geo2web.com

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Don’t take the title too seriously; I haven’t run off to trademark it (too late) or set up a series of conferences, but I do see some new technologies coming together with some old favorites to deliver a platform for web mapping and GIS like we haven’t seen in the past. Recent news about SQL 2008 Spatial, Silverlight 2.0, MapDotNet, and the VE server got me thinking about what it would take to glue together the next generation of GIS with a focus on the web; not just simple web apps to view maps that are abundant today, but true GIS 1.0 functionality brought to the web at web scale. Here’s a list of some technologies I’d be looking at if I was planning to build such a system.

ArcINFO. Hey wait, that’s GIS 0.1. Yup, and its still the undisputed king of map creation; you’re probably gonna be relying on the Arc family when GIS 8.0 comes around as well, so get used to it. In GIS 3.0 a lot more will become possible in terms of real map creation in a web browser, but i don’t see the world completely getting away from heavy clients for map making and distilling data into shapes anytime soon.

SQL Server 2008. SQL Server’s market leading growth, especially in small and mid sized orgs, is pretty impressive and gives the spatial features of the 2008 release a great installed base to ride on. And choosing to include Spatial in each edition of SQL from Enterprise to Express will prove to be key in jumpstarting GIS 3.0. Many organizations running 2005 that never touched mapping in a serious way will find they suddenly have the nucleus of the killer enterprise spatial platform after upgrading. that’s a huge adoption barrier obliterated.

Safe FME - The Swiss army knife of spatial data transformation handles hundreds of popular and unpopular data formats and is the perfect companion for your new SQL 2008 setup.

Virtual Earth Enterprise server. many businesses choose not to integrate web services in their applications including those GIS based. Reasons range from data privacy and policy restrictions to performance issues. The VE Server or appliance allows these orgs to access all of the unique capabilities of VE through its familiar API’s while never sending traffic off their net for map fetching. This isn’t a necessary component of GIS3.0, but for many organizations this addresses another major non-starter.

MapCruncher. One of the most empowering tools in our industry, Cruncher makes it easy for anyone to add their raster layers to mapping applications. from custom flown aerial imagery to hand drawn community planning maps, Cruncher helps you register your raster maps and then kicks out a directory of tiles ready for use in Virtual Earth.

MapDotNet Server. Spatial middleware that makes it easy to work with geographic data from a variety of sources in your web applications. MDN is complete with Visual Studio plugins, support for SQL Spatial, and out of the box web and desktop clients. if they deliver on their rumored Silverlight 2.0 support, MDN becomes the obvious choice as a pillar of your GIS 3.0 platform.

Silverlight 2.0. It’s unfortunate to see SL always framed as “its like flash, but different” in reviews. lazy tech reporters i think that misses the point of what will prove to be revolutionary about SL - its all about the developers. Yes, the promise of SL 2.0 to deliver application interfaces in the browser as powerful as we are all used to on pc’s is sexy and deserves the attention it gets in tech media. But ultimately providing developers with the ability to design, build, and debug with a class of familiar tools and languages is what has been missing.

Technorati tags: GIS 3.0