Ronan’s Blog

Very handy tip today on how to drastically improve seek times in results for spatial queries, by physically re-ordering the rows of data to be contiguous on disk.

VERY HANDY.
SpatialDB Advisor: Spatial Sorting of Data via Morton Key

Google have today released a static Map API, for generating simple single image, non-interactive map images.

What are the benefits of this API?
To Google -> Decreased Bandwidth and processing, if static maps will suffice (for example a location map on a business webpage), then a single request on their data will be enough, rather than placing a map with panning & zooming capabilities on it.
To the User -> A single image map can be copied & pasted into e-mails & documents more easily for your average user, so that they don’t need an image editing tool.
So why do they feel this completely new API is required?
A slightly different operating mode (i.e. Single Image Mode) in the existing API with a simple set of instructions would surely be enough.
Google Static Maps API

At eSpatial we’re getting ready to release iSMART 5.3, one of the major new features is a completely revamped online spatial data editing capability. In the development team, we’re all pretty excited about its capabilities, because it like nothing we’ve seen before in a pure web (i.e. No Applet) mode.
Click the link below to get access to the early-access demo recording.
eSpatial _ next generation geospatial technology

I’ve been watching with interested as a whole lot of people get excited about the new “My Maps” functionality in Google Maps. It looks quite impressive, but is really nothing new, well not to me anyway. We’ve been writing on-line digitizing functionality for a few years now adding more and more functionality with every release, the difference being that our product is a commercial one, which you will not find too many free-to-access public deployments of it which allows digitizing functionality.

Google Maps and our product have always had quite a different focus/market position and this is the first time that they’ve crossed paths (Ignoring the export to KMZ functionality I wrote last year). However, rather than starting to worry about another major competitor, I maintain the same position that I had when writing my Thesis (gCommerce - How GIS is facilitating modern business), that publicly available mapping solutions will just increase the usage of on-line maps and ultimately lead to generating more business as a whole for the industry.

I do feel a vague sense of jealously watching all the praise that I am reading for the “My Maps” functionality, but such is life I guess !

Google Maps: My Maps

Canadian Spatial data is now available online for download for free.
Its a bit disorganised in the various formats e.g. dxf & e00 files for Vector data), personally I would have preferred to have Oracle Spatial dump files available for download, but each to their own I guess.

The data by area and data types, but there’s so much data in there that it may take a while to find what you actually want or are interested in. Then the data format may be difficult for you to use without some conversion software. Organising by data format might have been a good idea also.

Download here: http://www.geogratis.gc.ca

Interesting “glitch” in Google Maps, you can get directions from New York to Dublin.

Link to Image
Direct Link to Google Maps

Gotta love direction step #23 : Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi

www.DublinPubCrawl.net

How did I ever Live without this site !!!

I’ve been beta testing Oracle 11g database since it has been made available (5 months ago) to certain Oracle Certified Partners. This was kicked off with a week long introduction session in San Francisco in November.

Since I work for eSpatial, I was primarily interested in the new Spatial features that are contained with 11g; these are: 3D data & TIN’s (Triangular Irregular Networks) and Spatial Web Services as well as improvements to the GeoRaster and Newtwork data model features.

3D Data & TIN’s
This is a major new feature which looks extremely powerful on first look. It should take a lot of the current complexity out of 3D spatial data analysis and querying. It will allow software companies without hugely complex desktop applications (such as eSpatial) to work with 3D data much easier than would have ever have been previously possible.

Web Services
This is a funny one. In your typical 3-tier architecture (Database -> Application Server -> Client) you would assume that any Web Services would be running in the Application Server, simply configured around the underlying data. However, since this is a database feature, the configuration is a little complex, requiring extra database metadata. Having said that, I believe that this feature would be of use to Oracle Spatial users that do not currently have any OGC Web Services yet implemented. (Which I imagine is a very limited number).

GeoRaster Improvements
The 11g GeoRaster improvements are excellent. Its so much faster than it was in 10g and really gives the feel of a finished product. We’ve loaded entire US GeoRaster datasets into an 11g install, which was running on an under-spec’d PC (768MB RAM & 1GHz processor) and it still performed really well.

I’ve not yet really looked at the Network data model changes, so I cannot comment.

What I also good is that the Spatial Java API (JavaDoc) is now one complete API for all libraries. I did have an issue because these libraries were complied with Java 5, causing them to not work on my existing software installations, and Oracle 11g installed Java 5 as default on your PC anyway, which may prove issues for some developers/deployers, but I’ve requested 1.4 versions of the libraries to be included with the next release.

On the whole, the performance of 11g is extremely good, it feels very solid.