GeoIQ & GIS in the Rockies

Last week I presented at GIS in the Rockies here in Denver. The conference is a good one to attend if you’re looking to brush up what’s going on in the GIS space around the region and also catch up with past colleagues and friends in the GIS industry.

The local open source geospatial community around the region has always tried to stay involved with the conference, and make sure there are talks on open source tools and ideas. In keeping with that tradition this year I presented a talk that focused on what “GIS in the Cloud” means. As I said in my talk I’m not going to typically go around even saying the word “Cloud”, but to some people the word has actually meaning beyond a buzzy marketing slogan.

In my talk I looked at the history of GIS in the Web space. I went back to the year 2000 and talked about how mapping on the web has evolved from a static visualization tool to a live/dynamic part of the GIS space. It is fascinating to think, and talk, about the past and how things have progressed over the years, and we now see the “big” players starting to enter the web space with a hint of potential seriousness.

The other major theme of my talk was comparing geocommons.com to new offerings from ESRI and Google. This part of the talk was particular enhanced by the fact I followed a Google developer advocate talking about their products. Comparing these tools is fun in part because they are actually just getting started in bringing GIS to the web while we’ve been at it for a while now. We are starting to move beyond just doing traditional GIS, and developing a series of new tools that will be coming out in the next few months.

If you look at the offerings from various “Web-GIS” tools you see some nice variance. On the one hand you have Google developing Earth Builder and on the other hand you ESRI building ArcGIS Online. These tools are similar but have some different goals. Google’s product is of course leveraging their array of APIs and tools, but it’s geared directly at the enterprise level. There’s no public component to Earth Builder, and this is exactly where GeoCommons excels: Free geo-spatial data management, analysis, and visualization on the web!

ArcGIS Online takes a more similar approach to GeoCommons. It’s mostly about making maps and sharing them on the web, and they have a bit of data management in there. They are hinting at actually providing some geo-processing interfaces in the future (similar to what GeoCommons already offers), but I think the world would be surprised to see free geo-processing tools on the web in the very near future. Until then we’ll continue to see more of the current model: do work in ArcGIS and publish it as “service” on the web.

Either way it’s a really exciting space to be in right now, and we’re going to see a lot of new tools being developed in the coming years that I personally am looking forward to being a part of in every way.

You can checkout my slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/chelm/cloud-gis-gis-in-the-rockies-2011