My latest vicitim is Tyler Mitchell, author of Web Mapping Illustrated. We discuss Open Source GIS (obviously), the Canadian government’s role in supporting OGC and Open Source tools, and the hurdles to data access in both the US and Canada.
Click here to listen (64 kbps)
Click here to listen (160 kbps)
I am participating in a fantastic, grass roots GIS project. We are working to serve as much Katrina imagery as we can, reprocessing it to make fit and look better, and providing access in as many formats as possible.
The project is nominally hosted by San Diego State University, who with others are providing hardware, bandwidth, and CPU. The group actually doing the work is a bunch of open source GIS hackers who have collaborated on various bits and pieces of stuff over the years and have come together to make this happen.
Academics, open source folks, and hobbyists are the ones leading the charge. This is because we are used to rapid prototyping, producing stuff that scales out of the box, and reacting to rapidly changing conditions. There is no “specification” or “design document.” It is done on-the-fly, filling holes and doing what needs to be done. This project is an implementation of those ideals…
The problem is that national agencies that deal in GIS data all have turf. Data is power, and those who “own” the data control the turf. Well, turf wars get in the way of those who actually need the data to do their job, check their house, or plan their mission (especially in a rapidly evolving situation like the Katrina fallout). Portals like the GeoSpatial OneStop are moving, but haven’t reacted fast enough in my opinion.
Each agency has its own system, resource constraints, and personnel with varying expertise. Some provide raw data (like NOAA), and some provide analysis (like USACE and USGS), but no one was providing common access in all of the various formats in a single location. Until now.
http://katrina.telascience.org is a clearinghouse for every Katrina related dataset (before and after) we could get our hands on. We provide WMS, web clients, NASA WorldWind access, and ArcIMS capability all with open source software. Some things were developed well before Katrina and merely implemented. Others were written on-the-fly, as they were needed to get the job at hand done. It is working well and growing quickly.
Wanna help? Send me an email at < hobu at hobu.net >, tell me what skills you have or what holes you see or what data you have and we’ll get you doing what is yet to be done.
James Fee kindly agreed to an interview. Please excuse some of my heavy breathing in the microphone as it was too close (still learning this stuff :), but most of the audio is pretty good.
We covered a little bit of ESRI, a little bit of Google, what got James doing GIS, the upside and downside of calling something a “beta” forever, and winning and loosing technology bets. It was great fun, the technology worked well (Skype, Wiretap, and Garageband), and it beats the crap out of listening to some boring tech geek spew into a microphone all by himself (see my last podcast).
Here are links to the mp3s. I hope to have access to a shoutcast server soon and will update that link when it is available.
Click here to listen (faster server).
Click here to listen (this server).