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Strange turn of events in my last two blog posts.  In this post Google announces the introduction of usage limits on their Google Maps API.  This post comes just after the ESRI Insider post highlighting ESRI’s effort to offer free web-based GIS For Everyone by Anyone.  Google has made their pile of money through advertizing while offering free services to their many users, and ESRI has made their pile of money through very high priced, but incredibly good, mapping software.  These two posts are opposite of what I would expect.  Kudos to ESRI on making crowd sourcing and community mapping a new part of their corporate direction.  They have talked about it for years and now they have done something about it.  Congrats to Bern Szukalski and the ArcGIS Online Team.

Google has made some changes to their Google Maps API Terms of Service; adding usage limits to the free API and beginning to charge for usage that exceeds the limits.  I hope they will reverse this policy now that ESRI’s ArcGIS Online offers capabilities similar to those of Google Maps.  Competition is a good thing, something that Google excels at.  Who would have thought with the history of both companies that Google would be charging for a service similar to one that ESRI offers for free.

Here is the entire GeoDeveloper Blog post as written by Thor Mitchell:

When the Maps API Terms of Service were updated in April of this year we announced that usage limits would be introduced to the Maps API starting on October 1st. With October upon us, I’d like to provide an update on how these limits are being introduced, and the impact it will have on your Maps API sites.

The usage limits that now apply to Maps API sites are documented in the Maps API FAQ. However no site exceeding these limits will stop working immediately. We understand that developers need time to evaluate their usage, determine if they are affected, and respond if necessary. There are three options available for sites that are exceeding the limits:

• Reduce your usage to below the limits
• Opt-in to paying for your excess usage at the rates given in the FAQ
• Purchase a Maps API Premier license

To assist in evaluating whether your site is exceeding the usage limits we will shortly be adding the Maps API to the Google APIs Console. Once available you will be able to track your usage in the APIs Console by providing an APIs Console key when you load the Maps API. If you find that your site does exceed the usage limits each day you can opt to pay for your excess usage by enabling billing on your APIs Console project. We will then start billing excess usage to your credit card when we begin enforcing the usage limits in early 2012.

For very popular sites Maps API Premier is likely to be a more cost effective option. It also offers a number of additional benefits, including terms that permit for-fee and internal use, enterprise technical support, a Service Level Agreement, fixed and invoiced annual pricing, and increased quotas for the Maps API Web Services. For more information on how Maps API Premier could benefit your application please contact the Sales team using this form.

We will announce the availability of the Maps APIs in the APIs Console on this blog later this quarter, and provide more details on how to set up an APIs Console account and update your Maps API application with an APIs Console key. We will also provide at least 30 days notice on this blog before enforcement of the usage limits and billing for excess usage begins.

We understand that the introduction of these limits may be concerning. However with the continued growth in adoption of the Maps API we need to secure its long term future by ensuring that even when used by the highest volume for-profit sites, the service remains viable. By introducing these limits we are ensuring that Google can continue to offer the Maps API for free to the vast majority of developers for many years to come.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Product Manager, Google Maps API

Great post on the ESRI insider Blog by Bern Szukalski on the benefits and simplicity of using ArcGIS Online to create web-based map templates.  I really like the capability ArcGIS Online brings to those of us without a server to publish web-maps.  Keep up the great work ESRI.

Here is the post in its entirity:

Earlier this week I was meeting with one of the directors of a large state agency. Among other topics we discussed, he told me that his organization was adopting a policy to move away from custom application development. Whenever possible they would serve internal and public needs with off-the-shelf applications, or better yet, with those that can be easily custom-configured without the need for programming.

We finished digitizing the primary Route 66 highway from Chicago, Illinois to Santa Monica, California on ArcGIS Online. You can see the map on ArcGIS Online at: http://bit.ly/ouLaKV or view it from the applet below.

The entire route is digitized along with selected roadside attractions along the route in Illinois. We would like to solicit your favorite content (places, pictures, postcards, etc) from places along the route. If you have content you would like to see added to the map please let us know at rick.marshall@verticalgeo.com

View Larger Map

The Google LatLong Blog had the following post by Bernd Steinert today:


This month’s update to 45° imagery in Google Maps includes U.S. and international imagery.

Let’s just begin with Graz. It’s the second largest city of Austria (behind Vienna), located in Steiermark. It is a typical Austrian town with a vivid university life, a charming historic center mostly of the Gothic period and is significantly influenced by mediterranean climate which manifests being among the sunniest places in Austria due to its location at the southeastern rim of the Alps. Arnold Schwarzenegger – bodybuilding world champion, movie star and former governor of California – was born and raised nearby.

Great post on the georelated.com blog that outlines the rapid rise in use of globes and how WebGL can help provide globe-like mapping solutions on the web. Great summary of why globes are important and why they have become so popular:

The rise of Globe in Web Mapping

In the last post “The Fall of the Tiled Map Image”Georelated.com provided some background on why we believe web mapping is on the cusp of a new generation moving away from the image tile map to vector mapping. In this post we will examine the potential of HTML 5 Globe Web Mapping and the changes in technology that make this possible.

Why are globes useful?

Globes provide highly consumable visualizations  of geographic data. Globes require no understanding of the concept of a cartographic map or projections being based on a more widely understood representation of the earth. This means almost anyone can understand data presented on a globe. At street level globe visualisations appear little different to 2D mapping but have significant advantages for widespread geographic data. Globes can be more difficult to navigate but generally offer a compelling alternative to 2D web mapping.

There are several desktop and plugin based solutions for Globe map visualization. The most popular with consumers being Google Earth. ESRI offers a similar capability in ArcGIS Explorerand NASA provides an open source equivalent and development control called World Wind. The problem with these solutions is their dependence on desktop software or heavy plugins.

What are the problems of a desktop software solution?

For enterprises to cost effectively roll out desktop software most organizations include geospatial software within their controlled desktop builds. This enables automated roll out to many machines in a controlled manner. It provides consistency, reduces the cost of deploying software and ensures simplified support. Creating, testing and rolling out a build or build update takes considerable resource, time and cost to ensure all the hardware, software and security configurations are managed. As a result roll outs tend to be aligned with significant operating system or office productivity updates. Hence, its not something an organization can do frequently or will prioritize for a single application update and is usually associated with high costs. The impact of infrequent software updates is that desktop software gets frozen at the version when the build was created for the lifetime of the build. This prevents users from easily accessing new releases of software and the capability they offer.

For consumers a desktop software solution is usually only provided where a solution is standalone or a web alternative is not possible. Handling the number of variants of operating system, language run times and dependencies is an expensive solution.

Why are browser plugins not the answer?

1. Plugins are a barrier to adoption. It’s generally accepted that generation X has a very low tolerance of information systems that are not immediately consumable. Installing a small plugin application from a unrecognizable source to view a web page is counter intuitive in a web 2.0 world.
2. Plugins are unpopular with IT buyers. To ensure security and help maintain appropriate use policies most organizations prevent browser plugins from being installed by end users. It’s normal practice to include widely used and trusted plugins within a desktop build unfortunately this has the same limitations of desktop deployments.
3. Plugins are a poor replacement for native browser capability. They operate within the browsers plugin container. This limits the plugins access to native capability and constrains options to deliver high performance as required for globe visualization.

Is there an alternative?

HTML 5 introduced WebGL. WebGL extends a browsers Javascript to support interactive 3D graphics without the need for plugins. It provides hardware graphics support enabling high performance rendering and globe mapping. WebGL is already supported in all major browsers except IE accounting for around 50% of the browser usage. A summary of browser support is below.

• Firefox – since v4.0
• Chrome since v9.0
• Safari since v5.1
• Opera 12 – support has reached beta
• Internet Explorer - Microsoft has currently not agreed to implement WebGL in Internet Explorer (IE) citing security concerns. There are no plans for WebGL for IE 10. These security concerns have been independently validated (Context Information Security Limited, US-CERT). The  Khronos Group who manage the WebGL specification have proposed updates to WebGL to resolve the issues. Mozzila has suggested that their implementation prevents some of the issues (here).

There are already some good examples of globes implemented in pure HTML 5.

• World Population Globe – Google Data Arts Team
• ReadMap – WebGL globe client (elevation example)
• WebGLEarth
• Open Web Globe (below)

Open Web Globe

In addition to this other HTML 5 features such as Web Sockets (push connections), WebWorkers (background threads) and IndexDB (structured browser storage) should allow developers to create high performance and interactive globes in web browsers.

Conclusion

Globes provide highly accessible, easily consumable map data visualizations. WebGL offers opportunities to provide plugin free web mapping visualization as globes. At present browser support for WebGL is good but not complete due to the absence of support in IE. Support for IE users could be handled with WebGL plugins in the short term. There are some concerns over security in the early editions of the WebGL standard that are in progress to being resolved.

ESRI just released the latest in their ESRI TV video services.  The latest shows us “What’s New in ArcGIS Online.”  I really like the capability ArcGIS Online brings to those who don’t have a server to publish their work online.  I think as this capability matures it will help ESRI catch up to the head start they have given Google Earth and Google Maps.  It is very interesting to see the race to capture the “economy and power of free.”

It is good to see several of the roadside icons get matching funding grants for preservation. Here is a link to the announcement for the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program Grant Awards – 2011. They are all worthy recipients! Several places will receive matching awards here locally in Illinois and Missouri.

We have a Great Route 66 event next weekend in Mitchell, Illinois (about 20 minutes from downtown St Louis, Missouri).  It is good to see the old neon signs along Route 66 be re-lit one at at time.  I saw the announcement that matching funds had been awarded to help re-light the Luna Cafe sign and I look forward to seeing the sign in all its brilliance.

The Illinois Route 66 Association provided the following announcement on their webiste regarding the re-lighting ceremony for the Luna Cafe sign in Mitchell, Illinois (a suburb of St Louis in the St Louis Metro East):

Please join your fellow roadies on Saturday evening October 22, 2011 for the special relighting event of the classic neon sign at the historic Luna Cafe in Mitchell, Illinois. Please find attached for your reference and review the official announcement that I sent to various media sources.

For those of you that may not be exactly sure how to reach the Luna, it is located approximately 5 miles east of the Chain of Rocks Bridge on Route 66 in Mitchell, Illinois. Its actual address is 201 East Chain of Rocks Road, Mitchell, IL 62040.

If accessing the location off of Interstate 270, you can take Exit 6 for Illinois Route 111 North – go to first major intersection and turn left (that’s west) on E. Chain of Rocks Road (old Route 66). You’ll see the old Bel Air Drive-In sign on the northwest corner of that intersection. The Luna will be on your right about 1 mile or so down.

These annual relighting parties on the Missouri side have been really neat events the last three years, and its a special experience to celebrate the restoration and rebirth of these vintage neon Route 66 signs.

So, grab your calendar and mark the date down now — plan to get down to the Luna around 6:00 PM so you won’t miss the actual “flip of the switch”! We anticipate a well-attended event with roadies from Missouri, Illinois, and other locales near and far.

Jim also says, “We want a big showing of Route 66 roadies for this event, as the owner of the Luna (Larry Wofford) is planning for a big party! In fact he’s going to have fried chicken and beans and cole slaw ready for 200 people. And special commemorative t-shirts will be available for purchase at a reasonable price also. Should be quite the event!”

Here is a Google Map of the location of the Luna Cafe:

 
View Larger Map

Looking forward to seeing you at the Luna!

Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps and Earth posted a great overview of Google Maps new Graphics Library feature today on the Google LatLong Blog:

You’re now one step closer to experiencing and interacting with a 3D mirror of the real world within your browser with Google MapsGL. Google MapsGL takes Google Maps and harnesses the power of Web Graphics Library (WebGL) to create far richer visuals and animations.

WebGL is a new technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without additional installed software. With WebGL your maps experience is much better with 3D buildings, smoother transitions between imagery and the ability to instantly “swoop” into Street View without a plugin.

Starting today, if you’re using supported browsers (such as Chrome 14+ or Firefox Beta) with compatible video cards, you can opt in to the early beta release. Visit maps.google.com and click “Try it now,” or visit maps.google.com/gl to learn more.

We’ve been using WebGL to create experiences like our Chrome experiments “3 Dreams of Black” and “All is Not Lost,” which happen right in the browser. Previously, such sophisticated 3D graphics have only been possible on traditional desktop applications and have required manual installation. WebGL ushers in a whole new generation of graphics on the web, and with that, we can begin to redefine the expectations of an online map.

Check out Chrome Experiments WebGL for more WebGL-powered applications, and opt in to Google MapsGL to begin using the next generation of mapping today.

There is a great post over on GeoRelated.com about PostGIS Version 2 being a game changer. Good summary of how PostGIS Version 2 relates to PostGRES and the options PostGIS Version 2 provides.  Here’s the post:

PostGIS Version 2: a game changer?

PostGIS for PostGres

For many years there has been a limited choice of geodatabases when looking for a single solution for all geodata models. Only Oracle and ESRI offered comprehensive coverage of spatial models. OracleSpatial provided database models and algs for vector, network, raster and topology in addition to the usual database refinements and in database geocoding. ESRIoffered ArcGIS Server with comprehensive support for Vector, Network and raster models but left topology to the clients and had no offering for geocoding.Competitors such as PostGIS, MapInfo Spatialware, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL only offered support for vectors.

It seems the status quo may be about to change. The elephant in the room has started to shuffle its feet towards the finish line. PostGIS version 2.0 not only has big plans but appears to a considerable way into delivering the promise of support for network and raster models. For those of you in the US a tiger geocoder is also available. It looks like the initial support will provide a reasonable coverage of raster and topological models but as always seems to be the problem with open source projects there is very little supporting visual tools.

Raster
Raster support is delivered through dedicated database data types for raster and GDAL based PostGIS drivers to support a wide range of raster formats. There is reasonably rich support for a first edition including:

• Range of functions to access raster metadata
• Raster band manipulation
• Raster processing
  • Raster value manipulation/calculation (Algebra, reclass, value manipulation)
  • Reprojection
  • Vector to raster conversion
• Transform to GDAL formats

Topology
Support for topology is also provided using PostGres data types. The implementation looks less mature than the raster model appearing to offer predominantly CRUD and import/export style capability only at this stage. There are also limited support for transforming data into the topological model in the database.

Vector  Geometry, Geography and Linear Referencing
PostGIS already has comprehensive support for vector geometries including 2D, 3D and linear referencing. PostGIS also supports geography types often used for global representations in its vector model.

PostGIS v2 will be worth watching in 2012 as it heads strongly into the world of GIS. The open source community makes a strong step forward with this release.