In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Bloggage update: As a fitting end to the Medieval Fenlands Mashup, UK Ordnance Survey will update their Parish shape files that had errors in  East Anglia. These were found by running Socium's Online Validation on  data downloaded for the purposes of mapping economic wealth in the region since Domesday 1067 survey. HC Darby and Julie Bowring data were simply added to the shapefiles by hand, so that a validation procedure seemed prudent. That is when we noted 25 spikes and kickbacks among 1900 poylgons, pretty good by digitizing standards at 1.3%. It was then a matter of alerting Ordnance Survey in one of their OpenData meet-ups, and presto! we looped the Volunteer Geographic Information loop by feeding back suggestions for the agency to correct. This is one of the benefits of the UK Government opening survey data to the public, who can help improve it in a new twist on crowd-sourcing.

Directions Mag shares an interesting article named What Douglas County Learned Moving its GIS to the Cloud, mostly using Esri GIS software and Amazon services.

From the article: "From a GIS administrator’s perspective, our number one benefit derived from using the cloud has been flexibility. The flexibility to deploy a new server instance or an image of an existing server and only pay for the time we use it is extremely valuable. We are better prepared to test new versions of software and custom applications. From an organizational point of view, the biggest benefits have been reliability and the reduced dependency on internal IT resources. The costs are predictable and Amazon provides many options for driving those costs down."

Directions Mag offers a great summary article named Navigating Through the Nebulous Arena of “The Cloud”, discussing the cloud itself but also plenty of tools like ArcGIS Online, MapBox, CartoDB, the Google Maps Engine, and more.

From the conclusion: "In the geospatial industry, cloud computing is a growing segment in which we are seeing the emergence of a myriad of innovative solutions.  Many of these solutions are helping to bridge the gap between traditional GIS and business solutions as well as consumer applications. However, the impact encompasses the entire industry."

Here's recent Esri-related geonews.

Mandown links to the CW article named Esri rolls out ArcGIS map services for the cloud: "Esri today [June 14th] rolled out an ambitious cloud offering for government and enterprise customers that allows users to create data-driven maps and map services without ArcGIS servers or desktop software. [...] "One way to describe it -- and here's a big sentence -- is that ArcGIS Online is a mapping platform, a new geospatial enterprise platform but especially focusing in on mapping," said Esri founder and President Jack Dangermond [...] "It has other services in there, like geocoding services across the enterprise or spatial analysis services that can be deployed across the enterprise, but the basic thing that most people recognize it for is that it has really cool maps." Related, Spatially Adjusted shares two entries on ArcGIS Online Service Credits.

Mandown shares several other Esri-related news, including:

• Q&A With Esri's Jack Dangermond On Cloud, Apple Vs Google Map Wars And Big Data (registration required to read the article)

• He also links to What’s New in ArcGIS Online (June 2012)
• Mandown also shares an informative entry named What Is Esri Maps For Office?: "Esri Maps for Office is a powerful add-in for Microsoft Office that brings the capabilities of Esri’s mapping platform to Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint users."

• And no, Adobe Flex isn't dead yet, ArcGIS Viewer For Flex 3.0 Released, but there's ArcGIS API For JavaScript 3.0 Released too
• And the ArcGIS 10.1 Resource Center's are now live

A single click solution to get your maps from desktop to the Cloud!

The extension is free and compatible with ESRI ArcMap 9.x and 10.x. You can download it from the following link: GIS Cloud Publisher for ArcMap (600kB)

Publishing GIS projects with traditional GIS tools is not easy. You have to set up your own server, being that a server from a commercial vendor or open-source, and follow that with maintaining the server and services, uploading your data from desktop, reconfiguring maps and generating tiles to be optimized for the Web, not to mention mobile and tablets. All these are, for the most part, daunting and/or expensive tasks.

A map in ArcMap

GIS Cloud already gives you a way to easily build and publish your maps on the Cloud, but there are still lots of maps and projects sitting on your desktops. Of course it is possible to upload all that data to GIS Cloud, but then you would have to go through the process of creating and setting up those maps once again.

We have always been focused on making your GIS workflows more efficient to save you time and money. Therefore we are releasing today a GIS Cloud Publisher extension for one of the most popular desktop GIS tools out there: ESRI ArcMap

The GIS Cloud Publisher for ArcMap extension enables you to publish your maps from ArcMap to GIS Cloud with only one click. It automatically uploads your data, symbology, layer structure and spatial references. The idea is that what you see in your desktop GIS is instantly replicated on your GIS Cloud account. Once your maps and data are on GIS Cloud, they are easily published to the public or embedded into your website/blog without a need for having your own servers.

GIS Cloud Publisher Extension

After one click your entire map with the data is in GIS Cloud:

Your desktop GIS map on GIS Cloud

Also you can share it over a link like this: http://www.giscloud.com/map/44163/test

The extension is free and compatible with ESRI ArcMap 9.x and 10.x. You can download it from the following link: GIS Cloud Publisher for ArcMap (600kB)

Read more about it at GIS Cloud’s blog: http://www.giscloud.com/blog/release-of-gis-cloud-publisher-extension-fo...

About GIS Cloud:

GIS Cloud is a leading cloud platform delivering simple and easy to use geo platform, applications and solutions. Company is focused on providing geo services for visualizing and publishing spatial data through its innovative HTML5 mapping technology.

The mission of GIS Cloud is not only to supplement desktop solutions, but to extend and enrich their capabilities through the potential cloud computing provides.

With a strong focus on using latest web and cloud technologies, company believes in moving traditional GIS industry into to the world of modern web based software.

Contact:
Dino Ravnic, co-founder and CEO
[email protected]
London - Zagreb

Cambridge, UK, 27th March 2012. Roscommon County Council has chosen Socium’s Online Validation and Automatic Correction Service to complete the quality assurance and fix up of their Irish MapRoads data.

Since its launch in November last year, a number of local authorities in Ireland have been utilising Socium’s Online Validation Service to identify and locate errors within their MapRoads data, which has proved extremely valuable. Roscommon County Council however, wanted to not only ensure that the data was accurate but also that it was associated with a truly connected road network and aligned correctly with the Ordnance Survey large scale road centreline dataset. To complete this manually would have taken months of work and Socium therefore fast tracked the launch of their new Automatic Correction Service so that they could offer a full end to end service, which not only identified the issues in the data, but also automatically fixed and re-aligned it for the council.

Roscommon found that this independent and automated rule approach was ideal for what they needed to achieve. The fact that the service was also cloud based, meant that the Council did not have to purchase any software, hardware or maintenance and could therefore easily complete the project on time and within budget.
 

Barry Doyle, GIS Officer, Roscommon County Council commented:

“Socium’s Online Validation and Automatic Correction Service proved a very useful and time saving tool and we believe that the service can save councils like us, many man months of work. We found the various rule checks identified issues that wouldn’t have otherwise been identified, no matter how much time was spent manually checking the data. Additionally the facility to automatically correct the data, by eliminating geometric and connectivity issues, while also re-aligning the road segments and road nodes with the Ordnance Survey line work, proved very valuable and ensures we have a database that is now fit for purpose.”

Duncan Guthrie, Managing Director, Socium Limited said:

“We are delighted to be working with Roscommon County Council to help them validate, correct and re-align their MapRoad Data. Barry was actually involved in the initial trials of the Online Validation Service before we went live last year and was one of the users involved in requesting the creation of the MapRoad Rules. We are therefore really pleased that now the rules and correction service is available, that he and other councils in Ireland are able to benefit from the huge time and cost savings that it provides.”
 

If anyone has any specific data challenges that Socium can support via the Online Validation or Automatic Correction Service, they can simply email the details to [email protected] and one of the team will get in touch to discuss how the rules can easily be created ready for them to utilise.

About Socium Limited

Socium is a wholly owned subsidiary of 1Spatial Group Ltd. As a Software as a Service company it opens up the world of data quality to everyone by offering new, online data validation and management services in the cloud. By doing so Socium are embracing technology trends and eliminating the need for users to invest in software or infrastructure, whilst still benefiting from state of the art technology.

Socium’s first offering, the Online Validation Service, provides an independent, simple and easy to use way of validating data against a set of standard or user-defined business rules in seconds.

For more information, visit www.socium.co.uk

ThinkGeo has announced on their blog that they have created an extension for their Map Suite GIS software that allows users to store, edit and access spatial information in the cloud via Amazon's DynanoDB cloud database technology.  The Map Suite DynamoDB Extension is currently offered as a community technology preview that works with any of the company's various Map Suite GIS software controls.

Amazon's DynamoDB database system is an innovative way to greatly reduce the cost and complexity of setting up a traditional SQL-based database for spatial data storage.  It's innately scalable and offers high performance, plus the cloud-based model means that data stored there can be easily updated and consumed from anyplace.  DynamoDB also obviates the need to set up your own dedicated hardware for serving databases or purchase licenses for database systems like Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Server.

In addition to the Map Suite DynamoDB Extension and a bundled sample application which demonstrates it, ThinkGeo has also put up a video on YouTube that describes Amazon's DynamoDB system and walks developers through the extension.

MyGeoCloud.com is a new OpenSoure project and a web service. It offers geospatial storage, WMS and WFS-T services for accessing data and transactions. Besides that it offers a built-in web mapping client and online editing of data. But MyGeoCloud is also a platform on which you can build your own location based web applications using a JavaScript API.

The core component of MyGeoCloud is the PostGIS database software, which is used for storage and geospatial operations. MapServer is used for map rendering and for tile caching TileCache is used. OpenLayers is used for the web map clients. The WFS-T service is implemented in the code base.

The goal is a all-in-one solution for storage, geospatial operations, geospatial web services and web mapping.

Test the project here: http://beta.mygeocloud.com/ and get the source code here: https://github.com/mhoegh/MyGeoCloud

Bloggage update: online spatial data validation (OVS).

Having transposed historic economic geographic data on shape files from the UK Ordnance Survey in my Medieval Fenlands project a couple of years ago, I can now test through socium.co.uk:
1) how good are vector data in East Anglia, as part of coi.guv.uk data feedback?
2) how well did I transpose attributes from Darby's map plates into shape files?
 

Using sets of rules on shape files, OVS is as simple as 1-2-3: 1) upload, 2) select the rules to test vector data integrity, 3a) view the report for free on line, or 3b) download it for one credit to get another shape file with "data busts" as points with descriptive attributes.

Having been in the geodata business for decades, I cannot see how data validation can be made any easier, while maintaining - indeed increasing - data integrity. This OVS  highlights two of the "holy grails" in matters geospatial:
1) GIS depict complex data in a simple yet effective way, by placing them in their local context 
2) web services offer two more opportunities:
   a) to post geo-processes on-line that are easy to reach
   b) to offer a flexible pricing plan that helps one and all
 

With all the discussions about geospatial in the cloud the past few months, via Mgeospatial, I learned about CartoDB, an open source cloud-based geospatial solution. Amongst the current users, they count the NASA and the UNEP.

Unfortunately, with its website alone, it's real hard at the moment to learn about the current features and capabilities. They do have a developers section. And there's an upcoming CartoDB Drupal module too. The best description I found so far: "CartoDB is an open source geospatial database platform that provides an SQL API layer. It allows developers to make querys to a cloud PostrgreSQL + OpenGIS database optimized to geospatial purposes. As a web service API, it is not required a certain database management system."