Geofoolery

When I found that Lists had been added to my account, I immediately dug in to see what this feature I had been hearing so much about in recent weeks was like. My first attempt at a list was to create one of the #geonerds I follow. It immediately hit me that creating such a list given the available tools was not going to be an easy feat with the large number of geonerds I follow. It's been several days and I still haven't finished the list. Having heard others express similar thoughts about the effort involved in creating lists, my question is once the initial novelty of Lists wears off, will they be widely used in the absence of applications or improved functionality for creating and managing them? The Twitter API seems to be quite robust, so it's likely a safe assumption that something to make Lists easier to manage will emerge, but part of me thinks that for many more casual users something to help with Lists will need to emerge soon in order to encourage their use.

 I like where Twitter's going with Lists, but perhaps they would have done well to have extended the beta period and bounced some management functionality off of the beta testers. Will you use Lists, and what do you think of the process of creating and managing them?

Yogi Berra has probably never spoken truer words. The Twitter #geonerd community has been abuzz in recent days over the topic of the future of GIS thanks to discussion originated by Shawn Bichsel and Don Meltz (my apologies to Don if I linked to his wrong Twitter persona! :-P). Shawn and Don have all the background and must-read thoughts for GIS newbies and seasoned veterans alike here and here. This sort of thought-provoking discussion and interaction is a good example of why I find participation in social media to not be just fun and games (although there's plenty of that), but virtually indispensable from a professional standpoint.

QGIS continues to impress me as an ever-more viable and useful desktop GIS application. I had started a thread on The GIS Forum this past winter asking about the availability of a field calculator along the lines of what ArcMap users know very well. At the time such functionality didn't exist either as a plugin or native to QGIS, but it was evident from information I was able to gather elsewhere that it was on its way in the relatively near future. This is a piece of functionality that I've been eager to see in QGIS since modifying attributes in bulk has been at best a difficult process.

Hitting fast forward to the last week or so, I was very pleased to find that Darren Cope had replied to the thread to let us know that a field calculator was now available from Changeset 11735 onwards, meaning that Windows users could get it in the 1.4 (dev) version of QGIS available via the OSGeo4W installer.

I think as the screenshot below illustrates, this is a great start for QGIS' field calculator. While I haven't had a chance to put it through all of its paces yet, it looks to me that it should do what most users would expect from a field calculator. This makes QGIS an even more likely option for the increasing number of people in my organization who need basic desktop GIS capabilites but have nothing available in their budgets. If you haven't checked out QGIS yet, it's well worth your while to do so.

I'm home after a busy second and final day of the Illinois GIS Association's Fall Conference. The highlight of the day was the open source GIS presentation which I'll get to in a bit.

I began the day by attending a plenary speech given by Dan Wilcox, Illinois' State GIS Coordinator. Dan spoke about open government, particularly the value of open geodata, in light of stimulus tracking. He also discussed the challenges Illinois state government faces in consolidating a disparate geospatial infrastructure scattered across various state agencies, and the challenges inherent in implementing better statewide coordination. Just having someone in his position after years of lackluster efforts in statewide GIS coordination is reason enough for me to be optimistic that good things are and will continue to happen despite many challenges.

We were up with our open source presentation in the next time slot. The presentation was intended for an audience that may not be very familiar with open source options. Due to time constraints we could provide only a very general overview of the open source apps we're most familiar with, but the presentation was extremely well-received with a number of people in the audience clearly expressing some enthusiasm for the topic. We were careful to stress that like anything else open source has its pros and cons, as well as that it may not be a solution for all use cases. In other words, although YMMV, open source GIS had advanced to the point where many viable options exist that are worth at least investigating. The presentation is at the end of the post.

The last presentation I was involved with was a panel discussion on GIS in local government. Hopefully it was as entertaining and hilarious for the audience members as it was for the panelists, but we may very well have thought that we were funnier than we really were. The variety of topics covered was broad, ranging from issues upgrading to ArcGIS 9.3.1 to regional user groups to the GISP to data distribution policies. Social media was discussed briefly in relation to how the two major ESRI user groups in Illinois could better engage their membership. Both groups still use e-mail lists, but it was clear that there was interest in trying to use social media to go beyond the e-mail lists.

All in all, it was a very good conference. I'm looking forward to ILGISA's spring conference and will likely participate as just an attendee since I could use a break from presenting. :-)

The morning workshop was led by Dr. Michael Fagel on the topic of practical applications of GIS in emergency response with a particular emphasis on the aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Dr. Fagel has a wealth of emergency management experience and was the Ground Zero Site Safety Officer from immediately after the attacks until the following December. To say that his presentation was sobering would of course be a massive understatement, but it was also an insightful look into the fluidity of emergency management and the countless number of issues personnel responding to a crisis deal with. Dr. Fagel had nothing but praise for the GIS personnel who aided in the response. He said that the response would have been far more difficult without the 24 hour a day GIS operation that was set up. The workshop was very thought-provoking for me.

The afternoon workshop I attended was given by some ESRI staffers and was essentially a call for users to realize that the time to migrate from ArcIMS to ArcGIS Server is pretty much neigh with ArcIMS being deprecated after 9.4. I'm not sure about other states, but it's safe to say that ArcGIS Server has not been all that widely adopted among local government GIS programs in Illinois. I'm sure the reasons for this vary widely, but this workshop was part of ESRI's continuing effort over the past few years to reach out to users in the state at ILGISA conferences and via other venues to urge them to migrate.

The workshop wasn't bad, but I felt that with a focus largely on content from the ArcGIS Server Resource Center that it didn't cover as much new ground as I had hoped. The APIs were clearly emphasized over the WebADF, which for most users is probably the proper emphasis. I haven't dug deeply into them yet, but on the surface I see quite a bit to like about the Flex and Silverlight APIs. The JavaScript API is a different story for me with OpenLayers being a viable option for deploying a JS-based solution. Again, I haven't thoroughly sunk my teeth into the JS API yet, but my impression from a decent amount of OpenLayers experience is that OL makes it easier to work with a wider variety of data formats and is just simply easier to set up and configure. In spite of that impression, I don't doubt that we will make use of the JS API on future projects.

I'm looking forward to the open source presentation tomorrow and hope that in spite of a busy day, I have a chance to catch up with colleagues from around the state. Our relatively new state GIS Coordinator will be giving one of the two plenary speeches. I'm eager to hear what he has to say as statewide GIS coordination is something Illinois has struggled with to no end in comparison to most other states. Here's hoping he'll have some good news to share with us.

It seems as if the meat of the geospatial conference, and increasingly unconference, season has once again snuck up on me. The URISA Conference just ended, WhereCampPDX is going full tilt, many state GIS conferences seem to occur in the fall, and I have my own Illinois GIS Association (ILGISA) Fall Conference to attend on Monday and Tuesday in Naperville, IL.

I'm spending part of the weekend keeping tabs on happenings at WhereCampPDX in Portland, OR via various social media while finalizing my own preparations for ILGISA. I'll be participating in a panel discussion GIS in local government that should be interesting. Aside from technical issues, it looks like the panel may discuss a variety of policy issues that many geospatial professionals in local government in Illinois often struggle with, particularly the extent to which the state's current Freedom of Information Act applies to GIS data, how the new Freedom of Information Act signed into law and effective as of January 1, 2010 affects local government GIS data, what costs, if any, should apply to data, and other questions that I'm sure are pertinent to local government geospatial pros everywhere. It should be a good discussion with a good variety of types of local government agencies represented.

I'm especially excited about a presentation my GIS Technician and I will be doing on our experiences with open source GIS. Although open source GIS has been touched on briefly as ILGISA in the past, it is a topic that deserves more attention at the conference as more geospatial professionals become aware of it and begin to at the very least research it. While I may joke about serving up open source Kool-Aid, my intent is to raise awareness of the many open source tools so many geospatial professionals are not necessarily all that aware of, and to present an honest discussion of open source's pros and cons as we see them. Our perspective is that even for those agencies that like mine have made significant investments in commercial off-the-shelf GIS software, there are open source applications that can supplement that investment quite nicely while not necessarily replacing or threatening that investment. An item of discussion I hear quite often at ILGISA is that there are many small governmental agencies around the state without GIS programs that have come to recognize the utility and necessity of GIS, and as such are looking for ways to implement GIS, but have unfortunately encountered severe budgetary constraints that have limited their progress. I hope my presentation will help raise awareness of some opportunities for the development of GIS programs that some of these agencies may not have been aware of. I'll be happy to share the presentation slides with anyone interested after the conference.

As this is my first attempt at blogging, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes and hopefully being a great vehicle for interacting with many old and new friends