Insights

On 30 September 2015, I gave a talk to the Southern Maryland GIS User Group titled "Interactive Maps Without Map Servers." This post consists of the slides from that presentation interspersed with my "talk track" in order to provide context. Today, I’m going to discuss publishing interactive maps without using a map server. I’m going to do this by focusing on a specific case study for one of our customers, the US Commission on Civil Rights. This example is fairly simple and I chose it for its ease of illustration…

Managing a team of Geospatial Analysts, and all their ongoing projects, requires a decent bit of effort for the Project Manager on one of our current contracts. At the onset, the PM would ask each GA what they were working on, obtain it verbally or via email, and manually enter the information into an excel spreadsheet. He would then discuss the spreadsheet with the client each week, noting any task updates or closures. The importance of the spreadsheet and the weekly client meetings cannot be understated; however, I believed that…

While working with geospatial information, it is often advantageous to find out how close one particular piece of data is to other pieces of data. This leads to a greater understanding of the area of study. The knowledge of how things relate to one another spatially is articulated in Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography. It states that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” This became especially important in one of our current contracts, as we needed to discover which feature…

Over the past decade, GIS professionals who can manipulate the software both manually and automatically are becoming increasingly more marketable within the industry. Automating mundane/repetitive tasks frees up time to focus on more advanced analyses and other GIS processes. On one of our current contracts, we are required to create map products in response to “breaking news” events. These maps provide situational awareness to our client regarding the status of assets within their area of jurisdiction. Time is of the essence during these events, and the faster a map product…

Esri CityEngine lets you create, as the name implies, cities, quite easily. As a bonus, it lets you export these creations in various formats including FBX files which can be imported into 3D game engines including Unity. You can very easily add VR support for the Oculus Rift to Unity 4 Pro. To follow along with this tutorial we will need a few things: Esri CityEngine 2013: 30 day trial license may be available Unity 4 Pro: for Oculus Rift Support, 30 day trial license is available. You should be…

We often hear that we should use the right tool for the right job. The problem for developers is becoming aware of those different tools. So I want to save you some time and introduce you to an old tool that is good for simple processing of CSV files. The language is so simple that an experienced programmer can pick it up in an afternoon. Awk is a text processing utility that happens to be a programming language. It was created back in the 70s by Aho, Weinberger, and Kerningham,…

A while back, my colleague Barry Schimpf touched upon some of the tools that we use in conjunction with the Platform Independent Model (PIM). Today, I will delve into one of the tools we use to generate physical schemas from the PIM. Before, I jump in, let’s review what a PIM is and what it does. The PIM is an approach we have developed to enable proper configuration management of geospatial data models. We have used it successfully for federal customers to track multiple versions of complex data models, validate…

A while ago Sky wrote a blog post about exporting an ESRI Silverlight graphic layer to Google Earth. The post explained how to export point data to KML but recently someone inquired on how to also do line and polygon layers. In this post I will explain how to do so. We will expand on the same code from the earlier post and will be concentrating on the KMLGraphicsConverter class. First, we will get the geometry for lines and polygons by adding the following two methods. [csharp] private static geGeometry…

Clojure is one of the most interesting languages that has emerged recently. It is a Lisp whose main goal is to be practical language for day-to-day programming. And although young, it already has a dedicated community of practitioners. Clojure has a number of features that makes it easy to learn, easy to be productive, and it already has a proven-track record in real-life applications. It also has a community that bridges the gap between industry and academia. I recently was lucky enough to go to Clojure Con, a Clojure conference,…

Debugging is one of the most important and most ignored aspects of programming. The literature on it is sparse; there is barely any training offered on the subject. This is one skill that most programmers have to learn themselves through trial and error. This is surprising. Debugging is the most intractable task that programmers routinely do. It is one of the biggest contributors to missing deadlines. It can potentially take a big amount of time. We would think that there would be more attention paid on how to effectively debug.…