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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, New Products, Around the Web and Events Calendar.

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Susan Smith, Managing Editor

Industry News
Just the Data You Want
By Susan Smith



Broadband mapping fills a niche in reporting areas that are not well served by the internet and broadband coverage.

Geared toward the enterprise market space, Broadmap's MapConnect Enterprise arose in response to the Recovery Act need to map serviceability of broadband and high speed internet access to determine where citizens were served or underserved in coverage. The product offers displays, geocoding and high quality boundaries, postal, Census and administrative boundaries. Broadmap maps the areas in question, reports results to the states and can do so for the federal government as well. Even the carriers didn't know where their service areas were at one point.

As a result of this effort, Broadmap was awarded with 8 states and territories.

A competing product to Broadmap's MapConnect Enterprise is Connected Nation which is accelerating broadband availability in underserved areas and increasing broadband use in all areas, rural and urban, as well. Their theory is that these areas can enjoy more economic growth and community service, health care and other advantages by having broadband mapping and service. They have deals with about 12 states.

Broadmap is new but has a lot of GIS experience, as it has derived from GDT and TeleAtlas. Broadmap's Todd Schmitt was with GDT/TeleAtlas for 11 years, while Mark Dykstra, senior director of sales, was also with TeleAtlas.

Although TeleAtlas was acquired by TomTom, it is interesting that MapConnect Enterprise is based on NAVTEQ based map data.

Broadmap's focus is on the enterprise market and understanding what people need in the way of display, geocoding and high quality boundaries, postal, census and administrative boundaries. Schmitt said these boundaries “play a critical role in the enterprise.”

Dykstra said they have a monthly fee from the post office which is useful for those in the direct mail business and those involved in geo-demographics. “They are always looking for the most up to date postal boundaries, looking for major changes,” said Dykstra. “Historically the post office has made huge changes in the July mid-summer August timeframe, and we've been suffering from the latency of some of the other products and want to kick those back out in a timely manner. The goal here is to keep those things up to date and high quality and turn them around quickly and get them back out to the marketplace.”

Schmitt noted an area in which the old GDT excelled -- its integrated, perfectly overlaid, very current, complete and correct boundary layers for postal and Census geographies - was a great precursor to the needs of enterprise customers today. “I think as GDT was acquired by TeleAtlas and TeleAtlas was acquired by Tom Tom, the focus of that company moved away from enterprise customers which we kind of considered business customers and government customers and moved into a focus from the two large data providers into 1) serving personal navigation devices and 2) serving automotive navigation,” said Schmitt. Enterprise didn't have a place in that equation, but all the expertise was still available. There is still a huge customer base that depend on the completeness and correctness of the postal and Census boundary data. That is the gap that Broadmap has stepped in to fill with a much needed product for that audience.

MapConnect is a simple product to use right out of the box, for enterprise and government customers. “It is really geared toward geocoding and display and ease of use, making sure the layers all sync together and overlay on top of each other, are logical and organized in thematic data layers,” said Dykstra.

Based on NAVTEQ data, MapConnect Enterprise prides itself on ease-of-use.
“Part of what we do is to reformat the data to present it in as easy-to-use a format as possible for these users, because the enterprise users are not scientists and they're not PhD geographers, they're business people with business problems and they use GIS to help solve business problems,” said Schmitt. “They want something simple and out of the box. They don't want a huge technical product built on a relational database model, just a flat, feature rich, attribution rich data product that's easy to use.”

Broadmap has also added certain Census codes and takes away some data that is not interesting to enterprise users. They have improved geocoding by making sure there is a one to one match between the segment link and the Census code they are associated with, and have also improved the display.

“We also include some auxiliary files, one of which is called is called a Locator that is a geocoding tool,” said Dykstra. “With this Locator file, you can take the data right out of the box and be up and running geocoding a file in a matter of minutes - you don't have to match up fields to each other or decide what data layers to use, the software does it (the Locator file that Broadmap creates) does it all automatically. Geocoding becomes a snap right out of the box, and the same thing with the display -- it's an ArcMap file, it's called a MXD file, so instead of pulling all the data out and figuring out how to display it, this file automatically right out of the box does map representation for you - you just have to open up this file it knows where all the other data files are. It has all the colors chosen, the symbology, the zoom layering, the scales at which certain features are or are not displayed, everything else is preconfigured. The first thing you have to do is double click on that MXD field and your rich cartographic display is right in front of you.”

Broadmap also offers MapConnect Broadband which builds a set of comprehensive maps of broadband serviceability at the local, state, territory and federal levels.

Top News of the Week

Geosparc, the company commercially supporting the open source GIS application framework Geomajas, unveiled at Foss4G the new release of its GIS application framework to build web-based and scalable GIS solutions, Geomajas 1.7.

Geomajas 1.7 now has a mechanism that fully supports plug-ins from third parties. A company or a developer can develop, add, remove or upgrade a specific functionality for Geomajas and simply plug it into the framework. The support for plug-ins is a major step forward for Geomajas as it frees the users from having to upgrade the whole application framework.

At the same time the Company announces the immediate availability of ten (10) plug-ins ranging from a Printing plug-in over an OpenStreetMap Layer plug-in to a WMS Layer plug-in.

Esri expands the power of geoportals with the release of the ArcGIS Server 10 Geoportal extension. The extension allows organizations to quickly set up Web sites, called geoportals that help them manage and share their geospatial information externally with the public or internally with employees.

Acquisitions, Agreements, Alliances

ITT Corporation announced that it was selected to build the imaging system-the “eyes” of the satellite-for DigitalGlobe's WorldView-3 high-resolution commercial earth imaging satellite, anticipated to be available for launch by the end of 2014.

OpenGeo announced that is has signed agreements with Orkney, an open source business solution provider located in Yokohama Japan, and Mapconcierge, a business solutions and GPS/UAV provider located in Tokyo, Japan, to provide support and translation services for the OpenGeo Suite in Japan.

Trimble and the Hilti Group announced that they have reached a definitive agreement to form Intelligent Construction Tools, LLC. The joint venture, 50 percent owned by Trimble and 50 percent owned by Hilti, will focus on leveraging technologies from both companies to develop measuring solutions for the building construction trades.

Announcements

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) members are seeking comments on OGC candidate standards Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) Core Encoding Standard, and NetCDF Binary Encoding Extension Standard - NetCDF Classic and 64-bit Offset Format. The following organizations submitted these candidate standards to the OGC:

• IMAA-CNR Italy
• METEO-FRANCE
• Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) UK
• Northrop Grumman Corporation
• University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
• US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

The candidate OGC standards and information about submitting comments on this document are available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/71. The public comment period closes on October 7, 2010.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) recently concluded the OGC Web Services, Phase 7 (OWS-7) Testbed initiative ( http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/initiatives/ows-7). OWS-7 addressed interoperability architectures, enhancements to existing OGC standards, and candidate standards developed in the testbed for sensors, video change detection, database synchronization, information cataloguing, web processing services, event architecture and aviation.

The Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) established the GIS Hall of Fame in 2005 to recognize and honor the most esteemed leaders of the geospatial community. To be considered for the GIS Hall of Fame, an individual's or an organization's record of contribution to the advancement of the industry demonstrates creative thinking and actions, vision and innovation, inspiring leadership, perseverance, and community mindedness. In addition, nominees must serve as a role model for those who follow. URISA Hall of Fame Laureates are individuals or organizations whose pioneering work has moved the geospatial industry in a better, stronger direction. The first class of inductees included Edgar Horwood, Ian McHarg, Roger Tomlinson, Jack Dangermond, Nancy Tosta, and the Harvard Lab. Gary Hunter was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2006; Don Cooke and Michael Goodchild, in 2007; and Will Craig, GISP and Carl Reed, PhD joined this esteemed group in 2009. URISA is honored to announce the 2010 GIS Hall of Fame inductee, Dr. C. Dana Tomlin.

Esri announced the release of the GeoServices REST Specification. This open specification provides a standard way for Web clients to communicate with geographic information system (GIS) servers through Representational State Transfer (REST) technology. The specification has been opened such that developers can expose the GeoServices API request structure from ArcGIS Server and other non-Esri, back-end GIS servers or processors.

GRASS GIS announces the release of GRASS GIS 6.4.0, the first in the new line of 6.4 stable releases. As a stable release 6.4 will enjoy long-term support. The next release (6.4.1) will introduce a few new features which are still undergoing final testing, but after that all further 6.4 releases will be bugfix-only. Due to our highly conservative stabilization policy this is the first official version of GRASS to introduce new features since October 2006 and supersedes the previous stable line of GRASS 6.2. As such the floodgates are open and there are many new features to explore and many new structural improvements to be found in the software.

New Products

The latest release of Esri StreetMap Premium with NAVTEQ map data includes both an expansion of coverage to include Mexico and an advanced version with new data and functionality. The advanced version provides users with a greater level of precision for geocoding for the United States and additional routing capabilities for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

TerraGo Technologies announced its new release of TerraGo Publisher for GeoMedia.
TerraGo software demonstrations will highlight the capabilities of TerraGo Publisher for GeoMedia, which enables users to create GeoPDF maps and imagery directly from the GeoMedia print interface. Highly portable and interactive GeoPDF maps and imagery can be easily distributed and used by mobile field personnel to collect and share on-the-ground intelligence. Designed specifically for the GeoMedia user, TerraGo Publisher for GeoMedia extends the access and application of an organization's geospatial assets across the enterprise by transforming complex maps, imagery and spatial data into compact, interactive, and easy-to-use TerraGo GeoPDF products.

CoreLogic announced the launch of LeadOptix, an innovative lead quality model, and LendOptix, a credit risk model, from Teletrack Inc., a subsidiary of CoreLogic, Inc.

A package of software and digital mapping products from MapMechanics is playing a key role in helping the L'Oréal Professional Products Division (LPPD), part of the international L'Oréal cosmetics group, to sustain strong growth in a constantly changing market.

The division's UK sales teams take a highly proactive approach to the marketplace, responding quickly to variations in the customer base. The MapMechanics package is helping the organisation to streamline the process of managing the territories served by these teams, adapting existing territories dynamically to reflect changes in the concentration of demand, and creating new ones where required.

First Base Solutions' newest high-resolution orthophotographic datasets for high growth areas in the Greater Toronto Area are now available to VuMap subscribers. VuMap is a browser based GIS (Geographic Information System) with geospatial data.

VuMap users can now utilize the following March 2010 orthophotographic mosaics: Durham Region 20 centimetre (cm), Brampton 10 cm, Mississauga 15 cm and Oakville 10 cm.

VuMap is a browser based GIS (Geographic Information System) with geospatial data including roads, places of interest, elevations, high-resolution orthophotography, lot lines, right of ways, soil classifications and other data layers.

Telmap announced the launch of the Telmap5 Mobile Location Companion, commercialized by SFR in France under the name SFR GPS.

SFR GPS is the next level of evolution in mobile location-based services, capturing the essence of what users expect today; high quality maps and a rich search experience including the ability to search for proximity services in their immediate surroundings and the famous Telmap navigation service which completes the experience.

NAVTEQ announced the launch of NAVTEQ Traffic in Brazil, delivering comprehensive, real-time traffic information to nearly 48 million people in six major cities, including Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Curitiba and Porto Alegre.

Azavea an award-winning geospatial analysis (GIS) software development company, and the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, announced the launch of the CommonSpace web application ( http://commonspace.us). Borrowing from the urban planning concept of a “walkshed,” the area that is accessible to pedestrians within a given time period, CommonSpace, in a pilot program currently exclusive to Philadelphia which will run through mid-October, enables users to calculate their personal “transit-shed” and find local activities and events within that area, while encouraging walking, biking and public transit.

FMS, Inc., an In-Q-Tel portfolio company, has released Version 4.5 of its Sentinel Visualizer data visualization and link analysis software. Originally released in 2005, Sentinel Visualizer offers link charts, social network analysis, geospatial mapping, and the examination of timelines based on a user-customizable knowledgebase. The Professional and Premium Editions of Sentinel 4.5 now provide integration with Google Earth. Not only can locations be charted on the Google Earth maps, users can track-and-display the geographical movements of entities around the globe.

ATLASALIVE ON DEMAND is a smarter approach to Web-GIS; a turn-key, subscription based webmapping service, enabling users to easily create simple collaborative maps or publish spatial datasets to the internet. ATLASALIVE ON DEMAND is an easy to implement, low risk solution. Only $1.99 a day per map, with no contracts.

Around the Web

GISCafe Today Blog

Google Buys QuikSee September 15, 2010, XConomy, San Francisco

Events




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-- Susan Smith, GISCafe.com Managing Editor.