Review of the GeoWeb 2009 Conference

I spent most of this past week in Vancouver at the GeoWeb 2009 conference.  This was my first experience at GeoWeb, and my first time in Vancouver.  Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever had the pleasure to visit.  They are hard at work preparing for the 2010 Winter Olympics which will be held in Whistler, just outside Vancouver and the city is busy building infrastructure to be able to accommodate huge numbers of new visitors.  Vancouver is a very modern and livable city with beautiful surroundings.  I hope that I can find an excuse to return to Vancouver soon.

GeoWeb is a pretty hard core technical conference that caters to the open source and open standards communities.  Ron Lake, the father of GML, is one of the main organizers of the conference and the agenda and speakers definitely reflect an open standards world view.  The speakers were all very bright capable individuals with interesting things to say.  I felt honored to have my presentation be selected to be a part of the program.   The conference agenda had a nice balance of hard core technical sessions and high level context sessions.  Some of my favorite presentations were from John Stutz of Tellus Institute and the very accomplished landscape designer Ken Greeley.

I learned a LOT at GeoWeb and really broadened and deepened  my global perspective on a number of issues.  I had the opportunity to meet and have fascinating discussions with guys like Tim Case and Carsten Roensdorf, the coordinators of the OGC CityGML effort, and Dr. Thomas Kolbe the father of CityGML himself.  James Fee gave me a personal demo of the WeoGeo product.  This is an absolutely brilliant play and I hope it goes far.  I hope to be able to blog about it once vectors are supported soon.  Vancouver being the home of Safe Software, there were lots of Safe folks there.  If ever there was an example of what it means to have a great corporate culture, it would have to be Safe.  The whole company seems to be imbued with the intelligence, creativity, and energy that they seem to inherit directly from Dale and Don.  It would be hard to say enough good about Safe.  Great company.  Great people.

As I mentioned before, this was my first time at GeoWeb and really my first time immersed in the open standards culture.  I was really impressed with some of the collaborative data development efforts that are happening on the web.  Michael Jones described the work that Google is doing to enlist collaborators in the process of developing street maps in their local area.  It is still unclear to me how this effort differs in scope and quality from the OpenStreetMap project.  Perhaps someone can enlighten me.  Javier de la Torre described some of the work that he and his colleagues are doing to enlist the public in gathering biodiversity data.  And then there was the presentation from Flikr that described some of the patterns they are seeing in their “Nearby” project that is definitely greater than the sum of the uploaded photos.   Clearly there is tremendous opportunity to leverage the online population to help create new data sets that are collaboratively developed and openly shared online.  That said, there will always be a need for authoritative data sets where companies or government agencies can be held accountable for the rigor of their quality assurance programs.  It is also my opinion that not all data sets gain value by being published to KML.  In fact, in my experience KML data sets are often of low value for analysis.  There is more to life than being able to discover your data with Google and visualize it on Google Earth.

As with my previous post about the value of the ESRI conference, the value of GeoWeb to me is measured by the quality and quantity of meaningful conversations that I was able to have during the conference.  While this is not nearly as big an event as the ESRI UC, the quality of the presenters and attendees was very high and I got a lot out of it.  Hopefully I will be able to return to Vancouver next summer for the next GeoWeb in 2010.

I spent most of this past week in Vancouver at the GeoWeb 2009 conference.

Vancouver

This was my first experience at GeoWeb, and my first time in Vancouver.  Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever had the pleasure to visit.  They are hard at work preparing for the 2010 Winter Olympics which will be held in Whistler, just outside Vancouver and the city is busy building infrastructure to be able to accommodate huge numbers of new visitors.  Vancouver is a very modern and livable city with beautiful surroundings.  I hope that I can find an excuse to return to Vancouver soon.

GeoWeb is a pretty hard core technical conference that caters to the open source and open standards communities.  Ron Lake, the father of GML, is one of the main organizers of the conference and the agenda and speakers definitely reflect an open standards world view.  The speakers were all very bright capable individuals with interesting things to say.  I felt honored to have my presentation be selected to be a part of the program.   The conference agenda had a nice balance of hard core technical sessions and high level context sessions.  Some of my favorite presentations were from John Stutz of Tellus Institute and the very accomplished landscape designer Ken Greeley.

I learned a LOT at GeoWeb and really broadened and deepened  my global perspective on a number of issues.  I had the opportunity to meet and have fascinating discussions with guys like Tim Case and Carsten Roensdorf, the coordinators of the OGC CityGML effort, and Dr. Thomas Kolbe the father of CityGML himself.  James Fee gave me a personal demo of the WeoGeo product.  This is an absolutely brilliant play and I hope it goes far.  I hope to be able to blog about it once vectors are supported soon.  Vancouver being the home of Safe Software, there were lots of Safe folks there.  If ever there was an example of what it means to have a great corporate culture, it would have to be Safe.  The whole company seems to be imbued with the intelligence, creativity, and energy that they seem to inherit directly from Dale and Don.  It would be hard to say enough good about Safe.  Great company.  Great people.

As I mentioned before, this was my first time at GeoWeb and really my first time immersed in the open standards culture.  I was really impressed with some of the collaborative data development efforts that are happening on the web.  Michael Jones described the work that Google is doing to enlist collaborators in the process of developing street maps in their local area.  It is still unclear to me how this effort differs in scope and quality from the OpenStreetMap project.  Perhaps someone can enlighten me.  Javier de la Torre described some of the work that he and his colleagues are doing to enlist the public in gathering biodiversity data.  And then there was the presentation from Flikr that described some of the patterns they are seeing in their “Nearby” project that is definitely greater than the sum of the uploaded photos.   Clearly there is tremendous opportunity to leverage the online population to help create new data sets that are collaboratively developed and openly shared on line.  That said, there will always be a need for authoritative data sets where companies or government agencies can be held accountable for the rigor of their quality assurance programs.  It is also my opinion that not all data sets gain value by being published to KML.  In fact, in my experience KML data sets are often of low value for analysis.  There is more to life than being able to discover your data with Google and visualize it on Google Earth.

I think that the most impactful concept that I brought away from my week in Vancouver was the understanding of the exponential nature of evolutionary change.  This trend was highlighted by John Stutz and Michael Jones among others.  The implications of this would be hard to underestimate.  Look for a copy of John Stutz’ presentation on line soon from the conference proceedings.  If we don’t figure out how to manage this rate of change soon, the implications to humanity could be alarming.

As with my previous post about the value of the ESRI conference, the value of GeoWeb to me is measured by the quality and quantity of meaningful conversations that I was able to have during the conference.  While this is not nearly as big an event as the ESRI UC, the quality of the presenters and attendees was very high and I got a lot out of it.  Hopefully I will be able to return to Vancouver next summer for the next GeoWeb in 2010.

Why Attending the ESRI User Conference is Valuable to Me

Today I am travelling to San Diego to attend the ESRI User Conference. In these difficult economic times, I have thought long and hard about the investment we are making to send six people to the UC this year. In the final analysis, I am more convinced than ever that this is a worthwhile investment. Here’s why:

PenBay Team at the ESRI User Conference

1. Market to a global audience. Last year nearly 15,000 people attended the ESRI User Conference from over 100 countries. I would expect that attendance will be down somewhat this year, but still it will be the single largest single congregation of GIS users in the world this year. No where else will we have the opportunity to present our marketing message to such an audience.
2. Reinforce relationships with clients. Many of our current and past customers attend the User Conference. The UC presents a chance to meet with a large number of customers in a short period of time in an environment that encourages both of us to think about future business.
3. Reinforce relationships with partners. A large percentage of our business is done in conjunction with partners. Again, most of these partners will attend the UC and we will have the chance to reinforce our personal and business relationships with them in the coming week.
4. Learn about upcoming technology changes.  The impending release of ArcGIS 9.4 will be a very significant release for ESRI.  There will be a number of important new features (like 3D geometries in the geodatabase) that are very important to our future business.  It is very important that we get a clear look at the future as early as possible so that we can shape our own product and service development plans in response to ESRI’s roadmap.  Often the Business Partner Conference offers this kind of look ahead, but this year the software development cycles did not align as well as we might have hoped with the conference schedule.  The UC will provide us with an important look ahead at 9.4 and hopefully beyond.
5. Reinforce our relationship with ESRI staff.  No question about it, our relationship with ESRI is our most important business relationship.  We have relationships with most of the ESRI Regional Offices and several of the international distributors as well.  I maintain personal friendships with lots of ESRI employees (and past employees) from all over the country.  The User Conference offers the opportunity to refresh many of these relationships in a very concentrated space and time slice.
6. Get my Jack fix. This may be a personal thing, but I consider Jack to be the most visionary and compelling CEO in the technology industry today.  In the personal and professional choices that they have made, Jack and Laura demonstrate an amazing level of commitment to a global environmental ethic.  Jack’s communication of this commitment is personal, authentic, compelling and inspiring to me.  I come away from one of Jack’s presentation with a renewed sense that the work I do IS important and that collectively we CAN make a difference in the world.  Monday of the User Conference is always a day of personal renewal for me.  (Then on Tuesday I get completely overwhelmed by all the incredibly bright and capable people around the world doing awesome things with GIS and feel like I will never be able to keep up with such an amazing community.)

So…  at the end of the day, we get an amazing amount of value for our investment of sending staff to the ESRI User Conference.  It is important to remember that this is a marketing event and not a sales event.  The number of sales closed on the trade show floor is absolutely the wrong metric to use in measuring the effectiveness of this investment.  When the UC is over, I will post again and try to describe some metrics that I think might be better measures of effectiveness.

If you are attending the UC yourself, I hope you will stop by our booth for a chat.  Creating new relationships is as important as renewing old friendships so I would love to hear your story and the reasons why YOU have come to San Diego.

Will the CityGML Standard Be Successful?

Yesterday, a group of us drove to Cambridge, MA to attend the OGC 3D Fusion Summit held at the Stata Center on the MIT campus. It was a very interesting event with presentations by:

• Tim Case, Parsons Brinkerhoff
• Mike Horhammer, Oracle
• Gene Roe, Spar Point Research
• Alain Lapierre, Bentley Systems
• Neal Neimiec, Autodesk
• Patrick Gahagan, ESRI
• Paul Cote, Harvard
• Claus Nagel, University of Berlin
• Dr. Kevin Wiebe, Safe Software
• Niels LaCour, University of Massachusetts – Amherst
• Carsten Roensdorf, Ordnance Survey

Certainly there were a lot of very thought-provoking presentations and discussions, but at the end of the day I was left with some real questions about whether CityGML will become a successful standard.

For my money, the most thoughtful presentation of the day was given by Paul Cote from Harvard.  He very clearly described the logical structure of the CityGML standard as well as making the business case for why CityGML data would be valuable to a wide variety of organizations and business processes.

After the lunch break, there was a panel discussion with Matt Davis, ESRI; Tom Gay, FM Global; Javier Lopez, Oracle; and representatives from Google, OGC, and Autodesk whose names I neglected to write down (sincere apologies). There was quite a contrast of perspectives between the representatives on the panel (largely industry) and many of the other speakers during the day who were verbalizing a more government and academic perspective on the emerging CityGML standard.

One of the more enjoyable talks of the day was delivered by Dr. Kevin Wiebe from Safe Software. He has a great sense of humor and an ability to explain very complex subject matter in a way that is easily understandable. He also has about as much experience as anyone on the planet in translating data from one format to another and so his perspectives on what makes for an effective data translation were interesting to hear.

At the end of the day, I was left wondering what it takes for a standard to become successful (widely adopted by a global community of users that use the standard in every day life and the software industry actively engaged in enhancing the standard). It seems to me that those standards that have become very successful have been those that focus on an area where there is significant commercial appeal. The W3C standard would be one obvious example of this, KML would be another. In many respects, the ESRI shapefile has become an industry standard for data exchange even though no “Standards Body” has formally adopted or endorsed it. These are standards that have been picked up by the major software vendors and deliver significant value to a wide range of users. The standards are rigorously enforced by the software community. If you do not format your HTML correctly, it will not render properly in the browser.

Standards that have been promulgated primarily by government or academic interests have often been less successful. Anyone who has any experience with floor plans can tell you that the “CAD Layering Standard” is anything but universally applied. The Department of Defense SDS-FIE standard and the various metadata standards have also struggled to gain widespread, consistent implementation.

Given the intense competition in the software industry to build creative and powerful architecture and engineering design software, is it any surprise that Bently, Autodesk, ESRI and others are not leaping to embrace the emerging BIM standard that would force them all to use a least common denominator approach to software design?  These companies are competing hard on differentiating their products from one another so that they can provide unique capabilities to their user base.  No matter how many large government agencies are enlisted to beat the software industry into submission, without a compelling commercial motivation for the industry to embrace and enhance the standard there is not likely to be enthusiastic industry participation. It is hard to see what that motivation might be in the case of BIM.

So where does this leave CityGML? There is no question that the emerging CityGML standard is sensible and well designed. Unlike the BIM community who has created a text file based approach, OGC has created a thoughtful hierarchical set of abstractions in XML that would be tremendously useful to many different workflows in planning, facilities management, public safety, etc. Whether these structures could be efficient enough to deliver content through a web service model for web consumption has yet to be seen. Unfortunately, the planning and local government communities are unlikely to have the funds to invest in the development of significant CityGML datasets. Without this kind of investment, the standard is unlikely to take off quickly.

There is a possibility that some of the big data providers like Navteq, or TeleAtlas might see value in developing large urban areas in CityGML format to serve the consumer navigation market. If Google or some of the large mobile network providers were to recognize the value of these datasets for delivery through their web and mobile clients, then the CityGML standard could very well generate a tremendous amount of interest. My guess is that we are a few years from this kind of large scale investment in data development. Do you agree?

Review of SPAR 2009 Conference

SPAR 2009 conference

A couple of weeks ago, we attended the SPAR 2009 show in Denver.  Never having attended SPAR before, I was not sure quite what to expect.  The SPAR conference, put on by Spar Point Research, is primarily dedicated to 3D LiDAR scanning.  From the SPAR web site:  “SPAR 2009 is all about the business and technology of capturing, managing and integrating 3D information. We search the world for the smartest, most experienced people we can find to exchange information and share their fresh ideas, new technologies, and inspired work processes with our conference attendees. Now in its sixth year, SPAR 2009 attracts attendees from the world’s largest petroleum and petrochemical producers, manufacturing companies, shipbuilders, civil and transportation infrastructure engineering firms, industrial metrologists, architects, geotechnical and mining firms, land surveyors, and federal, state and local governments. We aim to help design leads, project managers, surveyors, construction managers, maintenance managers and others who commit their careers to increasing their organizations’ productivity and project execution competence.”

Keynote presentations included a presentations from Hans Hess – one of the early visionaries in the field of 3D LiDAR, Charles Matta – Director of Federal Buildings and Modernization for GSA on how GSA is using 3D LiDAR to create Building Information Models (BIM) for existing buildings, and Daniel Livecchi – U.S. Secret Service and president of IAFSM about some of the work in 3D modeling done by the Secret Service in preparation for special events.  Presentations through the week included a number of interesting presentations about the use of 3D LiDAR for criminal forensic analysis and industrial process capture.

The vendor community was represented primarily by the large data collection players.  All the big boys that you would expect like Leica, Trimble, Faro, and Topcon were there.  Each showing off their latest and greatest data collection technology.  The software community, however, was less well represented.  ESRI was there in force and we were fortunate to cohabit the ESRI booth with Brent Jones and our friends from the Denver regional office.  Due to recent layoffs at AutoDesk, there were more ex-AutoDesk employees on the floor looking for jobs than there were current AutoDesk employees staffing their partner’s booth.

The players that I was personally most interested to find at SPAR were those doing interesting software work to automate the conversion of these massive 3D LiDAR point clouds into something useful to solve business probems.  There were a couple of firms represented at SPAR that I would put in this category.  QCoherent is doing some very interesting work to bring analysis and visualization tools to the desktop for aerial LiDAR.  For anyone in the GIS world, these folks seem to be doing some of the real ground breaking work in this area.  For terrestrial LiDAR, Clear Edge 3D had the most compelling solution that I saw for automating the extraction of features into CAD tools.

A couple of weeks after the conference, I am still trying to fit all of the pieces together to try to understand the state of this industry and where the real opportunities lie.  I guess my best sense is that this is still a very young industry.  One attendee described the state of the industry as “where aerial photogrametry was in the 1950′s”.  While the technology to collect more and better data in the form of 3D LiDAR point clouds is becoming dramatically better every year, our ability to derive more intelligently modeled information from point clouds is not keeping pace with the technology to collect ever larger and more accurate point clouds.  Furthermore, the various modeling standards (BIM, GIS, CityGML, etc.) are really struggling to come to grips with how we can build interoperable intelligent models that scale from the door knob to the planet and provide appropriately useful information at the various geographic scales in between.  The modeling community was largely unrepresented at SPAR.  While there were a couple of sessions dedicated to BIM, the focus was really on the implications to the construction management industry (as you might expect from a BIM discussion) and there was no venue to discuss facilities operations issues at a larger geographic scale or issues related to landscape planning that might have drawn interest from the CityGML or BISDM communities.

At the end of the day, the proof of the value of a conference like SPAR is whether we will spend the money to return next year.  SPAR is an expensive conference, particularly for anyone that wants to exhibit so the decision is not an easy one for us.  That said, it provides a unique opportunity to take the pulse of a very important and dynamic industry, and an industry that is very important to us as we pursue our strategy to bring GIS inside buildings.  All things taken together, we probably can’t afford NOT to attend.  We will be back next year.

Impressions from 2009 ESRI Business Partner Conference

Palm Springs

The ESRI Business Partner Conference (BPC) is my favorite conference of the year.  To begin with, the timing and location are great.  Any excuse to leave Maine in March for Palm Springs is pretty easy to feel good about.  Beyond that though, it is a great opportunity to reconnect with folks that are serious about ESRI GIS.  Attendees of the Business Partner Conference have already made a significant investment in becoming capable GIS professionals.   These are folks that are already making a difference in the world by applying their trade craft to some of the world’s more urgent problems.  They have made the journey to Palm Springs (many from the far flung corners of the world) to find ways to do what they do better.  It is an engaged and energetic community and I always come away from the experience feeling more energized and focused.  This year was not exception and I left Palm Springs yesterday with a sense that I had both enhanced my understanding of ESRI technology and expanded my relationships withing the ESRI community that will allow me to apply this technology understanding to more opportunities.

Technology

From a technology perspective, the focus at the BPC this year was on the impending release of the 9.3.1 versions of the ESRI product suite.  I would categorize the 9.3.1 release as an incremental release.  There is not a huge amount of sizzle here (with a few notable exceptions).  This release seems to have been focused on making substantial improvements at the core and addressing the important (if not sexy) issues of performance, scalability, and reliability.  For me, the technology highlights of the conference were:

ArcGIS Explorer build 900 - OK so this is the one really sexy piece of technology that will be released in conjunction with the 9.3.1 product suite.  ArcGIS Explorer build 900 represents a revolutionary step change in geospatial viewers.  Until now, ArcGIS Explorer (AGX) seems to have been struggling to keep pace with Google Earth (GE) and as new capabilities were released in GE the AGX team would try to release something comparable.  The release of build 900 turns that whole dynamic on its head.  This release shows great vision.  To begin with, AGX 900 explodes the “geospatial bookmark” concept and provides a wonderful blend of geospatial viewer with presentation tool.  Think MS PowerPoint on steroids.  You can create a whole presentation that is based on a sequence of spatial bookmarks with associated data sources with the appropriate cartography so that you can really tell a compelling story with the tool.  In the hands of an already gifted story teller like Bernie Szukalski (AGX product manager) the product just sings.  Additionally, you can package up any of the “slides” in your story (essentially a spatial perspective along with a package of cartography and data sources) and email that “slide” as a “Layer Package” to anyone else in your community so that they can see your specific visualization of the problem.  Finally, you can easily alternate between a 2D and 3D visualization of your problem in a highly optimized rendering experience.  The demonstrated end-user experience was tremendous.  I can’t wait to get my hands on the Beta.  Jeff Jackson and Andy McDonald  have really outdone themselves with AGX 900 proving that product innovation and creativity are repeatable qualities given the right organizational environment.

ArcGIS Server Performance.  It is no secret that ArcGIS Server has earned itself a poor reputation when it comes to performance.  There are a lot of ESRI customers that have refused to migrate off of their ArcIMS installations only because ArcIMS has consistently out-performed ArcGIS Server.  As my friend Steve Segarra likes to say, “there is nothing more important in software architecture design than elegance….  except performance”.  The ArcGIS Server team seems to have taken performance very seriously with this release.  I witnessed time and again sub-second refresh rates from ArcGIS Server with the kind of attractive cartography that you have come to expect from ArcGIS Server.  I will reserve final judgment until I get my hands on the final product, but my initial look at the new performance is very encouraging.

Microsoft Silverlight ADF. Last year ESRI got serious about supporting Adobe FLEX and now has a very mature FLEX ADF available for FLEX developers.  We have been Flash/FLEX developers for some time and love the work that Mansour and his team are doing with the FLEX ADF.  The addition of MS SilverLight to the family of ESRI application development frameworks presents some interesting new opportunities.  I think that for MS-specific server products like Exchange and Sharepoint, the availability of MS Silverlight to the arsenal may open up some interesting opportunities.

Business Analyst Server. This is not a new product to ESRI, but it is a bit of a new product to me so it makes my highlight list for this conference.  With Business Analyst Server, ESRI has packaged up a compelling set of transportation and demographic data, high-performance locators, and reporting capabilities into a single package designed to serve the needs of the commercial sector – specifically retail customers.  I was impressed with the thought that has gone into developing this package.  From the data, analysis, and technology perspectives, this is a pretty amazing product offering.  ESRI has never been all that strong selling to the commercial sector.  With the release of Business Analyst Server, the technology side of the house has delivered a very substantial offering.  It will be interesting to see now whether the sales side of ESRI can leverage this technology in the marketplace.

ArcGIS Online Content  ESRI is not new to the online map content business.  The ArcWeb Services model was very effective if not widely used.  For whatever reason, ESRI has decided to migrate that business model to the “ArcGIS Online” concept.  The news that got the most ink related to ArcGIS Online content this week at the BPC was the news that Microsoft Virtual Earth content will be available through ArcGIS Online very soon.  The much bigger story from my perspective is the news that Delorme’s content will be available through ArcGIS Online very soon as well.  This is BIG news for anyone that does work outside the US.  Delorme has the best global roads data available in the world.  Period.  This is VERY good news for ArcGIS Online content users specifically and for the industry in general.  Great to see Delorme as a member of the ESRI business partner community.

Relationships

As important as the technology aspects of the BPC are to me, the most valuable part of the experience is in the relationships that I am able to establish and maintain at the conference.  Our overall relationship with ESRI is our most important business partnership.  The BPC offers the opportunity to build on and expand this relationship.  This year was a great year for us in this category.  We were able to expand our relationship with ESRI not only into new market areas, but also into other parts of the world.  The whole conference this year was valuable to me on this level alone.  Furthermore, I was able to establish new connections with other business partners (Delorme is now a business partner…  Go Maine!) and to meet other players in the industry like James Fee and Dave Bouwman whose blogs I follow on a regular basis, but who I had never met before.

All in all, the ESRI BPC this year was a great experience for me.  I learned a lot, reconnected with a lot of old friends and made some new ones.  In the bargain, I soaked up a little bit of warm sun which is in pretty short supply in Maine this time of year.  Count on me next year for a return trip.  I hope I will see you there.