An overhead view of Port Alberni illustrates what can happen when government works with an Internet mapping service.

The right side of the image on this page depicts what Google Earth and Google Maps showed before entering into an agreement with the B.C. provincial government: Streets are identified, and you can make out green space and built-up sections, but the map is vague on details.

On the left side of the image is what you can see with the government’s help: A high-definition view in which houses and commercial buildings can be picked out and, zooming in, you can make out individual trees in all that green space.

On Friday, Agriculture and Lands Minister Stan Hagen announced GeoBC, a government organization, will provide 24/7 access to the province’s geographic database in partnership with Google. This information will be available online at geobc.gov.bc.ca and from Google Earth.

This makes B.C. the first government in Canada to supply Google with access to its information.

At the touch of a computer button, residents and tourists can check out an area before hitting the road, and industry executives and entrepreneurs can scout a location to see if it’s a viable place to set up shop.

A mining executive wanting to check out an area in northern B.C. can get aerial and 3-D images of the area, and also find information from GeoBC’s provincial geographic warehouse about such things as mineral potential, the existing road network and transmission lines, as well as existing constraints on land use, such as wildlife habitat, first nations treaty settlement issues, and the existence of trap lines.

"A question we get asked quite a bit is, ‘Where are the power lines?’ " said Mark Zacharias, acting assistant deputy minister for GeoBC. "If you’re going to have a development, you will need access to the grid, so this gives you that."

Zacharias said that by making this available on Google Earth, "not only will you be able to zoom in on an area and get a high-resolution view, you’ll also be able to download about 600 different themes from the provincial [geographic] data warehouse."

In a statement, Hagen said that this information "is essential for decision-makers, and we hope to see this information drive innovation and new business opportunities in B.C."

Zacharias said having this information on Google "will make it that much easier for citizens, business interests, environmental groups or anyone interested in coming here to be able to look at B.C., query what they want to look at and get the answer they want."

He also said that GeoBC hopes to have 200 of the themes posted by the fall, with the full 600 themes available in early 2009.

While Friday’s announcement is the first partnership between a Canadian government and Google, digital mapping expert Ron Lake expects more will follow.

"I think we’ll see something like this all over the world," said Lake, CEO and chairman of Galdos Systems Inc. and an organizer of next week’s GeoWeb conference, Monday to Friday at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue.

"With the introduction of high-resolution aerial photography, 3-D city models and ground-level photography, you can see things at a scale that matters for urban planning or urban development," said Lake.

mandrews@png.canwest.com

To see full article, Vancouver Sun

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ESRI Sponsoring GeoWeb 2008, Geospatial Information Conference

Redlands, CA — ESRI and ESRI Canada Limited will discuss and demonstrate how new technological advances make it easier to access geospatial information over the Internet during the GeoWeb 2008 conference being held in Vancouver, B.C., July 21–25, 2008. ESRI is a platinum sponsor of the conference.

The theme for GeoWeb 2008 is Infrastructure: Local to Global. Geographic information is now widely distributed on the Web and routinely integrated into thousands of applications and services including infrastructure support. Technology has evolved to a point where anyone can be a contributor to the GeoWeb and everyone can be a participant, from data access to infrastructure protection.

Alex Miller, president of ESRI Canada, will give a keynote address at GeoWeb 2008. Miller will cover pressing topics for GeoWeb and geographic information system (GIS) users including how to manage data sharing and workflows for enhanced communication and efficiency as well as improved decision making. In addition, ESRI and ESRI Canada will present three papers and lead two hands-on workshops. Presentation topics will include

• Leveraging Web services to access GIS resources in data, maps, and analysis
• Using JavaScript APIs to quickly and easily transform spatial mashups into advanced analysis applications
• Interoperability and the mass market initiatives (REST and JavaScript approaches) that use Web 2.0 patterns for extending the traditional interoperability paradigm
• Next-generation emergency response systems—The communication infrastructure, situational information, and directions to the emergency
• Best practices guide for intellectual property protection and licensing issues around the prudent use of geospatial data on the Web

"The widespread use of the GeoWeb is really just beginning," says Miller. "Technological advances in interoperability are opening up the use of geography for new applications including situational awareness and decision making. The GeoWeb and the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) are providing new opportunities to share geographic information across a spectrum of user communities."

Conference attendees can visit ESRI at booth #2 for more information on these topics and the latest geospatial technology capabilities. Also, interact with online demonstrations of the JavaScript APIs by visiting www.esri.com/serverdemos and learn about all the interoperability standards that ESRI supports at www.esri.com/standards. To register for GeoWeb 2008, visit www.geowebconference.org.

About ESRI
Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com.

http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/dailynews/2008/jul/14/news6.html

The workshops are selling out quickly.

Sold Out

• A Complete Guide to Geo-Spatial Technology at Microsoft
• GML and Related Technology
• Google Earth Weather and KML Layers

Only Two Seats Available for each workshop:

• Mapguide Open Source brings together CAD, GIS and BIM technologies

Only Eight Seats Available for each workshop:

• Creating and Using Geospatial Image and Data Services
• LiDAR: Understanding the Basics of Pulsing Lasers in the Creation of 3D Digital Point Datasets
• OGC and OGC Standards: An Update on Activities and Current Status of Key OGC Standards
• Registries for the GeoWeb
• Using Open Source Software to Process Geo-Semantic / Geo-Spatial Knowledge and Visuals Part 1
• Using Open Source Software to Process Geo-Semantic / Geo-Spatial Knowledge and Visuals Part 2

Only Fifteen Seats Available for each workshop:

• 3D Geospatial: Project Implementation Methods and Best Practices
• A Developer-Level Intro to Using JavaScript, REST and Web 2.0 Technologies
• BIMStorm Vancouver
• Geospatial Data Quality
• Map Based RIA Development Using Adobe Flex and AIR
• XML and XQuery, and Their Application to Spatial Information

Don’t miss this chance to hear the leaders within the geospatial community share their expertise.

Online Registration closes TODAY, Monday July 14, 2008. There will be onsite registration, however it may be limited based on available seating for certain workshops, events or days.

Please visit us at www.geowebconference.org.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Stephanie Hughes-White, MBA, Galdos Systems Inc.
+1.604.484.2768 or shugheswhite@galdosinc.com

An apparently unrelated issue is that modeling of geographic features and their consequent support in a Web Feature Service (WFS). One organization might for example, model a road as a generic “RoadWay” and define specific subtypes for “Street”, “Highway”, “Expressway”, while another might simply add a classification attribute to the “RoadWay”. Clearly the two models are not equivalent, but they are very similar.

Another apparently unrelated issue is that of traditional conflation. In this case you may have two different descriptions of a building, with different geometric and non-spatial properties. In conflating these two descriptions, you might like to use the geometry from one description and the spatial and non-spatial properties of the other.

How are these three issues – geolinking, model representation and conflation related to each other? And what has this got to do with the WFS (Web Feature Service)?

For a quick review, a WFS is a web service that provides transactional (update/delete/insert, request) to geospatial data using XML messages in a manner that is vendor neutral and that hides the underlying data store (e.g. storage technology, schemas etc). Most WFS have been implemented as client-server architectures, and many even employ RPC (Remote Procedure Call), but this is not really required. REST-based architectures are not inconsistent with the WFS specification.

Let’s start with the idea of geolinking. To make matters more concrete, we assume that we have two databases, one a relational database containing population data (birth rates, mortality rates, and current populations for a variety of jurisdictional entities (e.g. cities, municipalities, provinces, counties, states, etc.). The schema of this data base is as follows:

A sample fragment from the database table might then look like:

Completely separate from this database (i.e. located in a different data store and likely managed by a different organization) is a database that contains the boundaries or extents of the jurisdictional entities for example the Province of Ontario. (This is the Canadian Province containing Niagara and Welland). Assume that this database provides the spatial extent, expressed as a polygon, for all of the jurisdictional entities in Canada, and that there are features defined for Municipalities, Counties and Provinces, with each instance of these feature types having an ID value (e.g. type = Municipality, ID=”Welland”).

Now let’s proceed to link these two databases together – to geolink them – which is to associate the attributes in the relational database with the geometry in the spatial database.

To begin with, take a feature perspective on the relational database, and implicitly assert features, with types defined by the values of the enumerated attribute “JurisdictionType”, and with local database resource identifier “Jurisdiction”. Such a mapping could readily be supported by installing a WFS on the relation database and suitably configuring the WFS schema mapping (see http://www.galdosinc.com/archives/525 ). Note that this will give rise to a particularly simple GML schema representing the demographic data.

Now let’s also install a WFS onto the geospatial database as well, so in both cases we can request features by ID and other properties, using the WFS request protocol.

To link these two datasets there needs to be a special kind of cascading WFS that can perform the needed schema mapping, and effect the desired geolinking. This special WFS presents the usual WFS interfaces to the rest of the world, namely GetCapabilities, DescribeFeatureType, and GetFeature operations. It then translates these operations into further operations against the two WFS installed above. A GetCapabilities operation to this cascading WFS would result in GetCapabilities requests to each of the WFS’, with the Cascading WFS using its mapping rules to create a single Capabilities document response. For example, it could return a single list of feature types, namely Province, County, and Municipality. If we then requested a DescribeFeatureType (Municipality) it would return a single application schema for Municipality that combined the spatial information from one WFS and the attribute information from the other (Mortality, Birth Rate etc), by doing a “join” on the feature ID. To generate a map of Ontario showing the birth rate by county, a client would make a request to the Cascading WFS, which would in turn translate this request into queries to the other WFS’ and effect the required join operation on the returned data.

Such a specialized cascading or federated WFS can also deal with the issue of variant models for geographic features. Consider two spatial databases for roads as discussed earlier. Suppose we now deploy a Cascading WFS which exposes a different road model, namely one with a generic notion of a NavigablePath and with subtypes for Road, Railway, and FerryRoute. For the Roads subtype assume also a “type attribute” specifying the kinds of Roads, as an enumerated value, namely (Road, Street, Boulevard, Highway, Freeway, and Tollway. The Cascading WFS is then configured to map its feature types to the feature types of the cascaded WFS’. For example, (Road, type=”Road, Street, Boulevard” is mapped to the feature type “Street” of one database, and to (“RoadWay”, classification=”Street”), in the other. When a client issues a request to the Cascading WFS, the WFS uses its mapping rules to generate queries to the cascaded WFS’, and then transforms and integrates the responses. With this approach, different models for the road system can be handled using an extended Cascading WFS.

By now it should be apparent, that conflation is also something that “could” be handled by a suitably configured Cascading WFS. Of course this discussion has glossed over issues of performance, and the complexity of the mappings involved, some of which clearly will require numerical, string or even geometric transformations. Nonetheless, it makes sense to think of these three different issues as related to particular Cascading WFS implementations, each performing data translation in addition to cascading of requests, and then to explore the needed types of translations. This will come in a future blog.

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems Inc.

Ron Lake, Chairman & CEO of Galdos Systems Inc. says,
"GeoWeb 2008 appears set to pass all expectations. Abstract submissions were up
more than 50%, early bird registration more than 80%, and the quality and breadth
of papers and presentations is really fantastic. There is still time to register.
Don’t miss this exciting and informative event."

The GeoWeb 2008 Conference lineup:

• 3 Keynote Speakers (Dr. John Curlander, general manager, Microsoft Virtual Earth Business Unit; Michael T. Jones, chief technology advocate, Google; and Alex Miller, founder and president, ESRI Canada Ltd.)
• 3 Invited Speakers (Dr. Michael F. Goodchild, professor of geography, University of California, Santa Barbara; Dr. Michael Kay, technical director, Saxonica; and Kimon G. Onuma, FAIA, president, Onuma, Inc.)
• Over 50 Paper Presentations
• 16 workshops
• 2 Spark Panels
• Plenary Session
• A Vendor Exhibit Hall & Reception
• GeoWeb’s 1st Student Contest Winners
• A Networking Reception & Fireworks

"The momentum for this year’s GeoWeb conference has been outstanding. I’m confident
this will be the biggest and best GeoWeb yet," said Bob Samborski, Executive Director
of GITA.

So don’t miss this opportunity to register for GeoWeb 2008 in Vancouver, B.C. July
21-25th, 2008! For full conference details, please visit us at www.geowebconference.org.

For media inquiries, please contact:
Stephanie Hughes-White, Galdos Systems Inc.
+1.604.484.2768 or shugheswhite@galdosinc.com

“GeoWeb is a great forum to meet with the leaders and innovators from business, public sector and academia to learn how web based geospatial technologies are changing the way people live and work.” – Dr. John Curlander, general manager, Microsoft Public Sector Product Group

GeoWeb 2008 Keynote Speakers
• Dr. John Curlander, general manager, Microsoft Virtual Earth Business Unit
• Michael T. Jones, chief technology advocate, Google
• Alex Miller, founder and president, ESRI Canada Ltd.

GeoWeb 2008 Invited Speakers
• Dr. Michael F. Goodchild, professor of geography, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Dr. Michael Kay, technical director, Saxonica
• Kimon G. Onuma, FAIA, president, Onuma, Inc.

The conference will also include:
• Over 50 Paper Presentations
• 16 workshops
• 2 Spark Panels
• Plenary Session
• A Vendor Exhibit Hall & Reception
• GeoWeb’s 1st Student Contest Winners
• A Networking Reception & Fireworks

So don’t miss this opportunity to register as we look forward to you joining us at GeoWeb 2008 in Vancouver, B.C. July 21-25th, 2008!

For full information on the conference, please visit us at www.geowebconference.org.

For media inquiries, please contact:
Stephanie Hughes-White, Galdos Systems Inc.
+1.604.484.2768 or shugheswhite@galdosinc.com

###

The most often quoted definition of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_Data_Infrastructure) is that it is “a framework of spatial data, metadata, users and tools that are interactively connected in order to use spatial data in an efficient and flexible way. Another definition is the technology, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities necessary to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and preserve spatial data “[1].

The difficulty with this definition is that it provides little insight as to what the software component of the infrastructure might amount to, or what the benefits and objectives of the infrastructure might be.

If one looks at most SDI’s today they heavily emphasize a librarian view of the software infrastructure part (metadata collection and discovery are the primary points of focus), and as a result are inappropriate to support many of the use cases for which such an infrastructure might be deployed.

Why an SDI?

To address “what is an SDI” we need to think more on the function – the “why” of an SDI. Only then can we think more correctly about what such a thing might entail. Without being to grandiose, I think there are a number of reasons why government and the private sector might think to invest and build an SDI.

These include:

• It enables a local, regional, national or even a planetary accounting system on the state of the environment, by making visible the distribution and temporal variation in key environmental parameters from carbon emissions to deforestation.
• It enables the local, regional, national or even planetary response to emergency events whether caused by people or natural forces.
• It enables the more efficient interaction of corporations, government and citizens in the collaborative (and competitive) development of the built environment, from urban construction to mining, agriculture and energy production.
• It provides a vehicle by which government can meaningfully interact with its citizens at all levels on planned projects, programs and policies; enabling both the presentation of what is planned, as well as enabling direct feedback from the citizenry.

For many of you, much of this will sound like e-Government, and in fact one can simply look at SDI as no more than spatially enabling or geographically enabling e-Government. I prefer to think of it as e-Society, since while Government has a key role, so does the private sector and the agents of civil society.

What do we build?

With the objectives as above, what does that imply we should be building? Are the national and pan-national initiatives to build SDI such as the Canadian CGDI, the European INSPIRE, or the US NSDI being designed to address these objectives? Furthermore, with the rise of big search engines as players in the geo-space, what aspects should government and the private sector focus on in developing an SDI?

If we look at the “accounting system” view of SDI, we see that the key thing is to make the state of the environment locally, regionally, nationally, and globally, visible to all of us. This means it applies to a very wide range of data types over a wide range of scales. Most of this information is in some way spatially related, but this spatial relationship may be very implicit and not part of the actual data itself. So SDI must be concerned with access to all kinds of data that are only nominally spatial. Since much of this sort of data is to be found in government and private sector databases, an SDI must deal with data access for a wide range of databases and not just the nominally spatial ones. Furthermore, if we are to do the sort of “roll up” of information that is required in any sort of accounting system, we need access to the actual data, and not portrayals or presentations. Visualizations are important of course, but only if driven directly from the data, and only if available at various levels of the society and government. Finally, to make any sort of “accounting system” feasible, we will need appropriate models of the parameters that we are to report and measure – meaning we need public, shared schemas that deal with everything from forest cover, to floods, carbon emissions and water pollutants. This is a major undertaking, but so was the construction of a national highway system, a national broadcasting system or a national air transportation system.

If we look at the SDI as supporting the emergency response, we encounter similar issues, but with the additional requirements of tighter information security, and temporal responsiveness. Even more than in the case of the SDI as “accounting system”, we must see SDI as enabling the pushing of data change events to data consumers. A forest fire manager will of course want to request information, but that is of little use if first responders on the ground or in the air cannot supply new information “as it happens”. An SDI focused primarily on metadata and discovery cannot hope to support such activities.

SDI, as supporting emergency response, also entails the interaction of many levels of government and the private sector, including both national and international agencies. Recent events in Myranmar and Indonesia highlighted the need for quick and effective integration of information. This implies that information must be sourced in real time from a wide variety of locations, at a wide variety of scales, from citizens as well as professionals, and integrated on as needs basis. Again this cries out for common data models that are shareable across regions, provinces/states and nations. Some regions such as in the European INSPIRE are making encouraging moves in this direction. After all the parameters of a forest fire, flood or earthquake of interest to responders can readily be generalized over regions or nations. This is again not a small problem, but with costs for natural disasters in the hundreds of billions, and yearly losses in human life exceeding 100,000 people, the amount of money currently expended on SDI is still vanishingly small.

SDI, as supporting efficient collaboration of government, the private sector and civil society in the constructing the built environment, also calls for a re-thinking of traditional SDI initiatives. Fortunately, we are starting to see movement in this direction through the emergence and gradual adoption of Building Information Models (BIM). While nominally a “standard”, the key thing about BIM is a process that encourages early and continuous collaboration amongst all of the “actors” that contribute to the development of the built environment, including ordinary citizen, investors, construction companies, developers, owners, engineers (of many kinds), and architects. While most of these efforts have been focused on building design, there is no reason to draw such an artificial barrier. One can equally apply these ideas to the development of a highway, a mine, an airport or an entire city. SDI, as collaboration, again implies dealing with a wide range of information scales, spatial and non-spatial information, the need to support information push as well as information pull, and the development of common models for buildings, transportation systems, and entire cities. Big strides have been made in these areas by groups like the Smart Building Alliance, the German cityGML consortium and others. We need to see these initiatives as simply a part of the broader notion of SDI, and to think of how we provide direct support for things like projects, collaboration “spaces” and the integration of design information (buildings, transportation infrastructure etc) and what we nominally call “geography”. Governments and the private sector will spend close to $ 5 trillion dollars on construction in 2008. Even ignoring the immense soft benefits of spending this money in more environmentally sustainable and human friendly fashion, any improvements in efficiency must be measured in the billions of dollars annually.

SDI, as supporting communication with and amongst our citizens in relation to the actions of government, also requires a re-think of what SDI means. Many of the issues raised above are equally true for this use case. The notion of collaboration cannot be stressed enough. Government can use SDI to communicate new policies, new laws (e.g. changes in zoning or construction), and new projects to its citizens, and citizens can use that same SDI to make counterproposals, comments and suggestions. Again only some of this information need be explicitly spatial, but the spatial component is often the key to understanding how this information relates to you as an individual.

Many of you may look at this discussion and realize that these objectives are being better met today by the likes of Google Earth, Facebook and wide area games like Second Life. You may think that there is really no role, or only a diminishing role for government in the process, and I have had that view expressed to me by several members of national government agencies. I think this is not the case. Governments, the private sector and agencies of civil society have it their interest to work together to build information infrastructures that work for the betterment of the world. This cannot be left to just information companies as their ultimate interests must inevitably lie elsewhere. At the same time, we must recognize the immense contribution of these companies, and build them and their technologies into the SDI process itself.

Spatial information Infrastructures can make an important contribution to the security of our nations and the environment. We need to start thinking in the right direction.

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems Inc.

• The Integrated Land Management Bureau, Ministry of Agriculture and Lands of the Province of British Columbia as a new Gold Sponsor
• ScanEx Research and Development Center as a new Bronze Sponsor

Ron Lake, CEO of Galdos Systems Inc. says, “We are happy to announce the Integrated Land Management Bureau, and ScanEx as sponsors of GeoWeb 2008. This reflects the growing local and international presence of the event. It is a pleasure to see such organizations on the masthead.”

“Adding these first time sponsors to GeoWeb is an indication that the conference’s scope is increasing, and that bodes well for the continued growth and maturation of this event,” said Bob Samborski, Executive Director of GITA.

We look forward to you joining us at GeoWeb 2008 in Vancouver, B.C. July 21-25^th, 2008!

For full information on the conference, please visit us at www.geowebconference.org.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Stephanie Hughes-White, Galdos Systems Inc.

+1.604.484.2768 or shugheswhite@galdosinc.com