Special Conference issue - GITA 2005
- Denver, Colorado
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GITA 2005
Joe Francica,
Editor-in-Chief
On Monday, March 7th, Vince Rosales
of Idea
Integration and chairman of this year's GITA conference (photo at
right), welcomed the crowd to the Colorado Convention
Center in downtown Denver. He jumped on stage carrying a guitar and
promised to sing to anyone willing to listen. Mr. Rosales ,a member of
the GITA board of Directors, introduced the theme of the conference
"Crossing Boundaries" and vowed to make this the key geospatial event
of the year. But is it? I think GITA has tried to improve the quality
of speakers and some of the presentations that I attended were
excellent. The conference organization did a good job of logistically
managing the event. However, attendance increased only because the
number of vendors increased from last year. Regular attendance was
about the same.
The problem isn't the quality of the agenda but rather that this is a
mature market. Many of the same vendors are here year after year.
Moreover, many show exactly the same kind of solutions as their
neighbors. Just how many times can you see a network tracing algorithm
by yet another software or systems integrator and not come away in a
somnambulant state?
Many of the companies on the exhibit floor were touting mobile
solutions. Perhaps because both the hardware and communications
infrastructure are better established, the market is more prepared to
buy into mobile computing. These solutions can offer lower cost of
ownership because the software and pen-based, "ruggedized" computer
vendors have had enough years to work the bugs out. The market is ready
to purchase, and there was more of a buzz about mobility than anything
else on the show floor (see WOW Technology below).
GITA is taking steps to try to enhance attendance by inviting both
Oracle and Ten Sails Consulting to host user conferences the day after
the main event. It's a good move, but it won't change the audience
dramatically. There are too many alternatives. Many conference-goers
are opting instead for user conferences by ESRI, Intergraph, Bentley
and Autodesk. On tight budgets and in markets that are saturated, where
users have made their choice of GIS, users will spend their money to go
to the vendor's user conferences.
So, that brings us back to the benefits of attending a conference of a
professional organization like GITA. I prefer conferences like this
because it is a neutral venue. Still, there must be a more compelling
reason to draw attendees if the same types of geospatial applications
will be discussed. I've commented
on this before, but my strong recommendation is to have a merger
between GITA and URISA. Not only are the technical challenges faced by
local governments and utilities similar, but too often the politics
that hinder technology adoption, can be the same as well. That's
especially in the case where you have a public-owned utility that needs
to get its land base from the tax assessor, or vice versa. These
challenges should be addressed in the same forum. Merge the two
organizations, and their conferences, and I believe the synergies will
be good for the GIS community at large.
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Chip Eichelberger (photo at right) is a
"motivational speaker" that prefers not to be called a "motivational
speaker." A former protege of Tony Robbins (the "motivational speaker"
of some fame), Mr. Eichelberger energized the crowd, made sure the ice
was sufficiently broken, and got the attendees thinking about their
goals in life and how to achieve them. Both humorous and engaging, Mr.
Eichelberger provided a recipe for identifying the "errors in judgment"
that we repeat day after day and how they can lead to disaster. And so
his challenge to the audience was to make sure that a few simple
disciplines were practiced each day: work harder at improving yourself
than you do at your job, and create a "contagious enthusiasm" that will
be recognized by those you meet. Mr. Eichelberger currently conducts
various sessions to help companies such as Marriott, Southern Company
and the Bank of America to achieve their goals.
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The Convergence of
Web Services and Mobility
In a presentation before a crowd of more than 100 people Dr. Ignacio
Guerrero of Intergraph
Corporation laid out the emerging technologies, here today, that
will change the geospatial industry: Web Services and Mobility. "In
time, we will see a convergence between Web services and mobility,"
said Guerrero. He said that working with today's Web services paradigm
it is very similar to needing a plumber. Someone has a leaky faucet so
they need the services of a plumber, but to find a plumber, they depend
on a telephone book or the Yellow Pages. The person with the leaky
faucet is the "service requester"; the plumber is the "service
provider" and the Yellow Pages is the "service broker." In Web
services, the relationship between the requester and the provider is
well established but the relationship with the broker is not as well
defined. Guerrero believes that the next technology to significantly
impact geospatial solutions might be "search." He said that we've had
the wars in operating systems and we've seen the battles for the
browser, but the next big thing may be search engine technology. And
presumably once that's sorted out we'll have fixed the missing element
of Web services, the "service broker" relationship.
Sentient Computing
Peter Batty (at right) of Ten
Sails provided a far reaching look into the use of location
determination technologies to build real-time, highly interactive
spatial sensor systems, what he refers to as sentient computing.
"Location-enabled sensors will be the key to new applications," said
Batty. "Enterprise data management will need to adapt to serve mobile
users; and security will be a big, big deal." Batty discussed
everything from GPS, microwave, and ultrasound, to RFID, Wi-Fi and
ultra wideband sensors, each of which differs in positional accuracy
and availability. He discussed very interesting applications of where
sensors are being used in a microgeographic setting. In health care,
for example, hospitals need to know the location of intravenous (IV)
pumps so that they do not have an over supply and know where to get
them when they need them. In the workplace, sensors are being used to
monitor space utilization. If an office is being rented based on a
shared rental agreement, sensors can analyze when and how much space
was being consumed. As an adjunct application, sensors can determine
how corporations use space so that new office accommodations will be
more efficiently designed.
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Executive Interviews
With Jack Dangermond, ESRI -- Proliferation
of Geospatial Information
I spoke at length with Jack
Dangermond, president of ESRI,
about how he believed the Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) Initiative would be
able to reach beyond its current limitations with the GOS II
implementation, specifically with respect to reaching more people about
the available resources. He said that he believes two new areas of
development will expose more people to the portal. The first is the
ability to build "Community Forums" that join people with a common
geographic area of interest through relationship building and the
"Marketplace" where needs for specific geospatial data can be posted
and where others, perhaps with common or overlapping areas of interest,
can see synergies. Commercial companies that monitor the Marketplace
may be able to recognize the need and respond in a more timely manner
than they do today.
The second item Mr. Dangermond mentioned is the potential to
spatially-enable Google. GOS II uses the Google Search Appliance (more details)
to speed the query response. But the real potential may be in reaching
into the GOS metadata catalog through Google. That is, every time you
search Google for geographic data, the user would be pulling
information from the GOS II metadata catalog. In that way, the many
users of Google would be exposed to the resources available through
GOS. It would be a viral affect and therefore reveal the many data
resources that the U.S. Government has archived. But just as
importantly, Mr. Dangermond believes that building the search
capabilities of GOS to look like the familiar Google interface will
have a profound affect on bringing geospatial information into the
mainstream. "Before we were different; now we're the same," said
Dangermond, implying that it will be as easy to search for geospatial
information as it is to look up anything else via Google.
With David Armitage, CEO, CartaSite --
"Anyone can put dots on a map"
Solving the integration problem for communication was David Armitage's
first goal for CartaSite,
and he's landed some big contracts as a startup. Armitage was the
founder of another software company in the mid-80's called GeoGraphix
that competed with other big names in the geophysical data processing
field like Landmark and GeoQuest. GeoGraphix was later acquired by
Landmark and Armitage retired at age 39. His latest foray back into the
geospatial business was to create better communication integration and
geopositioning for vehicles. The company's solutions capture
machine-based information and use a map dashboard to display it to
dispatchers and other executive managers. "Anyone can put dots on the
map," said Armitage. Armitage has a unique perspective on integrating
geospatial data with other business processes and understanding the
customer's integration challenges. CartaSite helps to integrate
information from radio frequency (RF) and GPS devices on trucks and
sends communication packets to a central repository that then get
displayed on a map. Truck movements, for example, can be displayed in
real-time along with ancillary data such as speed, tire pressure, all
engine oil pressure. The data is displayed using a Microsoft MapPoint
mapping engine. Armitage said that his developers "ripped the hood off"
of the MapPoint product and used the application programming interfaces
(API) to deliver his solution to large truck rental companies.
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"Ruggedized" Tablet
PC's from Xplore
Technologies -- Yes you can drop it and yes, it can be exposed
to extreme weather conditions, and yes its waterproof, at least for a
little while (immersion to 30cm for 30 minutes max). The external
casing is designed to military standards (MIL-STD 810F tested) and the
corners of the casing will disperse the shock of impact, in 26
directions no less, should the unit be dropped. The iX104C2
model features an Intel Centrino processor (1.1 Ghz) and contains
multiple connectively ports: Bluetooth, 802.11 b/g, or other integrated
wireless options such as WAN (CDMA, GPRS) and a port for GPS. The price
of the iX104C2 is
approximately $3300. I found the 10" screen a little small but the form
factor was easy to hold.
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Cintiq 21UX from WACOM
- Big, 21" touch screen for project mark up. Very crisp display with
adjustable surface pitch for interactive pen computing.
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LizardTech
& Oracle
Oracle has signed
an agreement with LizardTech to support MrSID as a native datatype
in the next release of Oracle 10g due out this summer. Customers
wanting to access this feature will need the new release of GeoRaster
and a component from LizardTech. LizardTech also announced
that its parent company, Celartem, has merged its holding in the U. S.,
LizardTech and its sister company, Extensis, to capitalize on some back
office efficiencies. The two will now operate under the Celartem Inc.
holding company. This is clearly a move to try to broaden LizardTech's
base of customers beyond the traditional geospatial IT sector.
ESRI doing some reorganization
David Maguire, Director of Product Planning for ESRI, discussed some of
the changes occurring at ESRI. The ESRI BIS unit is being entirely
merged into ESRI. Responsibility for product development will fall to
Maguire's team while marketing will still be managed by David Huffman.
A new release of Business Analyst is coming soon and will incorporate
work done in conjunction with Dr. David Huff. Maguire mentioned that
there has been good uptake for Web-based solutions from the ESRI BIS
unit.
Intergraph's story catching on?
Art Spencer, Executive Vice President of Intergraph's Utility, Local
Government and Transportation group, noted that since last year,
Intergraph's stock is up 50% and customers of Geospatial
Resource Management (GRM) technology increased from 85 to 115. He
believes that although the division only squeaked out $7 million in
income on revenue of over $200 million that the story is beginning to
catch on and that the growth trend is positive. In the Intergraph booth
the staff was showing a pilot program with Hawaii Electric Company that
focused on critical infrastructure protection, which relied on multiple
data sources, including the City and County of Honolulu, a
long-standing ESRI customer. Intergraph is also looking at synergies
between its divisions which have become independent business units.
Could this lead to another reorganization where Intergraph's Public
Safety division rejoins the Mapping and Geospatial division? Time will
tell.
ESRI & Oracle - Is the ice breaking?
There were some signs that the ice may be breaking between Oracle and
ESRI. Some conciliatory tones were being struck by key executives.
David Maguire mentioned that new links to Oracle were being implemented
and he also remarked that there are certain business cases for when a
"database centric" approach may be a suitable option rather than an
N-tier approach, strongly pushed by ESRI, for certain application
implementations.
iNetSpatial from Hitachi - On
Demand or ASP?
iNetSpatial from Hitachi
Software Global Technology (HSGT) is a web-hosted solution for
small utility companies that provides a low barrier to entry in a
heterogeneous GIS environment. Using HSGT data server technology,
multiple data sources can be brought into the same thin client
environment. When pressed that it sounded like an application service
provider (ASP) business model that has lost favor in recent years
(because nobody knew how to sell it), Rob Carroll, VP of Sales and
Marketing for HSGT, shied away from labeling it as such. He preferred
to call it "on-demand GIS", although the press release issued by HSGT
puts the ASP model front and center. However, the solution provides
good screen navigation with completely configurable tab-based views.
3E-Government from Bentley Systems -
The integrated city by any other name?
Engineering, Enable, Empower are the 3 "E's" of Bentley's
attack plan for local government solutions. Bentley will be offering a
series of seminars to promote this approach, which John Hacker,
marketing manager for local government, referred to as very similar to
the "integrated city" model that other vendors have attempted.
Basically, Bentley is leading this initiative with ProjectWise to
manage a mixed-GIS environment giving local governments a manageable
view into feature layers.
GE - on the floor in a big way
GE made a statement with its booth this year. Big GE sign. Lots of
attendees around the demo stations. GE is putting more marketing
resources into supporting its Smallworld Spatial Intelligence solution
and positioning the analysis, visualization, and reporting tools as a
business intelligence tool.
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NEWS BRIEFS
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AWARDS
Excellence
Award Winner: Enmax Power
Corporation -- For the many business processes that provided
substantial operational efficiencies throughout the organization.
Innovator Award Winners
- Jones-Onslow Electric
Membership Corporation -- For developing its own
geospatial information system over the last 10 years. It is a seamless
consumer information system, financial management system, and mapping
facilities system for an electric utility.
- MassGIS, Office of Geographic and Environmental
Information -- For the development of the MassGIS
OpenGIS-based Web Mapping Services, which is the result of an effort
started in 2000 to provide "always-on" access to all the data contained
in the MassGIS data repository via WFS, Gazetteer, and Geocoder
interfaces.
Distinguished
Service Award: Keith McDaniel, Intergraph Corporation -- For
his many years of contributions and service to GITA having served on
its Board of Directors, chair of the executive symposium, chair of the
Education Committee and chair of the Strategic Planning Committee.
Lifetime
Achievement Award: Sakura Shinoaki,Otsuma Women's University,
Tokyo, Japan -- For his singular leadership in
introducing and implementing GIS in Japan. |
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Thanks for reading Directions Magazine,
and be sure to tell a friend.
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