GIS Wish List
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Ask two dozen GIS managers and technicians what new feature or capability they would most like to have and you will get two dozen different answers — reflecting the variety of GIS applications, the different stages of development of GIS projects, and different institutional cultures. Overall, the impression I get from this very small and totally unscientific survey is that GIS technology is heading in the right direction but end users, under pressure to produce results, are always a bit impatient and wish for new capabilities to be implemented more quickly than they are.

More specifically, the three wishes I've heard the most are easier data sharing, reducing data redundancies and misalignment within agencies, and better and cheaper data sets. Three additional ones are more portable products for mobile applications, better handling of large files (especially images), and easier Internet publishing and interactive visualizations.

Andy J. Goretti, the mapping project manager for the Land Use & Environmental Services Agency of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, told me that his agency is an active partner in the NCOneMap project. An offshoot of the National Map project, NCOneMap is a single Web site into which municipalities and state agencies can feed data and users can zoom in to view their community and pull data from their server. "We are trying to request that applications be developed from the technology that is out there and that goes into NCOneMap. We have the potential to develop applications that use WMS (Web Mapping Services). We have put a lot of effort into customer-driven applications, trying to eliminate duplication; anything to eliminate duplication is key."

As for day-to-day issues, Goretti would like to explore easier plotting and product output/generation. Data sets, he points out, have become very large and "we would welcome any innovation that would reduce their size while maintaining their accuracy and value, especially for mobile applications." While he acknowledges that that is already the direction in which this technology is going, he'd like these developments to be "faster and better." He would also like more server-based applications.

What Christi L. Becker, the member market area manager for Best Western International, most wishes for is "time to explore all the opportunities for using GIS within [her] organization." "We are constantly finding new uses for the tools we already have," she adds, "we just do not have the time to delve into these possibilities as deep as we would like." Her small GIS department is also looking for improved data sets — in particular, street data for the Caribbean and MSA (metropolitan statistical area) boundary files from the U.S. Census Bureau. Her company promises its members that it will not put another Best Western hotel within less than a certain distance from their hotel. That distance ranges from a quarter mile to five miles, depending on the hotel's classification.

Becker's shop uses GIS to implement this "territory protection program" by mapping member hotels and their market areas. The company used GPS receivers to geocode all of its properties (approximately 2,500 hotels in North America), while Geographic Data Technology, Inc. (GDT), Becker told me, "has geocoded 50,000 hotels in the United States and 7,000 hotels in Canada for us, so that we can map our competition." Becker and her colleagues use ArcView 8.3, Business Analyst, BusinessMAP (to do maps on the fly), ArcGIS Publisher, and ArcExplorer Web. "We would like more exposure to the business users," says Becker, who attends the big ESRI annual conferences and finds them "very interesting but not necessarily business-oriented." She is looking forward to attending ESRI's annual Business GeoInfo Summit, in April.

Tony Sammur, senior vice president of Gen Re Intermediaries and head of the CAT modeling group, thinks that the new geo-technology feature that would help him most in his work is "the ability to overlay real-time updates of natural peril catastrophe events — such as hurricane storm tracks or earthquake seismic areas (possibly from NOAA or the USGS) — on maps of insured exposures." He is in the reinsurance industry and the ability to overlay insurance exposure with areas affected from real-time developing events is of critical importance to him.

Paul Zundel is the I/T Deputy Director/GIS for the mapping arm of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, the state's environmental regulatory agency. His shop makes maps and uses different kinds of imagery for background, as well as satellite remote sensing and image classification. They use the entire suite of ESRI products, plus Leica Geosystem's ERDAS Imagine Remote Sensing/Image Processing software. Zundel's biggest wish: the capability to do 3D modeling faster and easier, e.g. for plume analysis, in support of a plan to create fly-throughs in response to toxic releases and other emergencies.

The DEQ provides information to the public safety officials responsible for making evacuation decisions; it also works with the U.S. Coast Guard to track barge traffic on the rivers, with the railroad companies to monitor the movement of hazardous materials, and with the U.S. Army National Guard, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, and local law enforcement. "Louisiana is a hub for the petrochemical industry," Zundel explains. "In order to help prevent accidents and terrorist attacks, and to react effectively in case there is one, we need to know where everything is." Zundel's shop is in the process of establishing a wireless network for its Emergency Response/Emergency Management application. The DEQ has a contract with ESRI to spatially enable the agency's data — including Agency Interests (AIs), such as petrochemical plants, and Subject Items (SIs), such as stacks. "We georeference all that stuff using GPS," Zundel told me. They have a "make-a-map" program (see map.ldeq.org), which enables the public to make maps of Louisiana, and a map database. Zundel's shop uses ORACLE as its database engine running under Microsoft 2003 server, HP hardware clustering Itanium servers, and HP Storage Area Networks (SAN's) (where it stores over 4TB of data with the capacity to expand to more than 7TB), HP workstations, and HP plotters."

Andrea Westersund, the GIS manager for Multnomah County, Oregon, has two items on her wish list: "Standards need to be developed to allow GIS vendors to exchange Text as a feature class. Also the ability to store a rotation parameter with a point type."

Gerard Reminiskey, GISP, a GIS Specialist with Wilson & Company, an engineering and architectural firm in San Bernardino, California, uses PC ARC/INFO. "We use our ESRI floating licenses company-wide via a WAN," he explains. "A feature of ArcGIS that I've been clamoring for is the ability to check out licenses: to take a floating license out of the license pool and be able to use it while away from the network." The trend in GIS with which Reminiskey is most enamored is the move to industry-specific data models. "My wish list for the future of GIS technology would include the ability to more easily share project-specific maps and data via the Internet with something akin to a 'personal IMS.'"

Tracy Calhoun, a GIS technician in the Public Works Department of the City of Eugene, Oregon, would like the ability to automatically connect GIS map layer features to descriptive tabular data when GIS map layer is imported to GIS display and analysis software. "This capability," she explains "would provide current descriptive data for GIS display and analysis; allow resource experts, who may not understand GIS, to maintain descriptive data; free GIS staff from attribute entry tasks; and reduce or eliminate the need to join descriptive attributes to GIS map layers."

Alan Steremberg, is the president of Weather Underground, which uses GIS to create weather maps, such as radar maps with highways, and for users to search on their Web site by ZIP code. "We use a combination of ArcInfo and tools we've built ourselves to visualize the data we get from the federal government (including the National Weather Service and Tiger data from the U.S. Census Bureau) and from data vendors," he told me. Steremberg and his colleagues then pull this data together and build their database. "We've been searching hard for cheap or better data, especially for city names, postal codes, and highway data for outside the United States," Steremberg says, and adds that data for the United States is easy to find and very cheap.

"Most commercial software tools are too slow. We coded all of our own software," he explains. Weather Underground bought a license to Keyhole, a Windows product — "It is great!" Steremberg told me — and also uses GlobalMapper, from Global Mapper Software LLC. According to Steremberg, GlobalMapper "supports almost any format and is not too expensive. We'll use desktop tools to visualize the data, then GlobalMapper allows us to do some editing; once we know the data is good, we render it to our Web site."

Steve Wallace, a senior strategic planner at the Florida Farm Bureau, would like to have the ability to print and export to "GeoPDF," which he defines as "the ability to export a vector map to Acrobat, which can be zoom layered (content turns on/off based on zoom setting) and doesn't require any GIS." Because Acrobat's PDF reader is free, GeoPDFs could be read by a user who did not have a GIS, greatly enhancing the ease with which GIS products could be distributed. "I am just talking about getting maps into people's hands," Wallace told me, "but in such a way that they can zoom in/out and see more/less detail. This is not possible with a static PDF or other vector output."

Cindi Salas, manager of GIS Business Solutions for CenterPoint Energy, Inc., uses the full suite of ESRI products, plus many utility extensions. "We have an enterprise GIS for all of our gas and electric local distribution companies," she told me, and GIS interfaces in some way with every one of her company's major corporate systems. CenterPoint has more than 4,500 GIS users in nearly every area — including dispatch syncronization, engineering & design, street light operation, gas erosion protection, surveying, corporate tax, revenue accounting, marketing, claims, and line rotating. Salas told me that her top two wishes are more mobile field GIS and more Web-enabled GIS.

"For us," she explains, "GIS is more of a strategic rather than a tactical tool. We use GIS to make strategic decisions regarding our optimization, business risk, and prediction models." To maximize the return on investment (ROI), "we need more integration with other systems." She wants to be able to design tools that will be predictive — for example to analyze weather data so as to predict weather damage and outages and to dispatch crews and inform the public. Salas wants to be able to evaluate whether her company has enough manpower and materials to deal with emergencies and to better inform its public.

Electric utilities are monitored by public utility commissions and have to file annual reports showing that they are making circuits more reliable. For this reason, Salas told me, "we want to use GIS to see whether we are spending in the areas of the ten percent worst circuits. Integration with corporate systems will enable you to get the power that you need. Managers are constantly competing for dollars; therefore, you need to integrate systems so that you can justify your budget request — for example, poles vs. software."

Leslie Cone, who manages the National Integrated Land System (NILS) program for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Land Management, is responsible for several applications to meet BLM business needs. "About 74 percent of our business," she told me, "involves spatial data." The BLM has three primary responsibilities (see http://www.geocommunicator.gov): surveying public land, keeping records of land and mineral ownership rights, and tracking the status of federal land ownership. "I have wanted to have a graphic representation of all of our surveys and land records and status data," Cone says, "and be able to display it and make it available to the public on the Internet." The BLM uses ArcGIS and has been working with ESRI to develop the ability to collect and maintain GIS data to map all of its cases. "You have to know what you manage and we need the ability to have all that data to do the analysis spatially," Cone told me.

Camille Merchant coordinates environmental biology for Springer & Associates, Inc., an engineering and environmental consulting firm that uses GIS extensively. "We would like greater transparency when working with AutoCAD files," Merchant told me, "and a better ability to translate and to edit files without first having to convert them." According to her, the technology is better now than it used to be just a few years ago, but it has not yet progressed far enough. She would also like a better ability to work with large aerial images ("Files about 250Mb or larger will usually crash my printer. I have some workarounds but they are unsatisfactory.") and the ability to print them generating small plot files.

Harsh Gautam manages the GIS development group for the City of San José's Department of Public Works. His department's GIS program is transitioning from an outdated legacy GIS system to a scalable database-centric environment. "As part of our City GIS standards, the City does not endorse any GIS product or vendor," Gautam told me. "Instead, we focus on making the data available in native format and prefer applications that interface natively." This openness and interoperability, he contends, has been key to the success of his agency's GIS implementation. "To make this effort a reality," he explains, "we had to build the system from the ground up."

The first step toward the transition was the development of a robust data model that incorporated business needs identified through intensive needs assessments and analysis. According to Gautam, the City's new GIS Data Model is OGIS- and FGDC-compliant and has logic and intelligence built into the database, thereby enabling constraints and maintaining referential integrity that crosses multiple disciplines. "In addition," Gautam explains, "the new data model includes project, process, and resource management capabilities that make our approach unique. The flexibility and openness of our new environment provide a stark comparison to the legacy environment."

The City of San José's legacy GIS contained "islands of automation," says Gautam, which resulted from the focus on a product-centric stand-alone GIS approach. "As a consequence, there was data translation, redundancy, and data misalignment between various users and datasets." Oracle Spatial, he contends, provides a platform to solve this problem. "We focus on the data and the underlying database, allowing the user to select the proper tools to connect to it." The central GIS staff then feeds the data into several enterprise applications, such as the city's E911 Public Safety Dispatch and its online permit and document management system.

According to Gautam, the implementation also has facilitated the city's joint efforts with the county to develop a regional base map. "We get better return on investment because we are not investing in software but in the data." He acknowledges that there still remain a few challenges to implementations such as this that need to be addressed industry-wide.

The city, Gautam told me, would like to see better synergy among GIS industry leaders, users, and database vendors. "These leaders should work closely with the Open GIS Consortium to push the database vendors to adopt OGIS standards. Oracle currently leads the industry in OGIS compliance, but all must embrace these standards to be truly open and interoperable. We at the City believe that the future of GIS is 'open,' and new advancements and efforts put forth in the open technology environment will not only benefit the City, but the entire GIS community."

Heather is the landbase GIS coordinator for a city in Ontario, Canada. (I do not fully identify Heather and her city at her manager's request.) She works for a section that is responsible for coordinating her city's GIS data; she is responsible for the data part, while someone else is responsible for the applications. "With respect to data," Heather told me, "we are looking for a good metadata tool. This is our biggest requirement, especially given the large amount of data with which we are dealing all the time." Currently, her section stores its metadata in Microsoft Access. "What is required province-wide are metadata standards, to make sure that people are all storing this information in the same way. That is the direction in which we need to be going."

This is very difficult, according to Heather, because of the number of datasets throughout the city that her section must track. "People call us and ask us what we have," she says, "and we have to give them a list and proper metadata. Each of our city's departments does its own thing, but we are now slowly bringing all the data into a central depository. The next step is to get good metadata for the data in the depository."

Bob Skoye coordinates the GIS division for the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, in Alberta, Canada. He told me that Wood Buffalo, one of the largest local governments in North America, is three years into its GIS implementation. His small division is charged with implementing GIS technology throughout the corporation of about 500 staff and for the municipality's citizens.

In 2002 Skoye's division looked for a vendor for software and support services, then recruited a program developer and two technologists. "In planning GIS implementation," he told me, "our most important requirement was to have data maintenance processes for sustainability and data stewardship — to make sure that we would be able to keep the data current — and to help break down departmental silos and promote data sharing and accountability. Our recent intranet webtool, GeoViewer, showcases easy, reliable access to secure and accurate corporate information." Skoye and his staff spend a large percentage of their time working on parcel mapping. "Our region is the third largest in Alberta in terms of the number of parcels and this number is growing rapidly due to development of the oil sands projects in the region. Updating information on our cadastral fabric was a key task." Skoye's shop is also working with other business units. For example, it is helping the taxation & assessment unit develop its computer-assisted mass appraisal system, which has a large GIS component, and has recently sent out an RFP for an Operation Management System.

"We have tremendous support from our regional council and senior leadership," says Skoye, and adds that his unit works closely with the emergency preparedness department, the fire department, and the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police). As to what innovation would help him most, he told me "We are not necessarily at a point yet where any new technology can help us. Rather, we are trying to implement and manage change in spatial data management and delivery in the organization." However, one need Skoye and his staff do have, is for a quick and inexpensive way to do digital elevation mapping for flood control, because every spring the area is in real danger from the breakup of the ice on the Athabasca and Clearwater rivers. "Ours is an exciting region in which to be implementing GIS technologies and processes."

Letters to the Editor
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The comments by Dimitri Rotow in last week's issue generated the following two letters. As I said in this week's Editor's Introduction, now that I've given space to both sides in this heated debate, I will give the topic a rest for a while.

Donald Marino, the technical lead for the Operational Tools Group in the Data Systems division of DigitalGlobe, Inc., wrote:

I feel compelled to respond to the remarks in the letter you excerpted from Mr. Rotow at Manifold systems, because his is pure, unadulterated FUD. [For a history of this term, see What Is FUD? — Matteo] I am hoping that you posted his inflammatory remarks to create some debate about what is actually happening in the Open Source GIS arena, since Mr. Rotow is obviously not up to speed on this domain whatsoever. Hopefully you will be willing to listen to someone who has not "drunk the Kool-Aid," so to speak.

My company has been having great success in implementing GIS systems using the very Open Source GIS technologies that Mr. Rotow so casually wrote off as, at best, useless. I'd say, in reading comments such as Mr. Rotow provides, please consider the source. In fact, Manifold uses the Microsoft platform as a strategic point. Here's a quote from Manifold's Web site: "Manifold is the first and only professional GIS and mapping application to achieve the coveted 'Designed for Windows XP' status."

I'd say that Manifold and Mr.Rotow have a strategic interest in convincing users that UNIX and Linux are "obscure operating systems". Statements like "There are no open source projects of any merit" prove that Mr. Rotow is not only ignorant of what is actually available in the Open Source domain, but is actually trying to dissuade users from checking this out for themselves.

His criticism of OGC and the Web Mapping Standards show that he is also short-sighted. There is no excuse for criticizing the OGC because it is an open process and Manifold could just as easily participate in it and steer it to something more to Mr. Rotow's liking. However, FUD works best when you just attack, attack, and ignore the facts.

Also, how is this not a straight-up sales pitch: ".. it is the ubiquitous availability of PC clones running Windows that anyone can afford coupled with the emergence of full-power, best-in-the-world GIS applications like Manifold that sell for under $250." I am surprised that you would publish this, as I'm sure ad space in GIS Monitor is not free generally.

How about this? Take that same "PC clone" and run Linux on it, add GDAL, GEOS, MapServer, PostgreSQL, postGIS, and GRASS, and you'd still be $250 and a Windows license fee away from the fabulous deal Mr. Rotow is obviously trying to convince you to buy. You'll be able to do all of your GIS work just as well — if not faster. And if you happen not to be shilling for Microsoft, you can run any and all of it on UNIX, Linux, Mac, or Windows. How is that not a plus? I guess we'd all be better off if we forgot about UNIX, Linux, or anything other than the products Mr. Rotow is tasked with developing. I suppose that Mr. Rotow has not heard of Quantum GIS, JUMP, UDIG, MapServer, or any of the other fine tools that work just as well on Windows as they do on UNIX and Linux. Either that or they know they cannot compete with the beer-free software that does exist out there and is of very high quality.

Please provide some actual news about Open Source GIS in your magazine. This kind of FUD is not welcome or useful, but can be very harmful when people blindly believe it.