Its been a long time between posts lately but there is a lot of things I’d like to report. Thanks to everyone who has reminded me how lazy i have become at every industry event i seem to attend 
First up, I have resigned from my position at Landgate starting December 1. Its been a great four years working with all sorts of industry and government personnel around Australia but its time to go. Landgate really is an innovative land information provider so if you are interested in a “bleeding edge” position specialising in spatial web service delivery, the job has now been advertised on Seek.com.au. I’m not aware of anything else in the government sector like this in Australia so get writing as it would be great to know a solid candidate will fill my rather large shoes
It is with no surprise then that i have accepted a new position at ERDAS to be based in Brisbane in the new year. ERDAS’ recent aquisitions and alignment towards strong OGC support has provided sufficent interest for me to join the team to dabble, tweak, prod and spread their internet solutions around Asia/Pacific. Watch this space!
Many will know much of my time over the years has been spent on the SLIP spatial data infrastructure in Western Australia. Its kinda sad to walk away from it, but its at a state now that I am confident the system will continue to grow as demand keeps increasing. Its time to hand over the reigns, so to speak. If you have no idea about the project, please check it out. Its very much a world leading project, not because its a new idea, but because we’ve actually deployed a system across a wide range of sectors. Its with great pleasure to announce then that in the last week we have been awarded both the WA Premiers award and the Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Award for Spatially Enabled Government which is great to be formally recognised in the community. While I wasn’t successful in the Young Professional category, i’ve still got a few more years to apply before i hit 35 Kudos to my offsider, Patrick Fitzgerald for picking up the Student of the year for two years running
In less exciting news, I am currently transitioning domains (again). It became clear this year that an address like http://chris.narx.net simply caused people to think i was American (a little too often for my liking). The current webmapper.com.au will be updated soon to yet another domain but the move will be transparent but the old address will still redirect automatically. So just to confirm, no I do not do consulting in the US, but thanks for the emails!
It certainly won’t be the end of me and this blog. It appears i might have even more time to write more frequently at ERDAS with would be great. Change is a good thing, and I look forward to see where we end up in the next 12 months
Chris
Jeff Harrison’s mass email caught my eye today with the free trial of CarbonArc. I had the pleasure of taking an early release of CarbonArc for a spin last year and while it was a good start there were a few key things missing from my point of view. Having pushed and prodded Mapinfo 9.5 support for use with our SDI, why not run the new CarbonArc 1.6 through its paces …
From the press release,
CarbonArc PRO 1.6 eliminates barriers to SDI usability through advanced SOA-based discovery, analysis, exploitation, transaction management and security tools for OGC SDI – directly from the ESRI ArcGIS desktop.
Instead of just regurgitating the release, the key question that always gets asked is … doesn’t ESRI ArcGIS already do all this?
Its a tricky question to answer because while on paper i could say, “Yes it does!”, in reality there are just so many annoying quirks and missing features, it quickly becomes a nightmare integrating SDI features into your normal ArcGIS workflow (which is what this is all about, right?). So with fingers crossed, lets dive right in and see what i can find in 5 minutes flat …
The Good
- Well laid out and robust tool set which delivers fully functional WMS/WFS/WFST/WCS capabilities … with no mucking about required!. The thing just works.
- Very easy export to Shapefile tool
- Full featured filter encoding support … no black magic, user has full control
- Full access to the query string for all service types
- Caching of features / images when saving to project files
The Bad
- GML Integration will always be difficult given its a completely new ArcGIS feature source, but its still not up to the average users expectations I dont think. There is no attribute table, the features are independant of pretty much all other ArcGIS functionality so you are really left with GAIA functionality squished into an ArcGIS window.
- Web services request headers are devoid of any accept-encoding headers. I’m still pondering the choice of Expect: 100 requests … but i’m sure there’s a good reason in the depths of HTTP …
- The exclusive tool for CubeWerx “Identity Management Service” seems a bit strange as i’m not aware of any services that use this technology? Shoot me a link if i missed something!
- Lack of support for any WMS LegendGraphics. Users can choose from multiple Styles, but theres no way to actually view legend information which is a bit disappointing
- In the full minute spent trying, i wasnt able to get the WFST support working … i could get as far as the schema but as soon as i’d try to insert a feature the thing would just bail out.
I’m beginning to think the best suggestion would be to somehow merge CarbonArc WFS functionality with an automated export to shape on each filter response. This would allow excellent SDI WFS support, while still giving full ESRI ArcGIS functionality to users without having to reinvent the wheel (for things like the edit system). With the WMS/WCS support pretty solid, i think getting the balance of WFS right could mean the difference between a very promising product and one I would recommend to everyone using our platform.
Thoughts?
So i’ve been a bit late taking a look at the new Mapinfo Professional v9.5. With the consistent dissapointment towards the consumption of OGC standards in commercial apps I wasn’t holding my breath … but wait a sec, it did work and it worked damn well. I mean, it worked flawlessly; updates, inserts, deletes, lock support and it also comes complete with a semi-intelligent conflict manager.
A few more suggestions to improve things further (for anyone listening~) …
- Add HTTP compression handling. Huge performance gains with the transfer of features and its really a no brainer to enable in any http library.
- I am by no means a “Mapinfo Master” ™, but it would be great to enable an automated WFS Table refresh especially if you are retrieving features based on CURRENT_MAPPER. I guess the CTRL+F5 shortcut makes it easy-ish … but i certainly found myself wondering whether i had retrieved the features or not and ended up just sending unnecessary requests.
- If a transaction is successful, give me some kind of alert. Alerting only when it fails does not instill much confidence whether my long edit session went through or not (even after refreshing)
- It would be fantastic to add helpful warning messages when performance drops. I’d imagine most users would skim over the maxfeatures and column / row filters and just add the layer.
If the first request takes 5 minutes and Mapinfo tells me i just retrieved 4000 poly features totalling 10mb and it kindly directed me to the WFS how-to, i’d be more inclined to see what the filtering options were all about
So there’s no WFS1.1 support … but i’m still trying to get my head around handling the axis order issue and are more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie … at least for the moment. I only had time to test against our Geoserver installs, but it certainly seems tested against many other apps including Cadcorp, Ionic & Mapinfo. Geoserver specific here, but the advanced security in 1.6.x works very well with the bundled support for basic authentication.
Finally…
Seems as though a lot of people missed this release last week.
It gives us great pleasure to announce that the pilot application awarded the development contract for the gvSIG Mobile application by the Regional Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport is available. gvSIG Mobile is a smaller version of gvSIG which has been adapted for use in mobile devices. It supports shapefiles, ECW, WMS and images and is able to make use of GPS systems. Currently, only the visualization of layers and the generation of GPS tracklogs/waypoints are supported.
gvSIG Mobile … available at gvSIG website http://www.gvsig.gva.es
I must thank the gvSIG guys for helping me out with my WALIS Forum presentation by supplying me with a pre-release copy. Implemented a work around in 5mins and had it talking to our SDI straight away. Anyone with a Windows Mobile device, its definately worth checking out and things will become more interesting pending the gvSig and OSGEO talks.
In other news, i am officially slack. But the good news is that i have been harassed by that many people at events and on email that i will begin making a concerted effort posting more regularly now. SO LAY OFF!
WALIS Forum has been and gone for another 18 months. Attendance was the biggest yet, with 820 through the doors. Highlights for me (in no particular order)..
- Tim trying to do updates throughout the conf but stopping after the first post. Hey, i never said i was going to!
- Harvey from Microsoft failing miserably trying to demo photosynth live. I feel ya pain buddy, i really do, but we had seen it all before anyway
- Mr Parsons with the usual tidbits of humour. My only feedback would have been tailoring another presentation addressing the “short tail” as 95% of the attendees were the custodians and advanced spatial users. Certainly from my point of view, addressing how Google is tackling this area would have been far more interesting from a GeoWeb perspective! Next time.
- Leaving a room of 100 people stunned after a presentation but then all saying what a great presentation it was. Hmmmm?
- Cameron not taking a breath, ever, throughout the 2 day conference. That man can talk.
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