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GISWeekly examines select top news each week, picks out worthwhile reading from around the web, and special interest items you might not find elsewhere. This issue will feature Industry News, Top News of the Week, Acquisitions, Agreements, Alliances, Announcements, People, New Products, Around the Web and Events Calendar.

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Susan Smith, Managing Editor

Industry News
Redefining the User Community
By Susan Smith

Ever since its beginnings, GIS users have considered GIS to be the domain of professionals. It has been noted that GIS data is only as good as its availability and usefulness, and until recently it has been locked up in silos which have been difficult to access, and then only by the most knowledgeable GIS professionals.

Technologies have changed all that; in recent years, we've seen the advent of Google, of mobile mapping, in-car navigation and all types of uses of geospatial information that bring it to the person who most needs the information, regardless of their professional training.

ESRI's latest release last week of ArcGIS.com and ArcGIS Explorer Online address the need to bring GIS to a broader audience. A new browser-based version of ArcGIS Explorer, ArcGIS Explorer Online, also launches with the site and provides direct access to ArcGIS.com content.

According to Bernie Szukalski, ESRI technology evangelist, ArcGIS.com features ready-to-use and free applications that make it easy for people to leverage information that has been shared by ESRI, such as base maps, and content shared by users made possible with a JavaScript Web Mapping application built into ArcGIS.com for creating maps and mashups.

Another site that has evolved is ArcGIS Online.com, which is a place to discover content that is shared by the ESRI user community. For those looking for data on a certain area, the data can be searched for and used. This site is now being embedded into the user experience with the release of ArcGIS 10.


A free download product that has been around for awhile, ArcGIS Explorer for the desktop, has led to a new web version called ArcGIS Explorer Online. With ArcGIS Explorer Online users can use web resources and add in local content. It is tightly coupled with the ArcGIS Online repository. With ArcGIS Online you can save a map to your ArcGIS Online account, search for maps or add to a map, or connect with a specific GIS server and add in resources from that server. ArcGIS Online content can be accessed directly from within ArcGIS Explorer Online to create maps that can then be shared and consumed by a broad community of users, including the iPhone community.


“These two new apps represent an easy way for anybody, not just a GIS user, to start tapping into all these great base maps and all the great content that people will find there,” said Szukalski. “We've been helping people with the Tennessee flood response and also the oil spill and users have contributed content. We've also published that in an oil spill response group on ArcGIS Online. Had the oil spill occurred after this event, anybody could have gone to ArcGIS.com and opened one of these apps, searched for oil spill data and could've discovered these ready-to-use maps and services that they could just bring into the app. They could look at the data, save it and make their own maps with it. We're taking all this great content and making it much more widely available to anybody.”

Szukalski said there is a cloud aspect to it as well. As ESRI evolves the application, they will provide more service capabilities through the cloud, or services that ESRI manages in the cloud and provides access to for users.

“There are certain aspects of GIS done locally - editing data, for example. You're not going to do all that in the cloud,” said Szukalski. “But what makes sense especially in smaller user sites, is they have a great map that they want to make available to other users, but don't really understand how to set up the server infrastructure for support or IT staff doesn't know how to do that, so they want to outsource what they don't know how to do. One thing you'll be able to do when we ship ArcGIS 10 is able to create a map package. The map package will let you take the map and all the contents that were used to build the map, put it up in little packages and then you can set up in your ArcGIS Online account. In the future one of the options you might have is to check the box to say I'd like to make this a map service because I want to use it in web apps and also want to make it available to other users who are using other free apps or building their own custom web maps. ESRI can spin it up as a service for them.”

ESRI's direction for map content but also for Geoprocessing capabilities and GIS capabilities is to allow the user to offer maps or tools and publish them from their own servers or put them up into their ArcGIS Online account and have ESRI publish it on their own account.

Szukalski said that ArcGIS.com is a new website that becomes another component of the overall ArcGIS system. “When you think of the ArcGIS system what are the components, well we have ArcGIS Desktop for professionals, for mobile apps that can connect in the ArcGIS system, and we've got some ready-to-use products as well as some tips and APIs to help people to develop mobile apps, we've got lots of web apps and web technology which helps people do this. This is a web site that is also part of the system that's a place where people can begin making use of all this content.”

“Right now to access content you could use ArcGIS Desktop for it, but that's not for everybody,” said Szukalski. “You could leverage a web mapping app, you could build one on your own but not everyone is a programmer. What we're doing is finding an easy way for people to use this content by providing a built in app that lets people use it and work with it.”

What is the difference between ArcGIS.com and ArcGIS Online?

According to Szukalski, ArcGIS Online is a place where users (not just GIS users, but anyone) can find resources shared by ESRI and GIS users everywhere. It becomes an integrated part of your experience (like the Office Online metaphor I used), whether you are using one of the free, publicly available Web apps, or a professional GIS desktop. ArcGIS Online

ArcGIS.com is a Web site where you can begin to experience online ArcGIS, via free and simple to use Web apps that let you use all the content that is shared there and out on the open Web. Intro to ArcGIS.com

Visitors to ArcGIS.com can access publicly available content without having to sign in. To take advantage of the extended capabilities of ArcGIS.com, such as uploading and sharing items, users can log in using their existing ESRI Global Account information.

Top News of the Week

Infoterra GmbH, the wholly-owned subsidiary of EADS Astrium that holds the exclusive commercial exploitation rights for the high-resolution radar satellite TerraSAR-X, has announced the first element of its TerraSAR-X ELEVATION product suite.

Featuring a 10m grid spacing and an absolute height accuracy of up to 5m, the TerraSAR-X ELEVATION DSM (digital surface model) is now operationally available for areas as small as only 500 sqkm, and up to full regional coverage, worldwide. Particularly the unique reliability of the weather-independent radar sensor makes this an ideal complement to the established Spot Infoterra portfolio of elevation data sets such as Reference 3D, based on SPOT HRS optical data.

MAPPS applauded the inclusion of a parcel geocoding provision providing for an 'early warning system' in S. 3217, the "Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010," that passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 59-39.

The bill makes amendments to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), including a provision for the newly-created Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection within the Federal Reserve to collect the "parcel number to permit geocoding" on mortgage transactions.

Acquisitions, Agreements, Alliances

Topcon Positioning Systems (TPS) has acquired InlandGEO, one of Topcon's top performing distributors. InlandGEO is headquartered in Madrid, Spain, and has four additional offices in Spain, two in Portugal and one in the Canary Islands.

In addition to continuing to distribute Topcon and Sokkia positioning products to the construction and survey markets in Spain and Portugal, InlandGEO will become the headquarters for distribution and support for Topcon precision agriculture products in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

A new solution announced at the Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems (DoDIIS) Worldwide Conference will give defense and intelligence personnel unprecedented analysis capabilities for human terrain mapping, better arming them for current and future counterinsurgency (COIN) and anti-terrorism operations.

i2, provider of intelligence and investigation software; and ESRI, provider of geospatial analysis capabilities; are collaborating to release several modules in the coming months, including the ESRI Foundation Module for i2's Analyst's Notebook: a powerful and flexible geospatial analysis tool with a host of military, intelligence, law enforcement and civilian applications.

iLOOKABOUT Corp. announced a partnership agreement with DMTI Spatial Inc. which will allow users of DMTI's industry-leading Location Hub software solution to access iLOOKABOUT's StreetScape imagery database. The addition of Streetscape imagery, as an add-on visualization tool, in combination with DMTI's high precision geopoints and rooftop precise X/Y coordinates will ensure customers have the utmost in data currency and accuracy. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

RapidEye confirms its long-standing partnership with S2Bvisio in the development and distribution of expert agricultural services based on RapidEye imagery.

S2Bvisio and RapidEye have been partnering for several years and are committed to developing valueadded products for canola and cereal crops which are beneficial to farmers. Ongoing research and development activities are concentrating on cereals, sunflower and sugar beet crops and focus on nitrogen fertilization, irrigation and yield prediction. French specialized research institutes are also involved in many of these projects.

DLT Solutions, a value-added reseller of industry-leading IT products and services, announced it has teamed with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to offer the SAIC GeoRover product line to Government agencies.

GeoRover software products provide customer-focused tools for GIS software which allows for flexibility and improved overall productivity for the Government end user's desktop applications. GeoRover allows Government agencies to leverage geographic information system (GIS) applications on their existing geospatial software in order to experience greater speed and higher efficiency.

Announcements

An Orange County Superior Court judge ruled that mapping data maintained by Orange County is exempt from the California Public Records Act (PRA). The PRA says that state and local agencies must provide copies of public records in their possession to members of the public requesting them, and they must not charge more than the direct cost of making the copy. Ruling on a suit brought against Orange County by the Sierra Club, Judge James J. DiCesare held that mapping database maintained by the County, which details the location and boundaries of land parcels within the county, is a "computer mapping system" and exempted under the software exemption of the PRA. The PRA law provides that software is not a public record, and the Court decided that parcel mapping data stored in a GIS database is included in that exemption.

Trimble announced that it will hold its International User Conference November 8-10, 2010 at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. The theme of Trimble Dimensions 2010-Converge, Connect, Collaborate-provides insight into how the convergence of technology can redefine the way surveying, engineering, construction, mapping, GIS, geospatial, utilities, and mobile resource management professionals connect and collaborate to achieve success.

In addition, Trimble worldwide users are invited to propose topics to present at the conference. Proposed titles and a short description of the presentation should be submitted to Trimble no later than July 18, 2010. For more information about the conference and how to submit a paper to present, please go to: Trimble Dimensions.

People

Maponics, provider of location-based data, announced the addition of two new senior account executives to their sales team. Angela Kapuscinski joins Maponics with 10 years of geospatial sales experience from Tele Atlas, where she successfully expanded enterprise relationships with organizations in business intelligence, government and other industries. Gene Cook, who recently left MapInfo (a division of Pitney Bowes) to join Maponics, brings 10 years of geographic information systems (GIS) experience, with an emphasis on building partnerships with systems integrators and growing business in the telecommunications industry. Both Kapuscinski and Cook will sell the full range of the Maponics product line including Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries TM, Maponics full featured postal dataset, and the recently announced Maponics School Boundaries TM product. They will both focus on industries where they have successful track records and those which are central to Maponics strategic direction.

New Products

RapidEye announced that over 95% of India (over 3 Million square kilometers) of its satellite imagery is now available in the RapidEye Library.

Much of the country has been collected cloud-free, with the remainder containing less than 10% cloud cover. The image campaign began in January, however the majority of the imagery was collected within a period of about 8 weeks.

ESRI announces the launch of ArcGIS.com, a Web site for finding and sharing geographic information system (GIS) content, organizing geographic information into groups, and building communities. A new browser-based version of ArcGIS Explorer, ArcGIS Explorer Online, also launches with the site and provides direct access to ArcGIS.com content.

The latest release of ESRI Business Analyst Online (BAO) includes a new unique tool, Smart Map Search, that helps users in a variety of industries-from commercial business to government to health-more efficiently make location-related decisions. Other key enhancements of this U.S.-based, on-demand report and map solution include the expansion of consumer spending and market overview data variables, the addition of 2010/2015 Updated Demographics data, and the ability to create custom PDF maps.

Farallon Geographics has developed and deployed a workflow-driven mobile data collection application to streamline the development of a comprehensive and accurate storm drain geodatabase and geometric network for a Bay Area city. Field crews required a simple, intuitive and efficient solution for collecting detailed storm drain information including high accuracy GPS data and digital photography. Managers in the office wanted to be able to adjust and visually track progress of the data collection in real-time.

Alteryx, LLC (formerly SRC) put the power of the world's fastest and most robust Geographic Business Intelligence technology platform into the hands of wider user communities via enhanced Web services capabilities demonstrated at the ICSC ReCON global retail real estate convention in Las Vegas. Enterprise customers using Alteryx in hosted, on-premise and hybrid environments will deliver custom applications to every level of user, partner and supplier within their organizations through the Alteryx menu-driven, Web wizard interface.

Accruent, provider of Enterprise Location Management (ELM) solutions, announced general availability of Accruent 8 (A8), a landmark upgrade to the company's suite for management of the end-to-end real estate lifecycle.

Accruent's ELM suite provides retail and commercial tenants with an integrated environment to plan and execute their real estate strategies while driving down occupancy and maintenance costs. A8 extends these capabilities, and represents an upgrade path for users of Accruent's REM, SLIM and RetaiLease products. These products introduced unsurpassed capability to manage real estate portfolios, and continue to support the needs of many of the world's largest retailers and corporations. Now A8, the culmination of a multi-million dollar, multi-year investment program, establishes an even more capable solution using new, industry-standard technologies.

Avenza Systems Inc., producers of MAPublisher and MAPublisher LabelPro cartographic software for Adobe Illustrator as well as MAPdataUSA, MAPdataCanada and MAPdataWorld royalty-free GIS data sets, announces the release of Geographic Imager 3.1 for Windows, the latest in powerful software that adds geospatial functionality to Adobe Photoshop. The Mac OS version of Geographic Imager offering Adobe Photoshop CS5 support will follow shortly.

Intergraph has expanded its Motion Video Exploitation solution, a powerful platform that enables defense and military analysts to geospatially integrate video with multiple intelligence sources to provide situational awareness and actionable intelligence.

Intergraph GeoMedia Motion Video Analyst Professional, a full-motion video analysis product, empowers military, coalition forces and agencies to exploit and analyze full motion video from UAVs and other moving vehicles, and combines with image analysis and surface analysis products to provide unprecedented situational awareness and strategic decision making capabilities.

Around the Web

GISCafe Today Blog

APSU GIS Center Helps Develop Damage Assessment Application, Clarksville Leaf Chronicle, May 26, 2010

Officials asked to finish GIS survey, Deccan Chronicle, May 26, 2010

Duke visits Cambridge tech luminaries Business Weekly, May 26, 2010

Geospatial Modelling Environment Jurasan Tambang Udana

Geospatial info service goes online Infrastructure and Logistics, May 26, 2010

Conservation Priorities for Dakota County, MN Gustavus Adolphus College News (blog)

Events