Vertical GeoSolutions, Inc

Dr Rick Marshall, President of VerticalGeo, will be attending the Department of Defense (DoD) Installation Geospatial Information and Services (IGI&S) Conference in Dallas June 7-13, 2009.   Rick will be presenting a paper during the Expeditionary Operations Brreakout Session called Creating Deployable Data for AMC’s Contingency Response Wings.  The presentation will be on  Tuesday from 1400-1430 in the Lone Star A2  Conference Room.

The presentation will outline the Expeditionary IGI&S workflow to acquire and process pre-deployment, employment, and post-deployment information for Air Mobility Command (AMC) Contingency Response Group (CRG) operations at potential Forward Operating Bases.  Headquarters AMC and the CRGs work hand-in-hand to ensure current information is acquired, processed, and shared for pre-mission planning, collected and validated during the mission, and verified and disseminated after the mission is complete.  This workflow ensures the end-users receive the highest quality and most current products available.

This will not be a technical presentation, but one that focuses on information the discovery and sharing techniques that make this program successful.  All conference attendees are welcome to the presentation.

VerticalGeo has been attending the ESRI Federal User Conference in Washington, DC this week.  ESRI is a great company who really takes care of their employees.  They also do a wonderful job of taking care of their customers too and this conference is no exception.  They have gone all out to ensure this conference is full of exceptional training, technical sessions, papers, and exhibitors.  ESRI really knows how to put on a great conference.

ESRI conferences are always full of hype over the next release of the software and this one follows in suit.  Jack Dangermond, the President and founder of ESRI, delivered a great Opening Address yesterday.  Interspersed with Jack’s speach were some incredible demonstrations of what ArcGIS 9.3.1 will be able to do.

ESRI followed the Opening Address with a catered lunch.

The afternoon was full of GIS demonstrations, the Keynote Address from Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley, and a small, but very well attended exhibit hall.

My observations so far this year:

1.  I have heard more mention of Google this year than I have ever heard at any ESRI event in the past.  ESRI must no longer feel threatened by Google Earth, because not only did Jack mention Google in the Opening Address, but Google also had a booth in the exhibit hall.

2.  ESRI is getting deeper into providing Professional Services.  Who could be better at delivering GIS services than the experts who deliver GIS software.  Their dedication to this work is overdue.

3.  ESRI seems to be marketing several solutions in a box.  At the ESRI St Louis Defense User Group meeting that I hosted last month I saw the Commercial/Joint Mapping Tool Kit (C/JMTK) GeoSpatial Appliance.  This morning I saw the Situational Awareness Geospatial Appliance in action.  It is pretty impressive, but similar to the C/JMTK appliance, it offers the ArcGIS Online services in a huge, 4 TB, stand alone server on steroids.  It is very powerful, but I’m sure it comes with a steep price tag.  ESRI seems committed to providing streaming imagery, maps, information, and services online and offline, something that I believe is overdue.  Great job ESRI!

I’ll post again tomorrow after the conference is over and provide a complete overview.

The below post in the Google LatLong Blog is a revolutionary concept.  Google has taken a huge market share of organizing the world’s data by offering free tools that most of us use.  Google’s tools seem to work better than those that we pay top dollar for.  Now they are offering to serve up partners imagery for free.  That is an incredible offer.    I can hardly wait to see the results.  Municipalities can get their imagery served up for free which will dramatically increase the quality of the images on Google Earth and Maps.  That is a win/win situation for everyone.  Bravo for Google.

Posted by Rick Marshall

Taking in the view: Introducing Google’s Imagery Partner Program

Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 12:05 PM

When people think about Google Earth, they often think satellite imagery.  Yet, since the early days of Google Earth, we’ve been working with local governments and other public sector organizations to add their aerial imagery as well.  Thanks to this data sharing, we’re able to offer our users a more current representation of thousands of communities and a higher resolution view of countless geographic features.  With this week’s launch of the historical imagery feature in Google Earth, we’re now able to partner with public sector organizations and other imagery content providers to present users a view of their community or geographic features, such as mountains or lakes, evolving over time.

For organizations that would like to share their aerial imagery, we’ve just put out the welcome mat — a new website for our Imagery Partner Program where you can learn the ins and outs of adding your organization’s imagery to Google’s services.  As you’ll see, we’ve learned from our partnerships with many governments and have structured this program to make it as easy as possible for your organization to license and deliver your data to Google.  Wondering what aerial imagery formats we welcome or how we handle data transfer or other details?  Visit the site and check out the FAQ.

Vertical GeoSolutions, Inc (VerticalGeo) will be attending and blogging from the ESRI Federal User’s Conference (FedUC) February 18-20, 2009 in Washington, DC. Our FedUC blogs will be posted on our Vertically Thinking Blog. If you will be attending and would like to link up please send me an E-Mail at:  rick.marshall@verticalgeo.com.

As reported by Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog

Here is some visual delights showing new features of Google Earth 5 by video (including three I created and added to my posts yesterday). You can download Google Earth 5 for free and try these features out yourself. Check out GEB’s main post on GE 5 which includes links to other feature stories.

Google’s official announcement video:

Sylvia Earle - Oceanographer from National Geographic Society introduces Google Earth 5’s Ocean Data:

Google Earth Blog’s first look at Google Earth 5’s Ocean (below the fold):

As reported by Leszek Pawlowicz of the Free Geography Tools Blog

A few months ago, Google discontinued Google Earth Plus, their $20/year augmented version of Google Earth. At the time, they said they would add one of Plus’s key features, support for direct connection of a GPS receiver, to the free version in the near future. With this week’s release of Google Earth 5.0, lots of [...]

There is a great presentation uploaded to the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009 Blog by John Powell of eMapSite titled, “Spatial SQL: Who Needs a Traditional GIS?”  John uses business cases to provide many of us an introduction to OpenGIS spatial data types as implemented in MySQL.

I believe this is a timely presentation because of yesterday’s editorial by the All Points Blog that:

“Open source is in the news again. This past week the US Dept. of Defence announced Forge.mil, an open source project repository akin to SourceForge. Last month President Obama tapped Sun co-founder Scott McNealy to prepare a document on open source and its potential role in government. But what of open source GIS? How is that corner of geospatial being funded and groomed for growth?”

The cost of vendor provided software has become so outrageous that the federal government will soon turn to open source as legitimate way to satisfy the government’s software needs. We have already seen the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) implement Google Earth visualization solutions; solutions which aren’t free, but are only a fraction of the cost of traditional GIS visualization tools. Turning to an open source software provider to provide GIS tools could help the federal government dramatically reduce the cost of implementing spatial technology. I will be watching to see what happens over the next couple of weeks on this front.

Posted by Rick Marshall