Posted By: Marc on Friday, September 3rd, 2010 @ 2:55 pm
Filed under: News,WMS
Tags: Contours, Ontario
The First Base Solutions Web Map Service (FBSWMS), for access to the library of First Base Solutions’ orthophotography now contains contour information. The FBSWMS contour elevation data includes; 1 metre contours for South Central Ontario, 5 metre contours for Ontario South of Sudbury and 10 metre contours North of Sudbury. This is now a value added feature to the FBSWMS that allows users access elevation information and orthophotography for geospatial analysis.
As many of you may know Google has just this week released the latest version of Google Earth Enterprise This release includes many upgrades to both the Fusion and Earth servers but the most notable addition is the new Portable Globe Creator. Previously if a client wanted to access a Google Earth Enterprise database (3D Globe) disconnected from their network they would need to use VM Ware running a Earth Server with complete Google Earth Databases published to it. Now with the new Globe Creator a virtual machine is no longer required and clients can now clip out portions of globes.
There are two applications used in the creation and deployment of portable globes:
The Google Earth Portable Globe Creator tool which runs on the Enterprise Earth Server and uses the Earth Plug-In. This cutter allows users to select a globe, define a area of interest and package and download the information in a single globe file.
The portable server is a light weight python based web server that runs on the client’s machine. It include a web based interface allows users to view the globe files created and downloaded with the cutter and select globes for broadcast. It also enable users to broadcast portable globes to other earth clients on there “disconnected” network and / or Android based smart phones.
Once the server is running earth clients can connect simply by entering the server address when prompted (http://localhost:9335). The portable globe can also be used with the Google Earth API.
First Base Solutions has added contours to MapWarehouse. The contours are based off 2002 captured at 1:10,000 scale and 1:20,000 scale. The accuracy of 1:10,000 scale areas (Niagara, Hamilton, Halton, Peel, Toronto and Durham) is 40 – 60 cm. The accuracy of 1:20,000 scale areas (Simcoe, Victoria, Peterborough and Hastings) is 60 – 80 cm. The contours are sold in a 500m x 500m tile format and currently available in MicroStation drawing format (.dgn). Over the next few weeks we will be adding ESRI Shapefile (.shp) and AutoDesk drawing formats (.dwg). The contours were automatically generated from our digital elevation model and have not been cartographically corrected.
First Base Solutions’ newest high-resolution orthophotographic datasets for high growth areas in the Greater Toronto Area are now available to VuMap subscribers. VuMap is a browser based GIS (Geographic Information System) with geospatial data.
VuMap users can now utilize the following March 2010 orthophotographic mosaics: Durham Region 20 centimetre (cm), Brampton 10 cm, Mississauga 15 cm and Oakville 10 cm.
VuMap is a browser based GIS (Geographic Information System) with geospatial data including roads, places of interest, elevations, high-resolution orthophotography, lot lines, right of ways, soil classifications and other data layers. Subscribers can measure distances, draw/trace objects, annotate, perform layer queries, save/print views, and import/export geospatial data. Subscribe for access to high-resolution orthophotography, property information, elevation data and more: http://vumap.firstbasesolutions.com/.
Google has just officially announced the release of Google Earth Enterprise 4.0. This release contains a couple of exciting features: mobile access through the Google Earth Android client, and the ability to extract portions of your globe and use the data in your disconnected environment. You can view the full announcement here.
Microsoft has just announced that they are adding OpenStreetMap as a layer for Bing Maps. The OpenStreetMap data is being served up by Microsoft’s Windows Azure CDN and is described as “pure OSM data coming down at screaming fast speeds“. To read the full announcement go here.
Day 2 is now over (it’s actually day 4 for me and fatigue is really starting to set in). Most of the days sessions were 3D centric, but somehow I managed to avoid most of them. Here are the summaries of the sessions I attended today.
Session 8 – Virtual Philadelphia: More than just a Pretty 3D City Model by Gert van Maren from ESRI
Gert showed off some really nice features in ArcGIS 10. I’m not sure if these are new features or existed in previous versions but the ability to analyze the affects of buildings on the surrounding environment was very impressive. Some of the analysis tools shown were a shadow analysis, glare analysis and skyline analysis. What was really impressive was the way the analysis tools could show the effects on individual windows in buildings.
Session 9 – Web Feature Service 2.0 by Satish Sankaran
This session went over some of the new specifications of WFS 2.0. The new spec is removing the requirement for outputting data in GML. It is also adding support for stored procedures, feature versioning and temporal operators. Access to WFS 2.0 has been set at HTTP GET / POST and SOAP, but there are no requirements for enabling specific access methods which could cause problems when trying to communicate to different services.
Session 11 – The GeoWeb Unleashed on an Encrypted Peer-to-Peer Network by Perry Peterson
Very interesting session talking about a Discrete Global Grid System with data streamed over a Peer-2-Peer networking. Instead of writing a summary for this session I’ll just link to the Pyxis wiki page which describes the topic in better detail http://www.pyxisinnovation.com/pyxwiki/index.php?title=FAQ.
Session 12 – Real Time Delivery of Navigation Map Data – Rationale, Challenges and Opportunities by Paul Bouzide
Paul described some of the issues that NAVTEQ currently face in trying to deliver map data in Real Time. One of the issues as described by Paul “Full-coverage replacement of geographic datasets is cumbersome and expensive” is exaggerated by “only a tiny percentage of features change”.
Session 13 – Distributing Spatial Data in Real-time by Seth Fitzsimmons
This session was a crash course in data distribution. A lot of information about many different technologies which are described here.
The conference is almost over now, just two keynotes and two sessions remain. See you tomorrow.
Interesting day today. There were so many different sessions that it was difficult to decide which to attend. Here is a recap of all the keynotes and sessions I attended today.
Keynote 1 – Going Real-Time with GIS by Alex Miller from ESRI Canada
Alex Miller presented several topics during his keynote, most revolving around the ideas of using volunteers AKA internet users with GPS enabled devices as geographers. This idea is more commonly known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Some of the projects that have had great success with VGI are OpenStreetMap and Google My Maps.
Keynote 2 – The Geospatial Revolution–Which Way by Kass Green
This presentation followed the same theme as the one before but focused more on the current state of GIS. Where data is coming from now (crowd sourcing) and how it is being processed and displayed (cloud computing).
Session 1 – Near -Real Time Emergency Data Updates via GeoPDF, WMS and ArcGIS Server by George Demmy from TerraGo
George Demmy showed how GeoPDFs are used by emergency response teams. Their product allows geographic information to be used by people of all types of backgrounds because it is using a format – PDF – that most people already understand.
Session 2 – Building Real-Time GIS applications with Twitter by Andy Gup & Allan LaFramboise from ESRI
This was the best session of the day (so far) for me because of the interesting topic, but mostly because of the live real-time demos (very risky). The presenters talked about using twitter feeds to gather, visualize and analyze geographic data. The live demo showed #geoweb tweets geocoded on a map in ArcExplorer in 2D and 3D. They also showed how you could use ArcGIS server to capture tweets and then perform analysis on the captured data.
Session 3 – Tapping into the Power of Real-time Data Services with Spatial ETL by Aaron Koning from SafeSoftware
Aaron Koning showed some of the function available in FME to produce KML files that can be used in real-time applications. He showed a few demos that loaded both static and dynamic data into other applications such as Google Maps and Google Earth.
Session 4 – Tech: Utilizing the GPU for Visualization of 3D Geospatial Data by Izak Grguric from Galdos
This session was really technical and most of the topics went over my head. Basically the presenter described techniques to render data using the GPU instead of the CPU (I think).
Session 5 – Real-time Visualization of Massive Aerial LiDAR Point Clouds by Hugo Ledoux from Delft University
Interesting session. Some of the problems that they face are pretty scary … loading 150,000,000,000 points (that is not a typo – 150 billion or more). Some of the techniques they are using are similar to the ones used by Google and Microsoft to display raster imagery. It’ll be interesting to see how their research continues and how they solve this problem.
Session 6 – Being Sexy in the Space-Time Continuum by Christopher Helm from NREL
One word to describe this session – Sexy. Really good presentation with lots of good points that all geo developers have faced – Easy and simple vs not easy and “Sexy”. Nice demos in the presentation that illustrate some nice visualization techniques. If you want to look at some the demos have a look at his presentation here or go to the openpv site here.
Overall it was a good start to the conference. There were a lot of session that I couldn’t attend so this isn’t a real recap.
The best session of the day for me has to be “Being Sexy in the Space-Time Continuum”. The presentation was excellent, the content applied directly to some of the issues that I face and the demos were “Sexy”.
Good presentation on the available Geo features for mobile and traditional browser applications. The slides are available here http://bit.ly/GeoWeb2010Mobile, but I’m not sure for how much longer it’ll be available and one of the sample that we looked at is here http://manomarks.net/geolocate2.html.
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I decided to attend this session, but unfortunately it was more of an introduction to KML. Covering all the main elements of KML and showing examples of each. The samples shown in the presentation can be found here http://kml-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/gw10/google-samples.kml and the site hosting this sample and others can be found here http://kml-samples.googlecode.com/.
Some of the other things covered were decisions and implementation of standards and the use and implementation of Google Extensions such as gx:Tour and gx:Track. Also talked about some of the KML tools used by Google in their products (GDAL/OGR) and tools created by Google (libkml).
That’s it for this session, the next session I’m attending is the Going Mobile with Google Geo APIs.
