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.

Sprinkle Some [#swgis] Magik on that Java Virtual Machine

Jim Connor's Weblog published an article a few days ago explaining Smallworld's move from a Magik virtual machine to the Java Virtual Machine.  Interesting reading.

You can read the article here: https://blogs.oracle.com/jtc/entry/sprinkle_some_magik_on_that

Thanks to @aardvark179 for bringing this to my attention.

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.