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.

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The widely known evolving crisis of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is threatening to tremendously damage the wildlife and ecology of the coastline. The situation is unclear as reports of the continued spewing of 5,000 or up to 20,000 barrels a day are continuing to enter into the water through three exposed leaks. We’re tracking the oil plume and endangered habitats, fishing areas, and businsses in our BP Oil Spill Dashboard. You can also investigate the data yourself by accessing our current repository of 40+ oilspill related datasets.

This crisis is again demonstrating the importance of location of affected communities, existing environmental conditions that threaten to exacerbate the situation (such as the Gulf stream), as well as the citizen and organization response to assisting in recovery efforts.

CrisisCommons has been coordinating tools and data that are being used by numerous organizations to enable their members to report observed affected wildlife and oil spill areas on land. Organizations such as LA Bucket Brigade (feed, Finder) are using Ushahidi to gather reports. Emicus and Project Noah are also citizen reporting platforms and have open-sourced their platforms in order to support additional efforts. And soon there will be the possiblity of a generalized reporting applications and national texting shortcode for citizens across the entire coastline to report and respond.

Official organizations such as the U.S. Coast Guard as well as NGO’s like National Wildlife Fedearation are working hard to setup response centers

While the Oil spill is currently top on the media coverage, we continue to be very active in responding and recovery efforts in Haiti. Like the Gulf Coast oil spill, there is the need for continued support through the long-term rebuilding efforts after such a tremendous disaster.

We’re actively working to ensure the data gathered through all of these efforts is openly shared and made available for the forthcoming analysis that will need to occur in order to understand the immediate and long-term impacts this crisis will have on the local ecologies. Environmentally sensitive fish, birds, and reptiles are just some of the endangered wildlife that will require assistance in surving the oil spill.

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Arguably the largest positive externality to the Web ecosystem that geospatial technologies can provide is creating more linked geo-enabled data. The beauty is the externalities work both ways. Not only does the Web get more useful content we also create more reasons for the public to use geospatial tools and software. Without the ability to geoereference data none of our collective mapping brilliance is terribly useful. Yet we put all sorts of obstacles in the way of the most basic geo-enabling capabilities – namely geocoding. We treat geocoding as a precious resource that needs to be metered and monetized. In short we put a strangle hold on the lifeblood of our business, geo-enabled data. Without geo-enabled content our relevance to the larger Web diminishes immensely.

The major providers all put restrictions around geocoding making it especially difficult to do batch geocoding operations to get large chunks of data geo-enabled. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s geocoders are all geared to single address look ups, and not for mass data geo-enablement. There are services like batchgeocode.com that get around some of the limitations but are still restricted by provider’s TOS.

The second big issue with current geocoding is further upstream. All the geocoding API’s are dependent on NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas’s and a few other providers data to geocode against. So, if the street data companies don’t think a country has a big enough market you can’t geocode in these areas. This especailly limits the ability to geocode data in developing countries.

Our thought is the best solution to this problem is an open source geocoder. There have been other open source geocoder projects, some of which have taken criticism as a bad business decisions.

We’ve taken a slightly different approach. One, we enlisted the brilliant help of Schuyler to evolve his work from Geocoder.us to best take advantage of the work and community already existing. Second, we decided to make the Geocoder street data neutral. Meaning that you can plug whatever street data source you want into the geocoder and have it work – sometimes with a bit of tweaking. In the first go we’ve set up the geocoder to work with TIGER data and NAVTEQ. We chose these two mainly because they both use all CAPS for their names.

The hope is that with the community’s help we can extend the geocoder to work with a large number of other data sources. As Andrew mentioned in his post OpenStreetMap is top of the list. Integrating OSM data will be key enabling geocoding in developing countries and other areas overlooked by current commercial providers. I think this is one of many areas where the OSM community is really going to show its power. While the geocoder is currently only accessible to developers through github, stay tuned because we’ll be exposing it as a web application in GeoCommons shortly. We want everyone to be able to geo-enable their data and access it in whatever format meets their needs. Data wants to be free and we all win when the gates are unlocked.

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Time to Switch over to Digital TV from the old analog system. This has been coming for a long time and its finally here. From the official DTV goverment website, “The switch from analog to digital broadcast television is referred to as the digital TV (DTV) transition. In 1996, the U.S. Congress authorized the distribution of an additional broadcast channel to each broadcast TV station so that they could start a digital broadcast channel while simultaneously continuing their analog broadcast channel. Later, Congress set June 12, 2009 as the final date that full power television stations can broadcast analog signals. As of June 13, 2009, full power television stations will only broadcast digital, over-the-air signals. Your local broadcasters may make the transition before then, and some already have.”

So who is ready for the switch and who isn’t? We made a few maps based on the Neilson report showing who was ready and who will be left behind in analog. Check the maps out below.

Click on the Eye Icon to turn layers on and off.

To download the data or view the meta data visit Finder here!

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