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GIS Monitor Sep 27, 2001 CONTENTS - GIS in the Trenches Note: Due to recent virus activity on the Internet, some sites are If a URL runs more than one line, you may have to cut and paste the second This issue sponsored by: ERDAS http://www.erdas.com/gm ***** I received this submission from Jack Eichenbaum who works in the NYC Department of Finance and is the coordinator of GISMO, a NYC User group. It sets the scene in GIS in New York City right now. “I am writing from Pier 92 (@ 52 St/Hudson, NYC) where the NYC Office of Emergency Management has set up its HQ after the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. I am at an Emergency Mapping and Data Center, which serves this effort. We have about 15-20 GIS professionals and others with related skills in a frenzied effort around the clock. “It seems to take us much longer to get things done here than on our home turf yet people are interacting wonderfully. The serendipity of people who have been thrown together is giving us a social base to proceed with long-term collaborations in the future for rebuilding and expanding GIS capability in NYC. The food they serve us reminds me of elementary school hot lunch a half century ago. “There has been a tremendous outpouring of volunteerism, not only from greater NY, but from Washington, Boston and Albany. We can't possibly use all skills at this point but it sure helps our morale to hear from you.” For more on “real life” in NY, I caught up with several ESRI staff who’d returned from a week and a half at the Emergency Mapping and Data Center. Tom Schwartzman, Dave LaShell and Rich Laird are all based at ESRI-Boston. I also spoke with Mark Scott, who remained in the office to field technical questions. One of the first things they mentioned related right back to Mr. Eichenbaum’s note above. Soon after disaster struck, Mr. Eichenbaum was able to email his NYC user group members and ask for help. And volunteer they did – from public, private and nonprofit organizations. The mapping center took form as software was installed and data was gathered. When I asked what gave them the most difficulty, the consensus was: data. New York City has a wide variety of agencies, all using GIS. Still, gathering the data, verifying its timeliness, finding its metadata and exploring legal issues of distribution all took time. And, with so many agencies coming together, it could be hard to determine which agency had the definitive word on what was most current. Even as those issues were explored, requests came in for maps. Different agencies needed maps of the restricted area, areas of phone outages and transportation routes… Some needed plots of imagery. Many wanted plots of the flag being raised over the rubble – those requests were sent to Kinko’s so the plotters could be devoted to maps. As the GIS workers tried to keep up with demand and add new layers of information, a system started to form. Requests for certain maps were common, so those were plotted and tacked to the walls with numbers. Requestors could simply ask for, say, “map number 6.” What was the role of the Web? As things settled a bit, maps were added to the NYC website, with updates added over time. Although gathering and managing data was the most difficult part of the operation, other parts were more straightforward. The volunteers knew the software, so they could be put to work immediately. Plotters hummed day and night, since the center was, and still is, open around the clock. ESRI users were very understanding. Many tech support calls to ESRI-Boston began with “I know you are busy, and this isn’t that important…” allowing calls in support of the relief effort to go the top of the queue. ESRI Redlands published a special toll-free number for those directly supporting the disaster effort. Back at the mapping center, the work was hard, with long hours and “on-the-fly” thinking. After arriving home this weekend, one of the GIS workers slept for 14 hours straight. Rich Laird noted that he “came away with a new appreciation for the impact that GIS and mapping can have in situations like this. Working with people from the fire department, police department, American Red Cross, and many others, I was continually being told what a huge impact the maps we were generating were going to have in the field. Often times, they were simple maps showing basic basemap layers. The sort of maps we see every day without giving them a second thought. Yet for some of these emergency workers, they were providing information far beyond what they would have had otherwise.” Dave LaShell highlighted the stark reality of building this type of emergency GIS with a single question, “Could your agency put together a CD with the latest data and metadata in three hours for inclusion in a disaster GIS for your area?” If more agencies worldwide can answer “yes” in the coming months, the Emergency Mapping and Data Center will have served one more purpose. ====== a message from our sponsor =============== Geographic imaging has gone to another new dimension! ERDAS IMAGINE Version 8.5 features upgrades in its mosaicking tool, improved scene creation and 3D visualization capabilities and more. With IMAGINE 8.5, you can create seamless output images, preview your mosaicked image and make changes prior to finalization and remove the rough edges of an image through a cropping feature. http://www.erdas.com/gm ***** Companies in geospatial technologies, and many other businesses, have spent the past few weeks making sense of, and reacting to the tragic events of September 11. Many businesses, TenLinks included, simply couldn’t work on the day of the crashes and instead went home to be with family to digest the events. But, as the days passed, at the urging of President Bush, businesses and their employees found a way to get back to work. Here’s how other companies reacted: On September 12, MapInfo posted a message on its website offering assistance with mapping, software and Web hosting of maps. The company sent out its “e-news” on Friday, September 21 noting, “In light of this month's events, and out of respect for all those who have been touched by the tragedies in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC we have held back on sending you our regular MapInfo e-news publication.” Space Imaging, SPOT Image, I-cubed, and GlobeXplorer are providing regular imagery. Intergraph made statements about their volunteer efforts in a letter to editors and ESRI posted a statement on its website. Plangraphics sent folks to NYC. I applaud these serious, calm, and respectful statements. The GIS companies did GIS; the imagery company did imagery. There was no grandstanding and no hype and no press releases. I was also touched by the decision of Spatial Corporation (they are a mechanical CAD company) to postpone their conference until May AND donate the monies budgeted for the event to the Red Cross. Other companies postponed conferences, but may not be in a financial position to provide such a donation, and I respect that, too. Then there were the “curious” statements. A press release from Digital Angel Corporation touts its offer of beta “wrist watch type trackers” to the New York Fire Department and the U.S. Department of Transportation. A few things strike me about this. First the product is in beta. Second, the technology was not requested. Third, there is no confirmation the departments will use the technology. The offer does not ring true and feels opportunistic. Instead, I’d suggest the company wait to see how the technology is used, and report about it later. Autodesk put out a press release on Friday September 21 saying that their business was not affected by the attacks and their target for the 3rd quarter would be met. The statement was obviously meant to assuage investors and analysts. Did it work? Morgan Stanley downgraded Autodesk stock, while Merrill Lynch maintained an “accumulate” position. On Wednesday, September 26, an Autodesk press release offered to replace software lost in the disaster and described its corporate relief program to support the families of victims of the New York and Washington, D.C. terrorist attacks. And, a final thought. Let’s take the lesson from the GIS and imagery companies. The best way to react to challenging circumstances is to “do what we do best.” At TenLinks we are trying to cover the situation by finding and serving information of interest to CAD and GIS professionals related to the crisis but for our specialized audience. ====== a message from our sponsor =============== If map data accuracy is important to your business, you need Tele Atlas. Tele Atlas has repositioned more of the U.S. than any other data provider. Click on the link below to request your FREE Positional Accuracy Report, comparing Tele Atlas to GDT in the top 100 U.S. markets. Then decide for yourself who has the better data. http://www.na.teleatlas.com/GISMonitor ***** GIS conference organizers have had to make some tough choices about whether to hold, postpone or cancel upcoming events. Contact your conference host for details. GOING FORWARD URISA (Long Beach, CA) CANCELLED OR POSTPONED Palm Developer Conference ***** Every year the industry press falls over itself to laud ESRI’s annual user conference. Meeting with nearly 10,000 GIS users over a week is a great opportunity, but meeting with 500 of them, all from your local area, is perhaps an even better one. I attended NEARC, the northeast US version of ESRI’s conference, for at least the eighth time this week. As an investment, these regional conferences are a great value. This sixteenth annual conference drew 530 pre-registered attendees and the committee expected another 100 walk-ins. Recent events or other issues prevented only 15 people from canceling their plans. Many of them, from the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), ESRI and Westchester County, NY were at work on the New York City efforts. A few vendors couldn’t make it, and a few of those in attendance had booths still in transit or stalled at a cancelled show. Still, the mood was upbeat and the spirit of those working together on the tragedy perhaps made the mission of users helping users even more timely this year. The opening plenary from David Cobb, curator of the Harvard University Map Library, traced the history of Boston in maps. This was a great story that would have entertained even non-map people. If you have a chance to hear Mr. Cobb, don’t miss it. Per tradition, one of the ESRI senior staff provided the second half of the plenary. This year, it was Rich Turner, a member of the product management team. He reviewed much of the material about ArcGIS presented at the San Diego conference. I did find a few “new” tidbits of interest. ESRI is changing its release schedules a bit by incorporating downloadable “service packs” to ease upgrades. Full install CDs will be shipped when the changes are too large for a simple patch. ESRI is following Microsoft’s methodology here. The update schedule looks like this: Service pack 1 for ArcGIS 8.1 came out in July. Version 8.1.2 will ship to all uses in November. ArcReader (more on that in a minute) and Service Pack 3 are expected in the first quarter of 2002, with an integrated ArcGIS and ArcIMS to follow later in 2002. ArcView 3.x will be supported “indefinitely,” with ArcView 3.3 expected later this fall. Turner spoke of ESRI’s plans to port ArcGIS to Windows 98 and ME. He noted that the port to 98 was particularly challenging since the Microsoft COM (component object model, on which ArcGIS is based) didn’t work so well in Windows 98. He asked how many in the audience ran Windows 98. I estimate about 10%. He asked about Windows ME and I saw no hands at all. Turner commented that internationally, where they’d expected significant demand for Windows 98 support, it just wasn’t there. It is possible, therefore, that these ports won’t happen. If they are important to you, be sure to let the company know. I asked one attendee if they’d heard anything new in the plenary and she mentioned ArcReader. The ArcReader free viewer was introduced in San Diego as the solution for distributing ArcMap (that’s the mapping part of ArcGIS) maps freely. I was pleased that one of the first questions highlighted the challenge of ArcReader: that the data must be available on the machine or the Internet. Put another way, ArcReader doesn’t work exactly like Adobe’s PDF to which ESRI compares it. A PDF file carries with it all of the “data.” An MXP file simply points to the data. Turner mentioned that a phase 2 version of ArcReader would provide a way to carry compressed data with the .MXP file. I spoke with several attendees about the move to ArcGIS. All of them noted that they had applications running in ArcInfo 7.1 or ArcView 3.2 but were doing new projects in ArcGIS. There is no rush to jump to 8.1 and all seemed comfortable that ESRI was giving them time to make the transition. Of those who had played with 8.1, the consensus was that the new version posed some real challenges but also some clear benefits. Business Partners had similar sentiments. Many were still supporting ArcView 3.x applications and were building new ones on 8.1. I visited with Applied Analysis, a company involved in spectral image exploitation, allowing you to get “more” information from multi-band data. In particular, they developed the subpixel classifier which works with ERDAS IMAGINE. Here’s how it works. Consider a pixel as the basic unit of information in imagery. A value is assigned to the area on the ground represented by the pixel. Of course, the ground may have a variety of different types of land cover but this value represents an average of what the sensor “sees” for that area. The subpixel classifier, by removing background, can estimate how much of a pixel has a certain signature, say for tree cover. That way, instead of assuming that 100% of the pixel is tree cover, the classifier can assign, say, a 75% tree cover to the pixel. Of course, you don’t know exactly which 75% is covered, but you do get a better measure. The company suggests that with the tool you can get more from some relatively inexpensive multi-band imagery. The other exciting work at Applied Analysis is defining spectral signatures for pollutants chlorophyll, and dissolved oxygen. These can help track non-point pollution sources, such as runoff from chemically treated lawns. It also may be helpful in tracking changes to the chemical makeup of water sources to highlight contamination. I also saw ID-CAD from IDS. (What an unfortunate choice of name!) This is an ArcView extension that has some tools to intelligently bring CAD data into ArcView; its strength however is a set of editing tools that work on shape files. These include trim, extend and a variety of “snap” modes. ***** - The Southeast Regional Users Group (GIS) conference will be held October 28th - November 2nd. The conference will be held on the Gulf Coast at the Perdido Beach Hilton in Gulf Shores, Alabama. - I followed the GPS-based geocaching game Project APE used to promote the latest “Planet of the Apes” movie. Now comes word that Coors Brewing Co. has installed GPS receivers and transceivers in three of its beer bottles. The bottles put out a signal once they are opened to alert the Coors tracker crew, complete with cameraman, to the winner’s whereabouts. Is this part of stupid GPS tricks? - I’m pleased to report a TenLinks visitor, whose virus software was up-to-date, informed me this week that a site linked to from our site had the NIMDA virus--a virus that can be transmitted by visiting a website. After some research, I contacted the company that runs the site and was amazed that they’d known of the problem for two days but kept the site UP AND RUNNING anyway. I immediately removed the link to the site from TenLinks.com. My dismay at that situation was only increased when a friend let me know that one of Verizon’s sites for testing the speed of a DSL connection had the attacking virus on every page! He phoned Verizon; that page is now “not found.” This is scary since Verizon is my DSL provider! Please, please be sure your PC and any sites you control are kept virus free. The new versions of anti-virus software are inexpensive and painless to keep up-to-date. Use them.
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