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.

Visualization in Smallworld (Part 2)

Back in January, I posted an article about Visualization in Smallworld. The article was long on words and short on visuals, so now I have created a video that shows more clearly what the post about.

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...