Smallworld Welcome To 2013

I recently saw a tweet welcoming Smallworld-using utilities to 2007...

Welcome to 2007, utilities. Google, GE Join Forces in Energy Sector Mapping Tool energy.aol.com/2013/02/27/goo…
— Helen Fairman (@helen_fairman) February 28, 2013

... while it may be true that the GE/Google announcement brings back memories of 2007, it is also true that Smallworld users have had the option of accessing web maps since at least 2009. You can see many examples of that here and here.

The web mapping world has changed a lot since 2007.  In my opinion, one of the cooler web mapping options involves MapBox.  I have blogged about them here.  MapBox provides a way for users to quickly create beautiful maps and host them on MapBox infrastructure.  You have access to pre-packaged Terrain, Satellite and Road layers that you can then customize to your style and visibility requirements.  In addition, you can create your own map layers and upload them to MapBox.

The following video clip demonstrates Smallworld access to MapBox maps with a specific example around styling your own contour lines and hillshading to integrate with your asset data layers.


While having Smallworld access Google map layers may seem "last decade", it definitely still has its value.  Extending Smallworld even more to access powerful platforms like MapBox solidly moves Smallworld users from 2007 into 2013.

Welcome to the future!  You can find out more about Smallworld web maps integrations here.

Google GE Smallworld demo

The recent partnership announcement by GE and Google is very exciting.  Finally there will be GE product support for cloud-based mapping (no mention was made of the various GE partners that have supplied this functionality for years to varying degrees).

There were lots of articles written about this partnership on the web and the major online news services covered it.  Clearly there is a desire to see GE move in this direction.

The first focus has been on integrating GE's Smallworld enterprise GIS system with Google basemaps.  The GE partner webinar today provided an introduction to some of the tools and applications that will benefit from this partnership.  I have not found online demo videos for the new Smallworld tools, but I expect that the tools will feature prominently at GE demo booths at the upcoming GE 2013 Digital Energy International Software Summit this May.

While we all wait for public demos and evaluation installations, I thought it would be helpful to highlight some of the functionality that Smallworld partners have already developed that already plays in the space that GE is entering.

Basemaps
If GE were to demonstrate a Google Basemap addon that allows Smallworld desktop users to view Google maps as base layers under their asset layers it might look like this (plus a bit more as presented by iFactor Consulting)




Other vendors that provide similar functionality include FCSI and dpgeo.


Network Viewer
Another way to view Smallworld data is to push data snapshots into the cloud and then use browser-based tools to overlay the Smallworld asset data there.  If GE were to demo this functionality it might look like this (plus a bit more as presented by Ubisense)



Another vendor that provides Smallworld-in-the-cloud functionality is Cliffhanger Solutions.

Mobile Apps
According to press releases, GE will also use the Google partnership to push them into the mobile app space.  Lucky for them, there are partners that have already moved into this space and gleaned valuable market experience.  Partners include Astec Gislet and Ubisense myWorld.

I'm sure their are other partner offerings related to web maps and Smallworld.  If you know of others, please comment to this post.

View Beautiful (and Offline) Maps in #swgis

Recently, I have seen much excitement around MapBox's TileMill and the beautiful maps that can be created with that tool. You can definitely do some cool stuff with TileMill.

That made me think back to a year or two ago when I was creating custom map tiles using Maperitive. So I updated my version of Maperitive and had a look. The GUI has had many improvements since I last used it and I really like the Python-based scripting that is now supported. You can also do some really cool map creation with Maperitive. A closer look at both applications showed me that both of them allowed a user to generate output in the MBTiles format.

So I thought that it might be helpful to see if we could view these formats within Smallworld. iFactor Consulting's Web Maps Connector (disclosure: I am the product manager for this product) has been focused on web-based map sources. But because of its flexible framework, it was easy to modify it to read MBTiles.

What does that mean for Smallworld users? Now you can create your own beautiful maps using CartoCSS or Maperitive style sheets and integrate them into Smallworld as additional layers. That is pretty cool, in my opinion. In addition to beautiful maps, you can also use Maperitive or TileMill to generate your background tiles for a predefined service area. Then you can copy the file to a laptop or mobile field device running Smallworld and your field crew will have access to beautiful custom-styled background tiles even when disconnected from the web.

The following video provides some more details of how this all works.

 

Exporting Smallworld Data to KML

There was a recent question on the sw-gis Yahoo group asking about how to export a Smallworld trail to KML for use in other applications. It turns out that can be done easily using the open source Magik Components Library (mclib). The following video demonstrates how this is done. Important information:
- Magik Components Library link is here
- Thanks to Brad Sileo (iFactor Consulting) for contributing this code to the MCLIB project.



Give it a try and let me know what kind of cool export applications you are using. And if you have any improvements to make to the functionality, please feel free to contribute to MCLIB.

MrSID files on Smallworld - another approach

While Smallworld SOMs provide a plugin for reading LizardTech's MrSID format files, I wanted to let you all know of another approach. LizardTech has a product called Express Server that lets you take one or more MrSID (or JPEG2000 or ESRI Image Server data) files and place them on a server and then serve them up as a single layer for a WMS-compliant layer. The nice thing about this is that the Express Server does all the georeferencing/tile-stitching for you. So you no longer need to configure a MrSID SOM with things like multiple path names, coordinate system, etc. You can use the GE WMS SOM to simply connect to the Express Server layers and you get all the imagery stitched together. Very cool!

And if you want to try something other than the GE WMS SOM, you could give the Web Maps Connector a try. Have a look at the demo below to see an example of how seamlessly MrSID data is integrated with Smallworld using Express Server.

Going to 2011 Smallworld EMEAI Users Conference

I am excited to announce that I will be attending the 2011 Smallworld EMEAI Users Conference in Salzburg, Austria this year. I will be there from 10-12 May. Last year in Noordwijk I was able to meet many people for the first time and I am looking forward to reconnecting in Salzburg. Additionally, this years Users Conference will be held in conjunction with the Smallorld User Group e.V. annual meeting so I will also get to practice my German... und darauf freue ich mich schon!

My main purpose in attending is to help promote my company's (iFactor Consulting) Web Maps Connector (WMC). Like last year, the good folks at Realworld Systems have offered me some space in their booth to run some WMC demonstrations. I am looking forward to meeting with customers and resellers and plan to show support for some exciting new data vendors and formats. I will post more as the time draws closer.

I will be tweeting on hashtags #swgis and #swuc and encourage everyone else to do so as well.

Please come by the booth for a demo. If you are not interested in Web Maps Connector, please come visit anyways and we can talk about the Smallworld community, OpenStreetMap, cycling and even beekeeping :)

Bis bald!

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.

Smallworld + ESRI = GIS Love

Someone pointed out to me recently that ESRI provides some really cool web services that you can host as a data appliance behind your firewall. And with existing WMS SOM functionality or other tile-based Smallworld client code, you can easily expose those ESRI data layers as layers in Smallworld. With a data appliance approach you can host it all in-house. If you decide you don't want to host the server in-house you can probably also arrange to use ESRI's cloud-based web services.

Stop reading here if you don't want to see a commercial appeal. (I don't use Google AdWords on my blog so I have created my own ads :) )

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iFactor Consulting (my employer) has a really cool product called Web Maps Connector. It was originally built to integrate Bing Maps services into Smallworld. But now it can do so much more... from Commercial map service providers, satellite imagery providers, air-photo suppliers, country-specific map providers, open source data, 3rd party data built on open source data and WMS read capabilities, there is something for everyone. Oh, and now it can also integrate ESRI web services into Smallworld. Request more information at info@ifactorconsulting.com

Temporal Imagery Comparison Technique

I was recently made aware (thanks Minfeng) of a cool infographic put together by ABC News in Australia showing a slick interface for comparing two pictures of the same location. You can see the pages here and here. In this case they are using the overlay technique to allow users to evaluate the impact of the Brisbane flooding by comparing aerial imagery taken before and immediately after the flood event.

The imagery comparison technique was so compelling to me that I thought I would see if I could do it in Magik. My scenario was to use imagery available via Web Maps Connector to compare imagery supplied by Bing with imagery supplied by NearMap. What I came up with was a class called a canvas_comparer. It could be used to take two snapshots of the same canvas with different contents and then easily compare the two snapshots dynamically as sliding overlays.

This video demonstrates how it works. I'm wondering if there are other temporal-type applications that this might work for. (I threw this canvas_comparer together in about 1 hour using Graham's very cool Dialog Designer. If you haven't tried the tool yet, you should!!).

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.

Integrating Parcel Data web services within Smallworld

My employer (iFactor Consulting) recently announced a partnership with Digital Map Products that allows Smallworld users to view and interact with parcel/property data as a web service (press release). I think this is a cool application of web services within the Smallworld paradigm and I hope to see other examples of web service integration. The one web service that people typically think of is geocoding. I have also seen routing, map tiles, and elevation charts. Please let me know how you have integrated web services into your Smallworld environment.

This video shows how the parcel data is integrated into Smallworld.

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...

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 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.

WMC Webinar Next Week

http://bit.ly/bu9Iwv

iFactor Consulting (my employer) is putting on a webinar next week featuring the Web Maps Connector. There's some pretty cool stuff in there in terms of integrating Smallworld with outside data sources (landbase, weather, satellite imagery, street routing, geocoding, reverse geocoding). If you are interested, please click here for more information.

Weather Radar Layer in Smallworld

iFactor Consulting now has a service that allows you to see the current NOAA Weather Radar layer as an overlay on your Smallworld map (see the post here). The service is integrated with Smallworld using the Web Maps Connector.

Clearly NOAA data applies only to data in the USA, but it seems like it wouldn't take much more effort to integrate weather layers from other regions.

(Disclosure: I am happily employed by iFactor Consulting so this isn't a completely unbiased post)

PS. If you are a Web Maps Connector user you can also get updates on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wmcreleases

Solving the Travelling Salesman problem with Smallworld and Cloud Resources

Here's a tool that can solve the Travelling Salesman problem in Smallworld. It makes use of Smallworld features/trail to create a list of points to visit and then uses a combination of cloud-based services as well as other Magik classes to suggest a more efficient ordering of the points.

(Disclosure: I work for iFactor Consulting and have been involved in the development of the Web Maps Connector that the above-mentioned link references)

Going to 2010 Smallworld EMEAI Users Conference

I am very excited to announce that I will be attending the 2010 Smallworld EMEAI Users Conference in Noordwijk, The Netherlands this March. I have been to quite a few Smallworld Users Conferences in the Americas but never in EMEAI. For those of you not familiar with the acronym, EMEAI stands for Europe, Middle East, Africa, India.

The kind folks at Realworld Systems have offered me a spot in their booth to demo the iFactor Web Maps Connector product. If you are interested in other iFactor product offerings, I will also be able to demonstrate or discuss them.

Aside from those product-demo goals, if you would like to talk about Smallworld/FME, SmallworldCamp, Visualization, or just introduce yourself, please come find me at the Realworld booth.

And if I have time, I think it would be fun to do some informal code demoing and sharing. Kind of like a mini BarCamp at Smallworld. Please send me a note if you are interested in this kind of informal sharing and we can coordinate a meeting time.

Over the years I have made many contacts in the Smallworld realm in the EMEAI region but have never met them in person. I'm hoping that on this trip I will be able to meet many of you and also make new acquaintances.

See you in March!