First up, I have resigned from my position at Landgate starting December 1. Its been a great four years working with all sorts of industry and government personnel around Australia but its time to go. Landgate really is an innovative land information provider so if you are interested in a “bleeding edge” position specialising in spatial web service delivery, the job has now been advertised on Seek.com.au. I’m not aware of anything else in the government sector like this in Australia so get writing as it would be great to know a solid candidate will fill my rather large shoes

It is with no surprise then that i have accepted a new position at ERDAS to be based in Brisbane in the new year. ERDAS’ recent aquisitions and alignment towards strong OGC support has provided sufficent interest for me to join the team to dabble, tweak, prod and spread their internet solutions around Asia/Pacific. Watch this space!

Many will know much of my time over the years has been spent on the SLIP spatial data infrastructure in Western Australia. Its kinda sad to walk away from it, but its at a state now that I am  confident the system will continue to grow as demand keeps increasing. Its time to hand over the reigns, so to speak. If you have no idea about the project, please check it out. Its very much a world leading project, not because its a new idea, but because we’ve actually deployed a system across a wide range of sectors. Its with great pleasure to announce then that in the last week we have been awarded both the WA Premiers award and the Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Award for Spatially Enabled Government which is great to be formally recognised in the community. While I wasn’t successful in the Young Professional category, i’ve still got a few more years to apply before i hit 35 Kudos to my offsider, Patrick Fitzgerald for picking up the Student of the year for two years running

In less exciting news, I am currently transitioning domains (again). It became clear this year that an address like http://chris.narx.net simply caused people to think i was American (a little too often for my liking). The current webmapper.com.au will be updated soon to yet another domain but the move will be transparent but the old address will still redirect automatically. So just to confirm, no I do not do consulting in the US, but thanks for the emails!

It certainly won’t be the end of me and this blog. It appears i might have even more time to write more frequently at ERDAS with would be great. Change is a good thing, and I look forward to see where we end up in the next 12 months

Chris

From the press release,

CarbonArc PRO 1.6 eliminates barriers to SDI usability through advanced SOA-based discovery, analysis, exploitation, transaction management and security tools for OGC SDI – directly from the ESRI ArcGIS desktop.

Instead of just regurgitating the release, the key question that always gets asked is … doesn’t ESRI ArcGIS already do all this?

Its a tricky question to answer because while on paper i could say, “Yes it does!”, in reality there are just so many annoying quirks and missing features, it quickly becomes a nightmare integrating SDI features into your normal ArcGIS workflow (which is what this is all about, right?).  So with fingers crossed, lets dive right in and see what i can find in 5 minutes flat …

The Good

1. Well laid out and robust tool set which delivers fully functional WMS/WFS/WFST/WCS capabilities … with no mucking about required!. The thing just works.
2. Very easy export to Shapefile tool
3. Full featured filter encoding support … no black magic, user has full control
4. Full access to the query string for all service types
5. Caching of features / images when saving to project files

The Bad

1. GML Integration will always be difficult given its a completely new ArcGIS feature source, but its still not up to the average users expectations I dont think. There is no attribute table, the features are independant of pretty much all other ArcGIS functionality so you are really left with GAIA functionality squished into an ArcGIS window.
2. Web services request headers are devoid of any accept-encoding headers. I’m still pondering the choice of Expect: 100 requests … but i’m sure there’s a good reason in the depths of HTTP …
3. The exclusive tool for CubeWerx “Identity Management Service” seems a bit strange as i’m not aware of any services that use this technology? Shoot me a link if i missed something!
4. Lack of support for any WMS LegendGraphics. Users can choose from multiple Styles, but theres no way to actually view legend information which is a bit disappointing
5. In the full minute spent trying, i wasnt able to get the WFST support working … i could get as far as the schema but as soon as i’d try to insert a feature the thing would just bail out.

I’m beginning to think the best suggestion would be to somehow merge CarbonArc WFS functionality with an automated export to shape on each filter response. This would allow excellent SDI WFS support, while still giving full ESRI ArcGIS functionality to users without having to reinvent the wheel (for things like the edit system). With the WMS/WCS support pretty solid, i think getting the balance of WFS right could mean the difference between a very promising product and one I would recommend to everyone using our platform.

Thoughts?

A few more suggestions to improve things further (for anyone listening~) …

1. Add HTTP compression handling. Huge performance gains with the transfer of features and its really a no brainer to enable in any http library.
2. I am by no means a “Mapinfo Master” ™, but it would be great to enable an automated WFS Table refresh especially if you are retrieving features based on CURRENT_MAPPER.  I guess the CTRL+F5 shortcut makes it easy-ish … but i certainly found myself wondering whether i had retrieved the features or not and ended up just sending unnecessary requests.
3. If a transaction is successful, give me some kind of alert. Alerting only when it fails does not instill much confidence whether my long edit session went through or not (even after refreshing)
4. It would be fantastic to add helpful warning messages when performance drops. I’d imagine most users would skim over the maxfeatures and column / row filters and just add the layer.

If the first request takes 5 minutes and Mapinfo tells me i just retrieved 4000 poly features totalling 10mb and it kindly directed me to the WFS how-to, i’d be more inclined to see what the filtering options were all about

So there’s no WFS1.1 support … but i’m still trying to get my head around handling the axis order issue and are more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie … at least for the moment. I only had time to test against our Geoserver installs, but it certainly seems tested against many other apps including Cadcorp, Ionic & Mapinfo. Geoserver specific here, but the advanced security in 1.6.x works very well with the bundled support for basic authentication.

Finally…

The opportunities this opens up to both the Geo community and also Joe Public is quite huge. Enter GeoRSS. Your time to shine has arrived

Many websites have geo-relevant content – including, but not limited to, Google Maps, Yelp, Craigslist, Trulia, Gruvr, and many more. Just check the source of the feed to see if there is a latitude/longitude provided for each item in the feed, and if so, the odds are good that it will work as a MyFeed on MyDash.

Hopefully this will continue across the PND market. *fingers crossed* The only downer (apart from the price) ?

It will not work in Canada, Mexico, Europe or any location outside the United States

It gives us great pleasure to announce that the pilot application awarded the development contract for the gvSIG Mobile application by the Regional Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport is available. gvSIG Mobile is a smaller version of gvSIG which has been adapted for use in mobile devices. It supports shapefiles, ECW, WMS and images and is able to make use of GPS systems. Currently, only the visualization of layers and the generation of GPS tracklogs/waypoints are supported.

gvSIG Mobile … available at gvSIG website http://www.gvsig.gva.es

I must thank the gvSIG guys for helping me out with my WALIS Forum presentation by supplying me with a pre-release copy. Implemented a work around in 5mins and had it talking to our SDI straight away. Anyone with a Windows Mobile device, its definately worth checking out and things will become more interesting pending the gvSig and OSGEO talks.

In other news, i am officially slack. But the good news is that i have been harassed by that many people at events and on email that i will begin making a concerted effort posting more regularly now. SO LAY OFF!

WALIS Forum has been and gone for another 18 months. Attendance was the biggest yet, with 820 through the doors. Highlights for me (in no particular order)..

• Tim trying to do updates throughout the conf but stopping after the first post. Hey, i never said i was going to!
• Harvey from Microsoft failing miserably trying to demo photosynth live. I feel ya pain buddy, i really do, but we had seen it all before anyway
• Mr Parsons with the usual tidbits of humour. My only feedback would have been tailoring another presentation addressing the “short tail” as 95% of the attendees were the custodians and advanced spatial users. Certainly from my point of view, addressing how Google is tackling this area would have been far more interesting from a GeoWeb perspective! Next time.
• Leaving a room of 100 people stunned after a presentation but then all saying what a great presentation it was. Hmmmm?
• Cameron not taking a breath, ever, throughout the 2 day conference. That man can talk.

After a couple of hours I seriously only found,

• http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/projects/wcsClientLite/
• on Globalmapper’s todo list
• Cadcorp SIS
• gvSIG
• Vague references to ArcGIS 9x support … vapourware?
• A classic Dimitri Manifold post
• and no hits on the long list of clients at vterrain.org

Suggesting users manually craft the requests is not an option

I guess this kinda gets back to my previous rants on this issue. We’ve got Deegree, Geoserver, Mapserver and quite a few other notable suppliers pushing coverages out … to where exactly??

It seems absurd how many people grab the whole SRTM/Landsat/DEMs in general just because “its easier”. After looking into WCS, perhaps they are right. Chicken meet egg, again.

• weird uri encoding
• apps pretending to talk SSL but only on some requests
• not supporting BASIC authentication when they say they do
• clients not sending the required STYLES WMS kvp
• sending hundreds upon hundreds of chunked requests …

then these scripts/apps may be for you. They are pretty generic and can be applied to any AJAX-type cross-domain restriction. The only OGC specific type line is the string replace of the online resource with the proxy uri (for obvious reasons for the getcapabilities document).

Other recommends ..

1. For desktop based apps, i highly recommend fiddler2 as man in the middle proxy interceptor for debugging HTTP. It even does HTTPS mitm
2. If you want to enable HTTPS/BASIC authentication on a desktop client that doesnt support it, check out InteProxy or email me for my own “Gismo” command line version. This will allow apps such as GRASS or QGIS which only has standard WMS support to magically start working on these services

But if you are just trying to get your poor OpenLayers application talking to that lonesome WFS server sitting on the interweb, these might come in handy!

Note that these are open proxies by default!

< ?php
	$urlparams = urldecode($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);
         $ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url."&Styles=");
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST,  2);
 	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Openlayers proxy - CTweedie hax"); // Set a different user-agent so we can track usage easier
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR,1);
	//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
   	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);  // the next 3 lines makes it work through https SSL3 with authorization.
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSLVERSION, 3);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $user.":".$pass);
	$data = curl_exec($ch); // Execute query
        $data = str_replace("https://www.wms.com/server/to/reflect/to?","https://www.wms.com/server/proxy?", $data)
        $content_type = curl_getinfo( $ch, CURLINFO_CONTENT_TYPE );
	header('Content-Type: '.$content_type);
	echo $data;
	curl_close($ch);
>

Python equivalent … almost identical to the OpenLayers version. In most situations, py urllib runs hands down quicker than php curl but it could well be my dodgy code!

#!/usr/bin/env python -u
 
import urllib
import urllib2
import cgi
import socket
import msvcrt
import os
import sys
msvcrt.setmode(sys.stdout.fileno(), os.O_BINARY)
# timeout in seconds
timeout = 15
socket.setdefaulttimeout(timeout)
 
fs = cgi.FieldStorage()
urlt = "https://www.wms.com/server/to/reflect/to?"
 
for i in fs.keys():
  urlt += i+"="+fs[i].value+"&"
url = urllib.unquote(urlt)
try:
    if url.startswith("http://") or url.startswith("https://"):
           passman = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()      # this creates a password manager
           passman.add_password(None, urlt, 'user', 'password')      # because we have put None at the start it will always use this username/password combination
           authhandler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(passman)                 # create the AuthHandler
           opener = urllib2.build_opener(authhandler)
           urllib2.install_opener(opener)
        y = urllib2.urlopen(url)
 
        headers = str(y.info()).split('\n')
        for h in headers:
            if h.startswith("Content-Type:"):
                print h
        print
        print y.read().replace("https://www.wms.com/server/to/reflect/to?","https://www.wms.com/server/proxy?")
        y.close()
    else:
        print """Content-Type: text/plain Illegal request."""
except Exception, E:
    print "Status: 500 Unexpected Error"
    print "Content-Type: text/plain"
    print
    print url
    print "Some unexpected error occurred. Error text was:", E

Second bravo goes to Flamingo mapping components, a new (i think) dutch GPL mapviewer. I happened to stumble onto these guys’ Flash based WMS client the other day and all i can say is hooray! Finally a flash client which is separated into components, has a neat interface and is actually configurable WITHOUT requiring Flash CS3 just to change the stupid service URI.

Take a look at some of the upcoming features in the stack. Anyone in the web mapping space has got to be excited about these …

1. “Look into my lines” … AGG support in the new Mapserver 5.0 beta! Its incredible how much difference high quality antialiasing makes to web mapping applications. G/Y/M tiles raised the bar in that respect and Mapserver is certainly catching up to that quality. Mapnik is another choice, but is feature lacking in comparison.



 

2. DMSolutions Mapguide Fusion. Wow, such a powerful tool for deploying quick apps. It kinda reminds me how i felt after first seeing the ArcIMS website publisher, although obviously the similarities end there. Customising the old Mapguide clients was a fairly painful experience modifying 20 frames for the layout. Hoping Fusion improves this 10 fold.
3. Geoserver’s move to 1.6 adds the WFS1.1 implementation and GeoJSON output plugins. Although Deegree and Featureserver have offered these for a while, im always partial having a flexible single application rather than supporting multiple.

Now the hard part for me is deciding which one to start playing with first!

I’m surprised at the lack of outburst by the pro-standards community. This makes me think they are humbled by your views. I’d expect somebody out there to stick up for OGC and the other standards you mentioned. It would be intriguing to hear someone from DM Solutions or Ionic, for instance.

Even though i am not Ionic, DMsolutions … here are some thoughts from someone who thinks the OGC has created some pretty darned useful standards.

A retort to one of Charlie’s post if you will ..

Rendering Maps. The argument i often see with the WMS bashing goes something like, “WMS is slow. Who uses it in an Enterprise architecture. G/Y/M dont use it, therefore by my intelligent calculations, WMS must be useless”. Lets back up a second. If you want a high performance, slippy interface that can be easily cached, tiling is certainly your best bet. I get the distinct feeling that a lot of people forget the disadvantages of a tiled mapping cache,

1. Fixed scales. The amount of people i see who simply generate their zoom levels based on GMaps is crazy. What about what your users want? If there are any papers detailing why splitting the world into 18 distinct zoom levels is ideal, please tell me. I’m yet to find one. One size will never fit all.
2. Redundant data storage. Active caching mechanisms whereby caches are only populated once browsed is nifty, but it also negates somewhat the advantage of using a cache. Conversely, if you pregenerate your entire cache you are more than likely storing 80% (number plucked from the sky) more data than you need. We also arent even touching the storage of the source data either here, or considering the time required to maintain the cache when you are using volatile datasets.
3. Lack of integration across clients. The whole benefit of standards it to enable cross-use, cross-communication amongst clients and servers. This is non evident amongst tile servers (beyond of course worldkit and openlayers). Sure, WMS-C / TMS are hopefully gathering steam at the moment, but if you are considering integration right now across a gamut of applications, nothing is better than WMS for transferring maps over the interweb to multiple clients. People seem to be losing sight of this purpose every day.
4. And the kicker for me … Absolutely no customisation. Dont want that road layer? You better hope they duplicated the cache and removed them otherwise you’re in trouble. Want the map in a useful cartographic projection? Duplicate again! Hmmm, can you colour the cadastre yellow instead of red? No, but i can duplicate the cache again for you. I could go on, but you should get the idea ..

And finally, “Arbitrary bounding boxes” are your friends Mr Charlie! Let your users decide their output scale, not the magical we-chose-18-scales-coz-google-wanted-a-nice-single-square-tile-at-zoom-level-0

Summing up, WMS is your friend regardless. Don’t toss it out with the bathwater just because you are using a cache with a slippy map. Implementing WMS and whatever tiling scheme you can easily abstract *AROUND* WMS will give you and your users the best of both worlds. The fact that you can quite easily use any random WMS server inside a tiling scheme surely highlights that the standard does have flexibility.

Time is at a premium at the moment so i wont reply to all Charlie’s points (especially sharing data because we could be here forever). All in all i can see his point of view however we need to remember that we can only work with what we have at the moment, despite their flaws. GeoRSS/Atom/OWS Context/KML ratifying are all coming, its just up to the rest of us to pick up the ball and keep running with it so this will never be true again,

Web mapping standards are going through a transitional state and haven’t kept up with GIS technology breakthroughs over the last few years.

Chris.