Integrating OSM, Navteq and ArcGIS Online with Smallworld

Here are some demo videos showing how you can integrate OpenStreetMap, Navteq and ArcGIS Online (or ESRI Data Appliance) data with Smallworld. The videos only show capabilities. It is up to the user to secure appropriate licensing from the relevant data vendors.

Viewing Brisbane (AUS) flood imagery in Smallworld Applications

If you have been reading world news recently, you will have seen much reported about flooding in and around Brisbane, Australia. The disaster has been devastating to the people in its path and I wish them well as they try to piece their lives together in the aftermath.

I realized that there might be value in taking recent flood imagery and integrating it as a layer in various Smallworld telecom and utility applications. With this data a technician could determine which hubs or switch gear might be under water. The key to this, though, is to have near realtime flood imagery. Enter NearMap.com. They have flood imagery as of January 13 for Brisbane. You can view all their activity announcements at http://twitter.com/NearMap.

I have created a silent video of a proof-of-concept of integrating Smallworld with NearMap's Brisbane flood imagery. At the end of the video there is also a section on creating Smallworld trails from OpenStreetMap data. Remember that this is all data accessed over the web with no need to host any data on your servers.

The integration is done with Web Maps Connector which is a product offered by my employer iFactor Consulting.

SEPM Launches a YouTube Channel

Robert at SEPM took my suggesting in a recent post seriously enough to create a SEPM YouTube Channel. The first video is up and shows some very cool stuff that he has been working on.

If you are considering creating your own channel, please consider tagging the videos with "swgis". On Twitter you can use the #swgis hashtag.

Another use of OpenStreetMap within Smallworld

Up until today, I was aware of only two Smallworld-based products that incorporate OpenStreetMap (aka OSM. see http://www.openstreetmap.org) data into a Smallworld application:

1. iFactor Consulting's (my employer) Web Maps Connector; and
2. another company working on OSM to be released soon.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see an announcement from SEPM today that one of the recent products they have released is SEPM X-Database "Open Street Map". You can read more about the product by downloading SEPM_2010_02_New_Features.pdf and browsing to page 20.

At the Smallworld Americas Users Conference this year I presented on OpenStreetMap integration with Smallworld (download presentation here). I presented heavily on using tile based OSM rendering in Smallworld together with downloading vector data on demand. I also mentioned other approaches such as setting up your own server or downloading OSM data into a VMDS partition. Now it seems that SEPM has taken that latter approach and is presenting OSM in VMDS. Clearly there are advantages/disadvantages to the different approaches (e.g., fetching tiles via a web service vs. having all the OSM data in VMDS). But the beautiful thing of having different options is that you can pick the one that fits yours needs best. And the OSM price is not one to be argued with :)

Now if we can just get SEPM to put a video up on YouTube demoing this product...

Using #FME to mash open data into #OSM addresses

While this video is not strictly related to Smallworld, it does describe mashing open data from various sources into something usable in a destination database. The "Big World" forum at the #swuc recently covered the area of open data and I thought this might be of interest to some of you out there.

In this case, the demo takes open parcel and address information from the Boulder City and Boulder County (Colorado, USA), processes it with FME and writes data into a format that can be uploaded into OpenStreetMap for the world to see.

A low-tech mobile field solution #sworld #osm

With all the cool hi-tech mobile field solutions available out there, I thought I would mention a very low-tech one.

http://walking-papers.org provides a way of printing out your maps onto paper. These paper maps have georeferencing marks on them. You take them out into the field, make your redlining changes and then when you come back into the office, you scan them and then upload the scan. The scanned maps are georeferenced onto the background map and made available for a back-office technician to digitize the data and red-lined attributes into the database.

Seems very simple yet effective. I'm not suggesting that Smallworld customers adopt this approach, but when thinking about mobile solutions I think it is good to understand the broad range of options and learn from them.

Smallworld and OpenStreetMap at #swuc

My presentation at the Smallworld Users Conference is titled "Let Other People Maintain Your Landbase (Without Having to Pay Them)". It could just as easily have been titled "Integrating OpenStreetMap with Smallworld".

I will be covering some options for how the utility can move out of the business of maintaining landbase. Most of the presentation will be an introduction to OpenStreetMap and how you might make use of that in your Smallworld applications. If you cannot make it to the presentation, let me know and I will send you the slides.

The presentation is on Friday, September 10 in Key Ballroom 3 from 3:45-4:25pm.

On Saturday, September 11, GE will be hosting a forum titled "Smallworld and the Big World". One of the agenda items is related to "open data". I will be attending that forum and hopefully actively participating in the "open data" bit. This forum will be in Key Ballroom 4 from 2:45-4:30pm.

See you in Baltimore! I am looking forward to meeting lots of people. Please stop by the iFactor booth and say hi.

Smallworld and the Big World #swuc

Recently the organizers for the Smallworld Americas Users Conference sent out an e-mail related to booking your exhibit booth. If you saw the subject line and ignored the e-mail (maybe because you are not a vendor), you would have missed a significant announcement. I have copied the announcement here in case you missed it...

====begin announcement====

This year we are introducing a new session on the agenda that may interest you…it is open to all attendees including customers, partners, and GE staff:

Smallworld and the Big World – Saturday September 11th 2:45-4:30pm, with a 15 minute break at 3:30

After a week of concentrating on products and applications within the Smallworld community, we’d like to shift the focus outside: how we relate to the bigger world.

This session is an open forum to discuss things like:

· visibility (making Smallworld and MapFrame more visible in the geospatial arena)

· standards (OGC and others)

· policy (stimulus, other government actions)

· technology trends (smart phones, neo-geo, social networking)

· organizations (sources of information and influence).

====end announcement====

I particularly am interested in the "technology trends" item. I have started doing work with integrating OpenStreetMap (neo-geo) with Smallworld (paleo-geo?) and now seeing that GE is going to have a forum about that is very encouraging. My presentation on OSM and Smallworld integration is currently scheduled for the same time as the open forum, but I am trying to get the time changed so I can be part of the forum as well.

I also see that they want to discuss social networking. In a past blog I have suggested that conference attendees try tweeting about all things conference-related under the hashtag #swuc. I think the amount of traffic on that hashtag could be gauge of how much the Smallworld community is already into this technology trend.

Could GE encourage their attending employees to start tweeting/blogging about conference proceedings? That would be very encouraging.

Exciting things happening in the Smallworld realm!

Smallworld and OpenStreetMap #swuc

Lately I have become very interested in the possibilities of integrating data from http://www.openstreetmap.org (aka OSM) with Smallworld. You can find out more about the mission of OSM at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org, but in summary…

“OpenStreetMap creates and provides free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways.” (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page)

Think of OSM as Wikipedia but on a world-wide geographic database. I am presenting at this year’s Smallworld Americas Users Conference in September a presentation entitled “Let other people maintain your landbase (without having to pay them)”. It will be a discussion of some options available to Smallworld users to get out of the landbase maintenance business. Most of it will be centered around OpenStreetMap and how you can integrate that freely available data as a Smallworld data layer (both raster and vector data). The session will be in the last time slot of the conference on Saturday, so if you are interested in the topic but cannot attend the presentation, please let me know and I will send you the slides.

As an example of OSM data, if you are a utility that has Bakersfield, California, USA in your service area, have a look at this link http://osm.org/go/TY4w8rXaV- This is the OSM data that is available for this area. If you read the attribution on the features in this view, you can see that someone got the data from the City of Bakersfield GIS download site. You don’t get that kind of building detail (even individual trees!) from Bing or Google. Although if you do integrate aerial imagery into Smallworld you could just see the building profiles. But if you are testing the viability of integrating external datasets with your Smallworld environment, you might want to consider OSM. The price is right and the data quality/quantity keeps increasing. The beauty of OSM data is that if you know that some data is missing or incorrect in the map, you can make edits to the database yourself and the changes will be available on the map within an hour or two. That kind of turn-around is not available from most other data vendors. Clearly there are trade-offs between using OSM vs. Bing/Navteq/TeleAtlas but that is what I hope to cover in my presentation.

If anyone has questions about how OSM could be integrated into their Smallworld database, please let me know.