Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Tuesday, January 10th, 2017
For over 10 years, our company has really been about extending the power of GIS, often ArcGIS®, to non-GIS users, making it more valuable, more relevant and accessible to all of a business’s end users.
And just like what’s happening with Salesforce.com and other more business-centric platforms, the end user demand for custom mobile, cloud-based solutions is growing rapidly. In Cloud 1.0, everybody rented the same exact web application (like Salesforce). In Cloud 2.0, companies want the benefit of the cloud but they don’t want the exact same application as their competitor.
So while organizations look to customize ArcGIS® for their industry AND their unique business requirements, today they also want custom mobile apps. And not just web apps posing as mobile. Not inflexible COTS apps. Not a simple, standalone, map-based app. They need real, native, customized, cloud-based apps tailored to their specific business requirements and seamlessly integrated with their enterprise ArcGIS.
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Tags: App, ArcGIS, collaboration, david basil, GeoPDF, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, PaaS, PDF, technology, TerraGo, TerraGo Edge, TerraGo Magic, Zero Code No Comments »
Thursday, June 18th, 2015
According to an article in Forbes, people make 150 million maps a day with Esri® software. 150 million.
It’s amazing when you consider the unmatched value of GIS for helping us better shape our understanding of the world we live in. The only thing that makes it more powerful is making it easier to share that understanding.
GIS systems create so much more than flat maps. But out of those 150 million maps made today, how many of those end up shared as paper or even a static image on a Powerpoint slide? What is the cost to train people to be GIS experts, cartographers, geographers, scientists, analysts, engineers, designers, planners and more? How can we leverage all that talent and all that knowledge if we lose so much information on the way out of the GIS system while sharing it with the non-GIS masses. What if you could unlock those maps and let end users truly interact with the data behind the map to better answer their questions? For free.
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Tags: ArcGIS, collaboration, david basil, Esri, GeoPDF, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, PDF, technology, TerraGo No Comments »
Tuesday, June 16th, 2015
A while back I was on a plane next to a man with a small backpack branded with the logo of a company with whom we do business. Small talk revealed that he was on his way to Afghanistan to help with the stabilization effort. He asked me what I did, and I segued with “I work at a small software company called TerraGo”. He stopped me there with “Oh TerraGo! I know you! The PDF guys! You’re all over Afghanistan!”
I don’t remember much of the rest of the conversation, but I do remember, I’ll admit, a glimmer of pleasure at TerraGo’s recognition, but too a state of cognitive dissonance in which being characterized as “the PDF guys” had left me.
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Tags: ArcGIS, collaboration, Esri, GeoPDF, George Demmy, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, PDF, technology, TerraGo No Comments »
Thursday, June 11th, 2015
Geographic Information System professionals built an industry on understanding the importance of data in geographic context as an organizational principle and facilitating decision-making by gathering and analysing these data.
They are growing the industry by communicating results in ways that take some of the mystery out of the process, allowing managers to understand information and insights, to offer feedback and to use it creatively and with confidence to predict, react to and even foment change. And those GIS professionals have come to realize that there’s a new responsibility associated with their role: measuring its value.
Where once the work of the GIS professional was used as an adjunct to decision-making, it’s now judged on its contribution to the bottom line, justifying itself through the same means as any other expenditure: return-on-investment.
Managers demand a way to justify increasingly capable – and costly – GIS operations. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways to show significant return on investment.
To read the full Earth Imaging Journal “Industry Insights” article in the March/April issue, click here.
Tags: big data, Esri, GeoPDF, George Demmy, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, technology, TerraGo No Comments »
Wednesday, June 10th, 2015
GIS professionals create amazingly detailed, accurate, cartographic quality information that can be visualized and analyzed in any number of ways to model complex problems, perform “what if” scenarios, identify hidden patterns and answer questions in ways not possible without GIS.
Yet many organizations are still sharing all that rich GIS information as paper maps or flat images in a PowerPoint, so a lot of that intelligence gets lost on the way to the GIS department’s most important stakeholders.
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Tags: ArcGIS, big data, david basil, GeoPDF, George Demmy, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, technology, TerraGo No Comments »
Tuesday, June 9th, 2015
TerraGo has just released the version 6.7 of most of our core products which focus on bringing GIS-Lite functionality to document workflows under the aegis of our OpenGeoPDF initiative. That’s a mouthful, so I guess it wouldn’t be too bad to shorten it to version 6.7 of our OpenGeoPDF products. In this release, we’ve added two functions which significantly enhance the GIS-Lite capabilities provided by the recently-added Identify tool in Toolbar: search and update of GeoPackage feature attributes.
Search
Search has become an essential paradigm. My once punctilious management of email, each incoming message being tagged and routed to its own place based on an arcane library of rules accumulated over more years than I care to admit in Emacs Gnus has been replaced by a couple of rules for alerting me to things of current urgency, but otherwise I just search to find in an sea of unsorted emails Outlook, at least at work. With Toolbar 6.7, you can search attached GeoPackage for features matching what you type in the search field, get a list of matches, and then you can click the match to see where it is on the map. Double click the match and you’ll zoom to that feature. We had to add additional metadata to the GeoPDF documents to make this all go, and that’s some of what went into Publisher 6.7, including persisting the field names that ArcMap thinks is the most useful to identify a particular feature. Again, using OpenGeoPDF to tie Publisher to its client application Toolbar helps illustrate the connection. I hope Esri clones the feature in their Identify tool — it’s pretty damn useful and cool.
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Tags: ArcGIS, big data, Esri, George Demmy, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, technology, TerraGo No Comments »
Thursday, June 4th, 2015
We’ve been using a couple of new words of late at TerraGo when describing part of what it is we do for folks: OpenGeoPDF and GIS-Lite. It’s had the desired effect of stimulating some very interesting conversations, but has also caused a little confusion. Let me see if I can clear things up.
GIS-Lite: What
TerraGo makes software that lets people turn their static maps into interactive GIS-lite applications by letting ArcMap users target a client application (TerraGo Toolbar) with TerraGo Publisher. GIS-Lite is what we provide.
OpenGeoPDF: How
TerraGo mashes up industry standards, common IT practices and infrastructure, and best practices under the aegis of its OpenGeoPDF technology initiative to enable its customers to deliver GIS-Lite apps to their audience. OpenGeoPDF is how we provide GIS-Lite.
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Tags: ArcGIS, big data, Esri, GeoPDF, George Demmy, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, technology, TerraGo No Comments »
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2015
If you saw GIS-Lite in isolation, you might imagine it to be pretty much anything not quite GIS. We’re starting to use the word at TerraGo to help explain part of what we do for people — let them transform what would otherwise be a static document into a lightweight location-enabled interactive application. But that’s a mouthful, so we call it GIS-Lite.
One of the reasons we are thinking in terms of GIS-Lite is to illustrate how at once a GeoPDF document with TerraGo Toolbar is not GIS, but is an intimate connection to the GIS and the person who created the document in the first place. When talking with folks about GeoPDF and Toolbar, people make comparisons to pseudo-alternatives like web applications or lightweight GIS software, which shows we failed to make our point: it’s not an either-or proposition. Web apps and GIS programs are distinct and don’t really compete directly at all, although there might be a superficial feature comparison here or there. Paper and PowerPoint are the competition. The real question is would the documents you create with ArcMap be more valuable if people could use Toolbar to take advantage of the geospatial context and data used to create that document? More often than not, the answer is a resounding yes.
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Tags: ArcGIS, big data, Esri, George Demmy, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, technology, TerraGo No Comments »
Friday, May 29th, 2015
Our GIS users create lightweight applications using GeoPDF, and share them with non-GIS experts. We call this GIS-Lite.
Of *course* GIS-lite is not GIS! How could it be? GIS can never be supplanted or replaced. But, its concepts are so amazingly valuable, it would be criminally negligent to not use them in proper proportion in all applicable workflows.
Any time a map is used, doesn’t it make sense to make them interactive….to be able to measure, extract coordinate information, dig into the feature attributes and the like to allow people to get that great GIS experience without having to learn GIS? To enable them to answer their own questions? GIS-lite is not a threat to GIS (that’s laughable! How could it possibly be?) – it’s a natural companion and extension.
No organization should have GIS without GIS-lite! You’re not getting the ROI you should without it!
Tags: ArcGIS, big data, Esri, GeoPDF, George Demmy, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, technology, TerraGo 1 Comment »
Wednesday, May 27th, 2015
It’s easy to fall into a trap of considering data for data’s sake. Knowledge is power, after all, and by democratizing data; you spread power to more places and more people.
To what end? When an organization considers the means to acquire, analyze and present data, the investment has to be driven by both its cost and its impact on the bottom line. By performance, more than power. In this case, performance means the Return-on-Investment (ROI) in democratized data.
The military faces this challenge regularly in its goal of making personnel “human sensors,” adding what they see on the ground, in front or behind them in real-time, to satellite and unmanned aerial system sensors to provide situational awareness to commanders miles or even continents away who are making life-or-death decisions.
In industry’s case, decisions can make or break a company and careers, and those decisions have a goal. In his blog, Michael McCarthy writes, “investing in democratizing data needs to have a wide range of influence over many decisions across the organization … The objective is to excel at decision-making. The reason for doing this (in business) is to realize revenue growth.”
He adds, “More emphasis needs to be placed on making better decisions faster and identifying the data needed to support those decisions, and not the other way around.”
That’s why TerraGo created OpenGeoPDF – to combine the latest, most appropriate geospatial and IT standards, practices and capabilities to extend the reach of GIS to the widest possible audience. These capabilities include a bi-directional relationship with field operations that can offer decision-makers a better sense of situational awareness than data limited to that normally available at headquarters. It can do so with mobile data input and decision reception from an iPhone or Android device.
This audience can then drive decision-making away from the realm of the “gut” and the limitations of company policy to allow managers to adapt to changing times. Data to support these decisions can be more up to date and adaptable to operational environment ebb and flow. Data behind the presentation maps can drive other decisions, as well as creativity and innovation in areas not imagined when the data was harvested. That’s democratization.
Measuring return on investment in GIS is easy enough if you limit it to reducing time-to-customer and man hours saved with the capability. But what about savings attributable to using data available to a wider range of people within an organization and the impact on revenue and market share growth? On measuring efficiencies vs. opportunities?
On attracting and retaining employees at decision-making and information-gathering levels because they see the “why” in the work they are hired to do, rather than just the less-rewarding and often-frustrating “what?” Those metrics can be softer and more elusive, but they are no less real or of diminished importance in cost-benefit analysis that drive ROI.
Tags: ArcGIS, big data, Esri, GeoPDF, George Demmy, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, technology, TerraGo No Comments »
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