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July 30, 2004
OSCON 2004: Open Source GIS with GRASS
When I was the CIO of Utah, I used to quip that every data record I cared about had a SSN or latlong coordinates. There's lots of things that are geographically categorizable, but commercial GIS software is expensive and consequently, geographic Internet applications are few and far between. Even things like MapQuest don't really do much besides give you directions. Why can't I annotate them, for example? GRASS is an open source GIS system that provides raster, topological vector, image processing, and graphics production functionality. I went to a talk today by SchuylerÊErle and RichÊGibson on using GRASS. Here's the slides. There are easier tools to use (like Quantum), but GRASS provides more advanced functionality using map algebra. That advanced functionality comes at a cost: GRASS isn't easy to use.
12:01 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Poor Man's Streaming
I reported on Dana Moore's talk about using Jabber in highly available agent networks for DARPA a few days ago. I wasn't able to go to his and Rich Kilmer's talk yesterday on using Ruby as the control language, but Jon Udell did and offers a video interview of Dana and Rick after the talk. The interview itself is interesting in its own right, but the meta-story is interesting as well. Jon did the interview with an iSight and his TiBook. He then just uploaded the Quicktime file to a server. No streaming infrastructure needed. Most players start playing right away nowadays, so unless you're doing something live, you don't really need streaming. Creating something like this is relatively simple and is vastly under-used as far as I can see.
10:15 AM | Recommend This | Print This
OSCON 2004: David Rumsey on Online Digital Libraries
This morning's keynote was David Rumsey, President of Cartography Associates. Rumsey's website is called he David Rumsey Map Collection and what a collection. The physical collection consists of over 150,000 maps, mainly from the 18th and 19th century. The online collection is no less phenomenal and is more than just a collections of GIFs or PDFs. The maps and other art is all interrelated and interactive. Its almost impossible to describe in words how incredible all this is. You literally have to see it to believe it. To get a feel, they have a Flash tour of the collection. The collection has a special browser that runs inside IE or Mozilla. This collection is a real high water mark for online digital libraries to strive for. I rarely see a keynote speaker at a conference get a standing ovation, but David did this morning. It was well deserved.