The GeoWeb has long been emerging; linked geospatial data, web maps, locative media. However, it has been primarily limited to small datasets of geolocated news items, blog posts or photos. What has been occuring within the last year is the move for larger, more capable GIS, geographic information systems, to also be part of the Web. The popularized phrase is “GIS in the Cloud”.

However, it’s worth investigating this term and realizing that it means more than merely hosting a desktop GIS server in an on-demand environment. It means building geospatial sharing and analysis into the fabric, utilizing the interfaces and standards of the Web, such that it integrates fully and seamlessly. It’s also about the exponential growth through fast-provisioning, compartmentalized access, and on-demand scaling that is necessary and effective in deploying applications to the internet.

Considering the definition of GIS reveals that it is quite accessible:

a geographic information system (GIS) is any system that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that are linked to location

- source: Wikipeda: GIS

There are many potential examples of online, web-based GIS that have been evolving over the years. What is interesting is to consider how web applications and services are providing traditional GIS capabilites but in a non-traditional way. The effect is a revolution in the way users interact with their data and collaborate, much the same was Wiki’s are not merely web-based documents but living and constantly evolving consolidations of concensus amongst a community around various ideas.

To highlight how the Web is becoming GIS enabled, lets consider the functionality of some of our platforms and how we’ve integrated with the Web.

GeoCommons as a GIS

The original inspiration behind GeoCommons arose from work in preparing for and responding to Hurricane Katrina. The traditional map publication cycles were so slow that responders would only find out about flooding and impact as the water poured over their doorstops.

So the simple concept years ago was to develop a fast map analysis and production cycle so that responders, and anyone, could quickly, easily, and effectively synthesize data and share these insights with others for better decisions and action.

GeoCommons, our community web site where anyone can contribute data, build maps, and download all of the data and maps, allows for just this. Users can go from a spreadsheet on their desktop, to georeferenced map and combined data in less than five minutes – and immediately share these results with anyone in the world. No additional tools, desktop or web, required.

Along this path we’ve enabled tens of thousands of users to contribute over 40,000 public data sets and maps that are answering their own questions and providing insight across the world on issues from the enviroment, to economics, security, and even personal happiness. Users can easily access this data from anywhere in the world via the internet – independent of location, amount of data, or individual need or purpose. Through the internet, and as popularly referred to now as the cloud, they can access their information and analysis and share this with others.

GeoCommons is by definition a GIS – users can contribute, annotate, and share data through the Finder application. They can visualize this data in maps, and analyze through fusing datasets or utilizing the underlying analysis engine to query and filter data. However, we often don’t refer to GeoCommons as a GIS – it’s much more than that and GIS is just one viewpoint on how to consider the platform, application, and community that collaborate through GeoCommons.

GeoIQ Cloud and Enterprise

Working with Enterprises and Government, public portals like GeoCommons are beneficial but insufficient for certain requirements and mandates. Organizations need a way to ensure their data is safe, secure, and available. Underlying the public GeoCommons web site is a powerful platform called GeoIQ. It provides the same functionality in addition to a host of features we’ll be highlighting in the near future that provide for even deeper analysis, collaboration, and protected sharing.

However, with GeoIQ the same principles are maintained. Users can interact with the GeoIQ platform through easy to use web interfaces – quickly adding, georeferencing, and finding data. They can build maps and share these privately within groups or easily publish to the Web through simple group controls.

And the best effect of all is that when users publish their data or results they are doing so in a myriad of open standard and accessible ways without having to conciously realize or enact these mechanisms. Cataloging, findability, downloading, integrating, and updating can all happen through programmatic and discoverable interfaces to common web services as well as industry standard service protocols. The tools provide appropriate interfaces easily and transparently effectively enabling as broad an impact and collaboration as possible.

We are leveraging the cloud by creating private GeoIQ clusters within minutes and dynamically scaling these for users. They are still part of the Web, in private and secured areas, but able to publish out to any other internet accessible service, public web or private intranet. Users can even move off the cloud to more traditional infrastructure appliances, or even fully offline, to mobile laptops or USB sticks for field deployments. These GeoIQ instances all stay a part of the Web, with the ability to syncronize and pull in data from GeoIQ cloud, GeoCommons community, or any web standards application or service. It’s GIS in the Cloud, collaboration in the Enterprise, and an integral part of the Web.

Forthcoming series

This is the first in a series of posts discussing how GIS is moving to be integrated as part of the Web – through open standards, easy to use interfaces, dynamic and interactive content combined with the advanced analysis that geospatial data can leverage.

Popularity: 10% [?]

This week some of the other engineers are off to Google I/O, look for plenty of GeoIQ and Geocommons goodness in the Developer Sandbox there.  FortiusOne is a Google Enterprise Partner and we’ve performed integration with Google applications on both the Geocommons and GeoIQ side.  On Geocommons we’ve integrated with both the Google Earth Plugin and the Google Maps API.  Geocommons and GeoIQ both support KML for upload and download of Finder overlays as well as download of maps as KML.  Specifically On the enterprise side GeoIQ allows you to hook into your organization’s Google Earth Fusion Server.  This enables you to use tiles from the Fusion Server as well as globes with the Google Earth Plugin.

Also in the Sandbox we’ll be demonstrating our REST API and JavaScript API.  Our documentation and some sample code is available on Github. For questions about either API join our API Google Group.   As a company that believes in eating our own dog food Map of the News is built utilizing these APIs.  To see the most current dashboard in action checkout maps of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.

If you stop by look for Matt Dew or Andrew Semprebon, tell them “wonderchook” sent you!

Popularity: 11% [?]

Everyone is keeping their eye on what will happen with Obama’s stimulus package. When it does pass, Obama pledges full “transparency,” so that “citizens can see how and where their tax dollars are being spent.” So as citizens, how can we best evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of projects that will be candidates for stimulus funding?

To help us, stimuluswatch.org has set up a site dedicated to helping “the new administration keep its pledge to invest stimulus money smartly, and to hold public officials to account for the taxpayer money they spend.” They provide a database of “proposed ‘shovel-ready’ projects” throughout the country which will be candidates for federal grant money as part of the stimulus package. The site offers the capability for citizens to view the proposals and decide if they think they are critical or not.

In order to help viewers better assess the appropriateness of these projects, we uploaded the data to Finder! and then used Maker! to compare where these projects will be and where jobs are most needed.

In the map below, we show the projects by the number of jobs that will be created. The larger circles are where more jobs will be created. We also show the change in unemployment by county between November of 2007 and November of 2008. The blue counties are where there was a decrease in unemployment, the white where there was a fairly small increase, and the yellow and orange areas show larger increases.

Taking a look at the country as a whole, it does seem that many of the projects are proposed in areas that have suffered job losses. This is particularly true for areas of Southern California, Florida and the Rust Belt. Areas in the center of the country, where there have been the some decreases in unemployment have less proposals for job creating projects.

Lets look more closely into an area to examine how the proposed projects are matching up to job losses. Georgia is one area that seems to have experienced a heavy loss in jobs over the past year.

You can see in the map above that there are many clusters of counties whose unemployment rate has increased by more than five percent in Georgia. None of these counties have a project planned in the direct vicinity. The county of Hancock Georgia has had the highest increase in unemployment and the third highest unemployment rate for this November of all the counties in the US. In November of 2007, its unemployment rate was 9.2 and in November of 2008 the rate reached 20.1, a 10.9 percent increase overall. The nearest proposed projects to Hancock are either an hour and a half away in Macon or an hour and forty minutes away in Conyers.

While the governor of Georgia may have good reasons for creating jobs in the proposed areas, it leaves one to wonder what will become of the towns, such as Hancock, who have suffered the greatest in this economic crisis.

Take a look at this map yourself in Maker!. You can zoom in to areas you are interested and decide for yourself the validity of these projects.

On the other hand, it is interesting that Illinois is fairly well represented here. Of the 891 projects in the country, 119 or 13.8% of them are in Illinois. While Illinois does have some yellow and orange counties, it is by no means the hardest hit state in the country in terms of unemployment. Does the state expect some favoritism from the new president?

At a closer look, the 119 projects in Illinois will create significantly fewer jobs then projects in other states. California, which faced the fourth highest unemployment rate in November, is proposing 93 projects which will produce 238,329 jobs.

The chart below provides 16 states with the highest unemployment rates in November along with the number of projects proposed in each state and the total number of jobs and the number of jobs per 1,000 people those projects will create.

States like Michigan and South Carolina, who need jobs the most are proposing projects that will create comparatively few jobs per capita. You can download a CSV of this dataset from Finder! and do your own analysis of the proposed projects.

We can also look at the projects compared to state unemployment rates, as is seen in the map below. The yellow and orange states are the ones shown in the graph above. To see this map click here.

Of course nobody is saying that the unemployment rates should be the only criteria as to where stimulus money should go. But if the package it going to truly address unemployment, projects that will add significant jobs to areas with high unemployment rates should be considered strong candidates for federal funding.

Popularity: 35% [?]

There has been a lot of talk about Barack Obama’s tax plan this political season. The biggest question seems to be, who will see their taxes increase? Well we decided to take a closer look at WHERE in the U.S. people will be most affected by the Obama’s tax increase.

First, to clarify, families with an income above $250,000 dollars would see their tax rates return the levels from the 1990’s. According to the Obama campaign, this tax increase will affect about 2% of the population.

So where are these people who earn $250,000? Are they from Republican or Democratic states? Are they concentrated or dispersed?

Since the US Census only provides data for incomes of $200,000 or more, I decided to look at house prices. An individual or family earning $250,000 a year could afford a home valued at about $1 million so we thought that, aside from the obvious margin of error, homes valued at $1 million or more would be a good indicator of who would be affected by Obama’s tax increase. The U.S. Census 2007 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates provides the number of $1 Million+ Owner Occupied Housing Units by state and county. After uploading that data to Finder!, we played around with some maps in Maker!and found some interesting patterns.

See the datasets (states, counties) and map.

Most of the states that had the most $1 Million + Homes were no surprise, however a few were unexpected. Take a look…the first map shows the number of $1 Million + Homes per state as well as 50 counties with the most $1 Million + Homes and the second shows just the counties have the highest number of $1 Million + Homes.

See the datasets (states, counties) and map.

It’s interesting that some of the states with the most homes only have one county that appears in the top 50 list. These counties, such as King County, WA, Maricopa County, AZ, Fulton County, GA, Hennepin County, MN, and Cook County, Il, have more than a third of all of the $1 Million + Homes in their state.

See the datasets (states, counties) and map.

So we know where the people are. Now, how might that affect the election?

Let’s take a look at the most current presidential election polls from USA Election Polls. This map shows that many of the states with the highest percent of $1 Million + Homes are also leaning toward Obama in this year’s election. In other words, the states that have the highest percent of residents that earn over $250,000 and therefore will be most affected by Obama’s tax increases are in states that are voting for Obama.

Of course, a few of those states are highly contested states including Florida, Virginia, and Colorado. Why is that? Well, its important to point out that the percent of million dollar home owners is only around 2% so they are not going to have a huge impact on an election. However, this demographic may be more likely to vote in an election than those earning less money.

See the datasets for states and polls.

The pattern that million dollar home owners tend to live in democratic areas, is also evident at the county level. This map shows the top 50 counties based on who they voted for in the 2004 presidential election. Of the 50 counties, 30 voted for Kerry and 16 voted for Bush. Most of those counties that voted for Bush are in Southern California, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois. All but Texas voted for Kerry and are in no threat from turning red this year. Of course, taxes did not play as big a role in the election in 2004.

See the dataset and map.

So why is the McCain campaign making such a big issue of the Obama tax plan? Since it will affect mostly people in blue states, maybe they hope to change some minds there. However it seems that such a scenario is unlikely even though people who earn more money do tend to vote Republican. Exit polls from 2004 show that those who earned $50,000 or more voted Republican.

Perhaps the Obama tax plan, which claims it will give tax breaks to those earning less than $200,000, may persuade some of the 98% + of those in the red states who would qualify to vote for Obama. By appealing to the $200,000 earners, maybe Obama is attempting to raise the democratic appeal to income levels above $50,000. It will be interesting to see what happens on Tuesday, especially to see how the richest counties vote this time around.

Popularity: 18% [?]