In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

This week GPS Bites interviewed Adena Schutzberg of Directions Magazine. She is currently working as a GIS consultant and is  serving as a content adviser to the Geospatial Revolution video project at Penn State University.  A short excerpt from the interview is as follows:

GPS Bites Asked: During your time working in GIS, what have been the most exciting and innovative developments that have occurred?  Whether from consumer, business, or military perspectives. 

The most exciting innovation, the one that still gets me excited, relates to interoperability.

Adena Said: I remember the first time I understood the impact of it. It was in 1992 and I was in a bar with a real visionary, Dennis Boston, who last I knew worked at Georgia Power. He explained how in the near future any GIS would be able to “pull in” data from any other. Remember that back then we didn’t have FME (Safe Software’s Feature Manipulation Engine) or Spatial Data Objects (FDO, Autodesk’s platform for data interchange, now an Open Source Geospatial Foundation open source project) or the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).  

Boston was of course correct; we now can read and manipulate file based data and web-served data in virtually an format, on virtually any platform, using virtually any software. Not only that, we can even use geoprocessing services from other vendors from a variety of software on the desktop, table or mobile phone. In retrospect, perhaps it was inevitable that I’d spend five years consulting to the OGC!

You can read the interview in full on the GPS Bites website.

Here's the articles from Directions Magazine published during the last month that I found interesting.

• DM published an article on maps with comprehensive and detailed coverage of postcodes and administrative boundaries for all African countries
• Here's an article with maps on European 2010 retail data, including purchasing power, spendings and more
• Don't we all want to save money? Here's a generic example named How One Utility Company Increased Productivity While Decreasing Costs Through Integration to its GIS Technology
• In an article named Do the “Hot Topics” in Geospatial Unite or Divide Us?, Adena says "The discussions of LBS, geospatial intelligence, planning, satellite remote sensing, open source and crowdsourcing made me feel more like the geospatial community players are taking off in many directions rather than coming together to find and use our tools and data for their highest purpose." Do you agree?

Last time I aggregated articles from Directions Magazine was early March. Here's selected articles published on DM since then.

• While we have already published quite a lot on the upcoming Google Earth Builder product, you might be interested in this additional generic article named Google Earth Builder Launched: Cloud Platform for Geospatial Data Storage and Processing
• DM shared their interesting geojargon survey results, letting us know, out of 538 respondents, which geospatial terms are well known and which ones aren't
• Here's a article named How Much Do GIS Consultants Charge in 2011?, from the tables provided (generated out of only 23 survey responses), the average for all types of GIS work seems to be between 86$ to 111$ an hour
• DM continued to provide regular coverage of GIS certification, this time with these articles: The Great Debate: To Certify or not to Certify, That Is an Absurd Question, Special Session on GIS Certification with David DiBiase, GISCI President, and Sheila Wilson, GISCI Executive Director and a last article on the GISP’s Code of Ethics and Rules of Conduct
• Here's an article on the Couchbase company and the CouchDB database system. The article is named Couchbase: Taking NoSQL and Geo to the Next Level. We mentioned GeoCouch in the past.
• Here's an article named Keeping the Patent Trolls at Bay - Defending Your Location-based Patents and Your Business and a related one named Microsoft and Google Fight Back Against Store-locator Patent Suits
• DM shared an article named The Case for Real Estate GIS in China
• In a praise for cloud GIS, here's an article named It’s Time to Change: How SaaS Will Enable the GIS Industry to Move Forward and Engage With New Market Opportunities
• Here's a article on Five Ways GPS Vehicle Tracking Can Reduce Fuel Costs

Here's a few Directions Magazine articles published in the past month that I found interesting:

• An article on GIS Computing in the cloud. The summary: "Author Philip O'Doherty believes our thinking may be too small when it comes to GIS computing in the cloud. One of the big problems with GIS today, writes O'Doherty, is that it is seen as a specialist tool, available only to a limited number of people in a limited number of organizations. GIS as a Service could change the game entirely by making GIS capabilities available to potentially hundreds of millions of users." A snippet: "The GIS sector needs to change dramatically if it is going to avoid being left behind in the new geospatial wave."
• An article on mapping technologies destined aligning with other data visualization technologies. From the conclusion: "However, geospatial visualization alone is an incomplete picture unless it is able to launch other visualization elements which manipulate and dissect information based on an endless array of other visual contexts as well. In the case of catching the bad guy with exploding undergarments; contexts other than space would be time, severity, risk, relevant keywords, category, relationships, etc."
• If you're into SDI, you might be interested in reading this article on the legal aspects of spatial data infrastructures and data sharing.
• Here's an article named Leveraging GIS to Enhance Shopping Center Performance
• Here's an artilce on TomTom's 'Traffic Manifesto'. The summary: "On October 20th, personal navigation device maker TomTom released its “Traffic Manifesto,” a document stating that the company is on a mission to reduce the hassles of traffic congestion for everyone by up to 5% whether they use TomTom’s products or not. The following day, Editor in Chief Joe Francica paid a visit to TomTom’s headquarters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands to get a firsthand look at TomTom’s traffic management center and find out how TomTom will achieve its objective."
• Here's a Q&A on The New Geospatial Jobs and How to be Ready for Them, offering plenty of interesting information even for the already employed.
• And finally an article published a month ago named New Cartographic Basis for Risk Assessment in Latin America