geoMusings

GEOINT 2015 – A Day In My Life

2015-06-26 by Bill Dollins

I spent June 24th at the 2015 GEOINT Symposium. Despite having worked in the field and related areas for years, this was my first time attending this event and I was only able to attend for one day. It was a bit of a whirlwind and my impressions were somewhat superficial. I got to catch up with many old friends and meet some people that I had been wanting to meet.

There’s the old adage that, when building a house, the lot gets cleared and in a very short time, there are walls and a roof. After that, nothing much seems to be happening. In reality, the plumbing and the wiring and all of the internals that make the building useful are being installed. There is progress, but it is less dramatic. That is the feeling I came away with from the GEOINT symposium.

Maryland Open Data

2015-06-15 by Bill Dollins

The most recent meeting of the Maryland Council on Open Data was held on 12 June 2015 at the headquarters of the Maryland Department of Transportation in Hanover, Maryland. I attended in my role as a member of the council. The meetings are now being held quarterly, down from monthly during its first year, so the agenda was very aggressive. There were a number of items of potential interest to the GIS community:

Thoughts on HERE

2015-06-04 by Bill Dollins

When was the last time you bought a CD? Come to think of it, when was the last time you plugged an iPod into your computer and synced music from iTunes?

That’s what I thought.

The fact that HERE may be for sale (publicly, which is somewhat unusual in the world of acquisitions) and that it languishes is really no surprise. (“Reviewing strategic options” is a vaguebooking/subtweeting way of saying “Make us an offer.”) HERE is the CD of navigation. Many years ago, I supported a customer that did a lot of multi-modal transportation analysis. In the pre-OSM world, you had TIGER and a handful of commercial data providers. (Remember ETAK?) This was around the time that in-vehicle navigation was becoming commonplace in personal vehicles. The data in those systems, NavTech, was highly sought after but unavailable in standard GIS formats at the time. After a while, NavTech entered the GIS data realm, and its US product became the flagship commercial data set in the HSIP Gold database; a status it holds to this day. In some government circles, users clamored to get NavTech/Navteq/HERE data for their analysis. The rest of the world, however, has moved on.

Square States, PostGIS, and D3

2015-05-08 by Bill Dollins

There’s been a lot of attention paid lately to choropleth cartograms using alternate geometries such as squares or hexagons, with good reason. I’m not referring to hex binning per se, although it certainly falls under that umbrella. I am referring to geometric binning such as this, published by the Washington Post:

This visualization appeals to me because it solves the problem of understanding state-level data in the small, clustered Northeastern states while depicting a national view. The arrangement of the squares in a layout reminiscent of the actual geographic placement of the states makes still possible to still glean a regional understanding by glancing at the diagram.

Writer’s Block

2015-04-22 by Bill Dollins

It’s been an unusually long period of inactivity on the blog. I have been experiencing probably my worst case of writer’s block since I (re)started this blog over eight years ago. It’s not as though I’ve not been working on interesting things. I have been helping implement a data publication system for a large federal … Read more

Thoughts On TUGIS 2015

2015-03-18 by Bill Dollins

I spent yesterday at TUGIS, Maryland’s GIS conference. It is an annual, one-day event, held at Towson University. As such, it is a bit of a sprint, especially when bracketed on either end by a double-beltway commute. The day started with the plenary which included a brief talk by Maryland’s Lieutenant Governor Boyd K. Rutherford, who reaffirmed the new administration’s commitment to the importance of data and metrics in decision-making. Julia Fischer, the current MSGIC Chair, also gave an update on MSGIC, including its renewed focus on advocacy and on providing free or low-cost GIS training in Maryland. The plenary wrapped with a keynote by Dr. Chris Tucker of the MapStory Foundation, who discussed the importance of capturing temporal change data as a way of visualizing our history.

From there, it was all about tracks and sessions. I won’t go into a blow-by-blow of everything I saw but I attended the Public Safety, Lightning Talks, and Application Development tracks. I generally saw two flavors of content: “JavaScript all the things” or “Look at this really cool thing I built with ArcGIS without programming.” There was also an undercurrent of open data as Maryland’s open data sets drove many apps I saw.

Working with Node and the GeoServer REST Configuration API

2015-02-27 by Bill Dollins

I’ve been working with a mix of technologies lately that includes Node and GeoServer. I’ve recently begun integrating the two by using Node to manipulate GeoServer’s configuration through the REST API it provides for that purpose. One task I’ve been working on automating is the registration of vector layers stored in PostGIS with GeoServer to make them available via WMS, WFS, and the various other services provided by GeoServer.

Run To Daylight

2015-01-28 by Bill Dollins

I am a huge football fan and the title of this post is one of my favorite quotes, attributed to Vince Lombardi. The concept is simple: find a gap in the defense and run through it. Spotting gaps is a little easier in football than in other endeavors, but the concept is broadly applicable: spot an unmet need and meet it.

By U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It is this very concept that has driven my consulting work and has also attracted me to the open-source world over the past decade-plus. It is, of course, not unique to open-source but I have come to understand that it is fundamentally baked into the culture.

Perspectives

2015-01-26 by Bill Dollins

Today marks the first day of classes for the spring semester at Salisbury (Maryland) University. This is significant for me because it also marks my first day as an instructor in the Masters of GIS Management program, teaching an online course called “Leadership in GIS Organizations.” This is my first foray back into academia in the 22 years since I finished my own degree.

This new venture doesn’t represent a career change for me so much as an enhancement. I have spent my entire career working as a consultant, primarily developing geospatial systems for government (mostly federal government) users. This means I live in the for-profit private sector and interact with government fairly regularly.

Toolbars

2015-01-15 by Bill Dollins

The convoluted user interfaces of most desktop GIS software is something I revisit from time to time. James’ most recent issue of his SpatialTau newsletter got me thinking about it again. A while back, I got caught up in a Twitter discussion about it. Tools like geojson.io and TileMill have fantastic interfaces, but they also perform narrow functions (data editing and map composition, respectively).

For a while, I’ve been thinking that this might be an approach worth investigating: rather than one piece of software with everything in it, a suite of tools dedicated to different aspects of the typical GIS workflow. This would not be a panacea as some tasks are just more complex than others. (Think of all of the editing options available in any piece of CAD software, and this is devoid of any analytical tools.) As attractive as this approach seems to me in concept, I suspect it would break down in execution. I think it could end up multiplying the problem with many overly-complex applications instead of just one.

Over the last year or so, I’ve become somewhat enamored of another approach: the search tool. This requires a little back story.