However, it’s worth investigating this term and realizing that it means more than merely hosting a desktop GIS server in an on-demand environment. It means building geospatial sharing and analysis into the fabric, utilizing the interfaces and standards of the Web, such that it integrates fully and seamlessly. It’s also about the exponential growth through fast-provisioning, compartmentalized access, and on-demand scaling that is necessary and effective in deploying applications to the internet.

Considering the definition of GIS reveals that it is quite accessible:

a geographic information system (GIS) is any system that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that are linked to location

- source: Wikipeda: GIS

There are many potential examples of online, web-based GIS that have been evolving over the years. What is interesting is to consider how web applications and services are providing traditional GIS capabilites but in a non-traditional way. The effect is a revolution in the way users interact with their data and collaborate, much the same was Wiki’s are not merely web-based documents but living and constantly evolving consolidations of concensus amongst a community around various ideas.

To highlight how the Web is becoming GIS enabled, lets consider the functionality of some of our platforms and how we’ve integrated with the Web.

GeoCommons as a GIS

The original inspiration behind GeoCommons arose from work in preparing for and responding to Hurricane Katrina. The traditional map publication cycles were so slow that responders would only find out about flooding and impact as the water poured over their doorstops.

So the simple concept years ago was to develop a fast map analysis and production cycle so that responders, and anyone, could quickly, easily, and effectively synthesize data and share these insights with others for better decisions and action.

GeoCommons, our community web site where anyone can contribute data, build maps, and download all of the data and maps, allows for just this. Users can go from a spreadsheet on their desktop, to georeferenced map and combined data in less than five minutes – and immediately share these results with anyone in the world. No additional tools, desktop or web, required.

Along this path we’ve enabled tens of thousands of users to contribute over 40,000 public data sets and maps that are answering their own questions and providing insight across the world on issues from the enviroment, to economics, security, and even personal happiness. Users can easily access this data from anywhere in the world via the internet – independent of location, amount of data, or individual need or purpose. Through the internet, and as popularly referred to now as the cloud, they can access their information and analysis and share this with others.

GeoCommons is by definition a GIS – users can contribute, annotate, and share data through the Finder application. They can visualize this data in maps, and analyze through fusing datasets or utilizing the underlying analysis engine to query and filter data. However, we often don’t refer to GeoCommons as a GIS – it’s much more than that and GIS is just one viewpoint on how to consider the platform, application, and community that collaborate through GeoCommons.

GeoIQ Cloud and Enterprise

Working with Enterprises and Government, public portals like GeoCommons are beneficial but insufficient for certain requirements and mandates. Organizations need a way to ensure their data is safe, secure, and available. Underlying the public GeoCommons web site is a powerful platform called GeoIQ. It provides the same functionality in addition to a host of features we’ll be highlighting in the near future that provide for even deeper analysis, collaboration, and protected sharing.

However, with GeoIQ the same principles are maintained. Users can interact with the GeoIQ platform through easy to use web interfaces – quickly adding, georeferencing, and finding data. They can build maps and share these privately within groups or easily publish to the Web through simple group controls.

And the best effect of all is that when users publish their data or results they are doing so in a myriad of open standard and accessible ways without having to conciously realize or enact these mechanisms. Cataloging, findability, downloading, integrating, and updating can all happen through programmatic and discoverable interfaces to common web services as well as industry standard service protocols. The tools provide appropriate interfaces easily and transparently effectively enabling as broad an impact and collaboration as possible.

We are leveraging the cloud by creating private GeoIQ clusters within minutes and dynamically scaling these for users. They are still part of the Web, in private and secured areas, but able to publish out to any other internet accessible service, public web or private intranet. Users can even move off the cloud to more traditional infrastructure appliances, or even fully offline, to mobile laptops or USB sticks for field deployments. These GeoIQ instances all stay a part of the Web, with the ability to syncronize and pull in data from GeoIQ cloud, GeoCommons community, or any web standards application or service. It’s GIS in the Cloud, collaboration in the Enterprise, and an integral part of the Web.

Forthcoming series

This is the first in a series of posts discussing how GIS is moving to be integrated as part of the Web – through open standards, easy to use interfaces, dynamic and interactive content combined with the advanced analysis that geospatial data can leverage.

This crisis is again demonstrating the importance of location of affected communities, existing environmental conditions that threaten to exacerbate the situation (such as the Gulf stream), as well as the citizen and organization response to assisting in recovery efforts.

CrisisCommons has been coordinating tools and data that are being used by numerous organizations to enable their members to report observed affected wildlife and oil spill areas on land. Organizations such as LA Bucket Brigade (feed, Finder) are using Ushahidi to gather reports. Emicus and Project Noah are also citizen reporting platforms and have open-sourced their platforms in order to support additional efforts. And soon there will be the possiblity of a generalized reporting applications and national texting shortcode for citizens across the entire coastline to report and respond.

Official organizations such as the U.S. Coast Guard as well as NGO’s like National Wildlife Fedearation are working hard to setup response centers

While the Oil spill is currently top on the media coverage, we continue to be very active in responding and recovery efforts in Haiti. Like the Gulf Coast oil spill, there is the need for continued support through the long-term rebuilding efforts after such a tremendous disaster.

We’re actively working to ensure the data gathered through all of these efforts is openly shared and made available for the forthcoming analysis that will need to occur in order to understand the immediate and long-term impacts this crisis will have on the local ecologies. Environmentally sensitive fish, birds, and reptiles are just some of the endangered wildlife that will require assistance in surving the oil spill.

The major providers all put restrictions around geocoding making it especially difficult to do batch geocoding operations to get large chunks of data geo-enabled. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s geocoders are all geared to single address look ups, and not for mass data geo-enablement. There are services like batchgeocode.com that get around some of the limitations but are still restricted by provider’s TOS.

The second big issue with current geocoding is further upstream. All the geocoding API’s are dependent on NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas’s and a few other providers data to geocode against. So, if the street data companies don’t think a country has a big enough market you can’t geocode in these areas. This especailly limits the ability to geocode data in developing countries.

Our thought is the best solution to this problem is an open source geocoder. There have been other open source geocoder projects, some of which have taken criticism as a bad business decisions.

We’ve taken a slightly different approach. One, we enlisted the brilliant help of Schuyler to evolve his work from Geocoder.us to best take advantage of the work and community already existing. Second, we decided to make the Geocoder street data neutral. Meaning that you can plug whatever street data source you want into the geocoder and have it work – sometimes with a bit of tweaking. In the first go we’ve set up the geocoder to work with TIGER data and NAVTEQ. We chose these two mainly because they both use all CAPS for their names.

The hope is that with the community’s help we can extend the geocoder to work with a large number of other data sources. As Andrew mentioned in his post OpenStreetMap is top of the list. Integrating OSM data will be key enabling geocoding in developing countries and other areas overlooked by current commercial providers. I think this is one of many areas where the OSM community is really going to show its power. While the geocoder is currently only accessible to developers through github, stay tuned because we’ll be exposing it as a web application in GeoCommons shortly. We want everyone to be able to geo-enable their data and access it in whatever format meets their needs. Data wants to be free and we all win when the gates are unlocked.

So who is ready for the switch and who isn’t? We made a few maps based on the Neilson report showing who was ready and who will be left behind in analog. Check the maps out below.

Click on the Eye Icon to turn layers on and off.

Maker.maker_host=’http://maker.geocommons.com’;Maker.finder_host=’http://finder.geocommons.com’;Maker.core_host=’http://core.geocommons.com’;
Maker.load_map(“maker_map_5993″, “5993″);

To download the data or view the meta data visit Finder here!

Harvard launched AfricaMap. The map is based on the Harvard University Geospatial Infrastructure (HUG) platform and was developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis.  AfricaMap, a OpenLayers-based app, aims to expand existing initiatives for globally sharing spatial data and technology. 

Google Maps created a fun quiz where you get to test your geographic puzzle solving skills. To play the quiz, you have to rearrange letters in a map, using visual clues in the form of a Panoramio photograph, to spell a world capital or U.S. state capital.

The USGS National Geospatial Program Office launched a new version of The National Map website. Revisions include The National Geospatial Program and The National Map web site.

Discussions about the auto industry bailout have been percolating the blogosphere. How would this affect auto industry workers? CNN created an interactive map showing the number of auto industry jobs in each state.

Vector One’s Jeff Thurston discusses the representation part to his GIS series. He says that representation part is an integral feature and one of the primary functional capabilities of GIS. Thurston discusses the many ways GIS is represented, including tabulated spreadsheets, numerically instead of graphically, through maps, charts, etc. He also talks about visualization tools that ‘take GIS data output and use it to develop other forms of visualization.’

The Washington Post released a flashed based Google Map mashup called TimeSpace: World. The map is a compilation of world news from the newspaper, its online site – washingtonpost.com, PostGlobal, Foreign Policy magazine and other partner sites including The Associated Press. The coverage is represented by clusters around hot-spots on the map. Each cluster lets you view articles, blog posts, photos, videos and even reporter twitter feeds.

Microsoft Research India created a system called the Robust Location Search, which enables location addresses in structured formats from any country. Microsoft plans to add it into Window Live Local.

The unemployment is getting worse. “Initial jobless claims surged by 58,000 to 573,000 in the week ending Dec. 6, the highest level since 1982.” MSNBC created an interactive map that displays the unemployment rate by month for each state starting in September 2007.

Blogger added geotagging! Now the Blogger community can geotag blog entries and not just photo. Now feed readers, map applications and search engines can associate posts with their locations.

The Catholicgauze reflects on past Geography Awareness Weeks and discusses the trends of three geography surveys from the years 1988, 2002 and 2006. Overall, the past surveys show little or no change since the first study in 1988. The findings indicate that Americans are lacking in geographic literacy. Those that did well on the surveys include people who took and completed a geography course, recent immigrants, frequent travelers and those that keep up with world events.

Mark Doherty of Integraph presented a detailed overview of where the technology of GIS has been, where it is now, and where it is going at the Rocket City Geospatial Conference in Huntsville, AL. He shared four trends ‘converging to create a potentially unique opportunity’ in regards to the new era of computing. The four include SOA and standards, cloud computing, orchestration and thin clients/rich internet applications.

MyGeo Position, an application to help geo-code a single address, was deemed as ‘very accurate’ by Keir Clarke over at Google Maps Mania. The site offers a number of useful facilities for geo-coding a position, including finetuning using a drag and drop marker, geoposition as a float or in degrees, and an iGoogle gadget for quick geocoding from a personal landing page. MyGeoPosition is available in English, German, Dutch and Bulgarian.

O’Reilly’s Where2.0 2009 Call for Participation is now open. Submit your proposal here before December 2^nd.

One of the most useful references for me in this process was a workshop Tom Carden gave at ETech last year on the data rendering capabilities of a variety of approaches. The readers digest version of the workshop went something along these lines:

HTML/Javascript – handles 100-1000 data points – loads in .1 seconds
Flash – handles up to 10,000 data points – loads in 1 second
Java/Processing – handles up to 100,000 points – loads in 10 seconds
OpenGL – handles upwards of 1,000,000 points – loads in 100 seconds

For Maker we wanted to be able to handle 10,000+ points/polygons and there was no way JavaScript was going to be able to handle it. Of course rendering the data was just one of many problems. Not only did we have to render the data but also parse it from the server out to the client while running the mathematical operation enabling you to take advantage of the structured data being sent. The team came with lots of clever tricks to pull it off, but the level of performance afforded by using Flash for rendering the vector data was not available with JavaScript. Processing could be a very cool option as the technology matures. Silverlight could also be a great option if they can get the plug-in universally embedded into browsers as with Flash.

While Flash was a great option for the tiling and vector rendering we did not want to build out the entire application in Flash for a variety of reasons. In GeoCommons everything outside of the map itself is JavaScript/HTML. This is probably rudimentary for many folks, but reading the debate on James’ blog I think sometimes developers lose sight of picking the best tool for the job. Oftentimes it is easy to get wedded to an approach just because it is what you know well. We were complete Flash rookies when we started, but got some great help from Tom with Modest Maps, Axis Maps with the Flash development and cartography, hired some full time resources, and learned a lot on our own. It ended up being a great approach for the specific problems we were facing. As long as you are using standard interfaces in your development, you should be able to fluidly adapt to the technology that makes the most sense for your set of problems.