well, he told me. "But if the focus of what you are doing is creating reports to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley, or about customer service, if mapping is not your number one priority, you would certainly choose a tool like MicroStrategy, because they will do a much, much better job of dealing with generalized data and getting it into a format that makes it easier to consume by thousands of people in the organization."

If your focus is strictly on the map, however, then, according to Winslow, MapInfo tools are the solution. "Other times, the focus of an application isn't just the map, it is a CRM system or a sales force analysis system. That application can be greatly enhanced by bringing mapping into it, but it is not going to be replaced by a mapping solution."

Geospatial Industry Survey

Here's one more set of responses to my questions, by Alain Lapierre, Chief Architect, Bentley Geospatial. I will publish a final batch next week; if you'd like to submit your responses, please send them to me by COB on Tuesday, January 30.

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?

   3D cities. Two of the major players in interactive maps, Google Earth and Local Live/Virtual Earth, are investing an enormous amount of money in the creation and delivery of 3D cities. This is going to have an impact on the entire geospatial industry, since it provides the ability to answer all kinds of questions that weren't easy to answer before. However, one bottleneck is network infrastructure, because of the large amount of data to be transferred. Another impact is related to the fact that these interactive map providers have limited software clients that are not necessarily customizable to the point that would be required or this valuable data is not accessible to more powerful software clients. It is then likely that municipalities will understand the benefits of the 3D city and will want to own these data themselves in order to use them the way they want. How they will obtain or create this data will surely raise many issues.

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

   Optimistic. Bentley is involved in the process and has invested a lot of energy in the Framework Data Content Standard (especially the Transportation theme).

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

   Again, the 3D city, simply because it provides so many opportunities for making better decisions and saving money in such areas as city planning, line of sight studies, noise modeling, heat leakage investigations, building permit processes, traffic simulation, etc. We are already aware of cities that have had great ROI from the very first year of 3D data availability.

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

   Since Bentley is a software provider and not a data consumer, this question is not applicable to us.

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

   Bentley has been providing 3D solutions for 20 years, so this is part of our culture and core competence. We are happy to see that the value of 3D representations is finally being recognized.

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

   The integration of CAD (large scale) and GIS (smaller scale) is capturing more and more interest. For example, an emergency operation team will want to navigate quickly to the target building using street navigation tools (GPS, voice navigation, street light control, etc.) but, once on site, they will want architectural and engineering details such as detailed plans of the building interior, electric and water network, etc. Since Bentley provides CAD, GIS, and BIM [building information modeling] solutions, we believe that this integration is necessary and our common software platform allows this integration. We also strongly believe in common standards that will allow this integration among different software solutions, and have been actively participating in the CAD/GIS/BIM project of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) 4th OpenWebService (OWS-4) initiative, by accessing, from the same client application, three different OGC-compliant servers for obtaining aerial imagery (WMS), a 3D city model (WFS/CityGML), and some detailed buildings (WFS/IFC). Such integration will certainly make any organization more productive and support more effective decision-making.

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

   We are using some open source libraries including OGR and GDAL for supporting various geospatial file formats.

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?

   Not applicable to Bentley.

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

   Solving global problems always required having access to the appropriate data, which has been costly and difficult in the past. Today, with virtually free access to Google Earth, Virtual Earth, and World Wind, just to name a few examples, an explosion of new opportunities are offered to anyone who has to solve global problems.

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

    Bentley runs its own user conference, the BE Conference 2007, in Los Angeles and London, which well more than 3,000 people will attend. We also participate in numerous conferences over the year and here are some events that we are planning to attend: GITA 2007, GeoWeb 2007, Geocongres Quebec 2007, Map World Forum in Hyderabad, Gi4DM, 26th UDMS 2007, 3D GeoInfo 2007, multiple conferences on standards (OGC, ISO, ANSI,.), DistribuTECH, AGI 2007 (UK), Intergeo (Germany) FIG 2007, Geo Brasil, and many more.

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?

    I reinforce our belief in the 3D city. Also of great potential is the federated system approach, where an intelligent index allows you to search and access various data sources without having to convert them into a single, 'mother of all systems'.

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

    I meet many users from all over the world and I would rather say that there are very smart and professional people in all countries (and there are also incompetent people everywhere). I can say however that I prefer the pizza in Italy. over that in the United States.

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

    Yes, definitely. It's the kind of disruptive technology that we see only rarely. It was in fact the first time in my professional life that all my family members (wife and kids) came home and asked me about something that was directly related to my job. They all asked me if I knew about this cool Google Earth thing, while I was professionally working on implementing links between our products and Google Earth. I think it's very good because it brought additional capabilities to everyone for learning more, making better decisions, solving problems. And it also motivates the geospatial industry to do better and offer new products. Bentley is committed to supporting de facto standards like Google Earth, Oracle Spatial, Adobe PDF, and Microsoft products like Office and SharePoint.

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

    No comment.

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?

    The awareness about digital geospatial information has definitely increased, and people are now aware of GPS, Google Earth, and Yahoo maps. I think that GIS is too technical and covers a broad area that doesn't mean anything clear to people in general. I think that concepts and words like the mapping world, or even the geospatial world would do better than GIS. Organizations like OGC also recently changed from Open GIS Consortium to Open Geospatial Consortium. This might reflect a new tendency.

» Back to our GIS Monitor JAN 2007 Issue