Jeff Danielson, Editor of GeoPlace, kicked things off by taking care of a few house cleaning items, and then presenting the Geospatial Leadership Awards for 2010. Kathleen Hastings, Managing Editor and Conference Program Manager took to the stage to introduce Markham Mayor, Frank Scarpitti. The Mayor welcomed the attendees and discussed how Markham has been a leader in using and implementing geospatial technologies.
Josh Knauer followed with the Keynote Address titled: Embracing the Future of Geospatial Data Collection & Sharing. Josh is CEO of Rhiza Labs who:
Are dedicated to putting people at the center of complex technology. We don’t think that powerful tools for visualizing, analyzing, and sharing data need to sacrifice simplicity, elegance, or usability
Josh’s presentation was a very incite full and thought provoking discussion on “crowd sourcing”. Rhiza Labs are the brains behind the FluTracker website which tracks the progress of the H1N1 swine flu. Another very interesting project Josh discussed was the Surui Carbon Project. In summary, the project enabled the Surui tribe to be able to capture and map their lands for the purpose of identifying the potential for their forest to be entered into the global carbon trading market. This project fascinated me a number of levels, including the moral aspect, but it was also a great example of what is possible when the technology is made simple enough for users to use.
In the afternoon session, where I was presenting, there was 2 great presentations by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA), and the GIS team from The Weather Network. The GTAA demonstrated a Properties Information Management System (PIMS) used by the Properties group for managing property and tenant leases, and all documents related. The GTAA space data is stored in an Oracle Spatial database, and also incorporates the floor plans as background information. The ROI for the PIMS application has been huge, with process no being performed in minutes as opposed to hours. The team from The Weather Network described how they implemented a centralized GIS warehouse for managing the base information for all of the various platforms; TV, Web, Mobile. The massive amount of data, and variety of data providers, was the driving force behind this initiative, as a better, more streamlined system had to be found, and one of the main components to their solution is FME from Safe Software. FME has become one of the core applications for transforming all of the data in useable formats for The Weather Network.
The final session I attended was a panel discussion on Cloud Computing. The panel was being moderated Kevin Macdonald of Thinkwrap Solutions, and the panel consisted of: Mano Marks (Geo Developer advocate for Google), Chris Pendleton (Bing Maps technical evangelist for Microsoft), David Stanley (CTO for PCI Geomatics), and Kris Woodbeck (CTO for Incogna GIS). This was a great session with Mano and Chris describing how their respective companies view cloud computing, and what is available for technologies today. A couple of the terms and phrases that resonated with me as how to describe cloud computing were: ‘offloading processing’ and ‘scales with need’. Offloading processing refers to the ability to offload your required computing processing power to ‘someone else’, and scales with need refers to the ability for a system to scale up and down depending on the need. High on the list of the attendees questions and concerns were around the topic of data privacy. It’s obvious that there is no easy answer to this topic, but Microsoft and Google both believe that data in the cloud has the potential to be more secure than locally stored data. It was also discussed that the privacy issue might just dissipate with time.
All in all, a very good day.
Until next time,
Take care
Warren M
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