Friday, February 29, 2008

Does ESRI need to Fear OGC (or vice versa)?

Infrastructure under attack?


Eamonn from ESRI attacked OGC's SOA and spatial infrastructure efforts in the recent DirectionsMag article - "The Strategic Power of OGC Standards" - and folks jumped on him.

I usually stay out of these rows since it takes time to generate those really looooooong responses popular in the community - but I thought about it and asked myself some simple questions -

Can users do what they need to do with OGC standards? Yep

Are OGC standards perfect? Nope

Are enterprises adopting OGC? Yep

Does ESRI need to fear OGC standards? Nope




ESRI servers support OGC standards very well, and you can use the entire OGC SDI baseline on ArcGIS with the CarbonArc PRO extension.

-Jeff




Mashing up maps with social networking

Our work on EchoMyPlace was just featured in Mass High Tech Journal in an article titled Carbon Project mashes up maps with social networking.

Some snips include -


A Burlington company is armed with new federal funding and is working to launch by midyear a beta version of its geosocial networking software that uses 2-D and 3-D mapping to allow users to share real-time photos and other information - directly from one computer to another.

Much thanks to the good folks at Mass High Tech Journal.

-Jeff

Saturday, February 23, 2008

OGC SDI 1.0 Interest at ESRI Federal Conference

The Carbon Project team exhibited this week during the ESRI FedUC at the Washington DC Convention Center. We set up in Booth 720 and showed ESRI customers how they can extend their ArcGIS desktop with OGC SDI 1.0 and Microsoft Virtual Earth using CarbonArc PRO 1.5.

Lots of energy during the two-day event. ESRI customers were interested in OGC interoperability and eager to learn more about using OGC Web services and data - including WMS, WFS, WFS-T, WCS, Filter Encoding, GML, GMLsf and CS-W.

Our most popular demo was feature editing using the new tools in CarbonArc PRO 1.5. During these sessions we showed how simple it is to:

  • access a WFS Transactional service
  • build the editing tables right from the feature schema
  • add validation rules to make sure people add the correct info
  • create new GML feature data or edit existing GML (points, lines and polygons)
  • manage WFS Transactions
  • commit WFS Transactions so they can be used by anyone that needs them
I'll try to post some more of the CarbonArc PRO 1.5 demos from the ESRI 2008 Federal User Conference soon.

Overall assessment - Great event for ESRI and CarbonArc PRO 1.5!

The following organizations provided software or OGC SDI services used in the example above - ESRI, Leica Geosystems and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Jeff

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

CarbonTools PRO Featured in GIS Development

Image Courtesy and Copyright of GIS Development Magazine


CarbonTools PRO is featured in this month's GIS Development magazine. Here's an excerpt -

"Digital mapping has been the exclusive domain of professional GIS users until recently when Google released a friendly mapping system named 'Google Maps'. Google Maps gave Web developers the ability to add mapping to their websites without consulting the mapping specialist. Suddenly GIS was both a cool and indispensable feature of websites.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft quickly followed suit with 'Virtual Earth' and mapping is now a mandatory component of nearly all Web sites. Though this kind of simple "mash-up" mapping opened new possibilities for developers, it didn't change the way geospatial software is designed, developed or applied, and it did little to help programmers use the growing number of geospatial content sources like KML, GML, Web Map and Feature Services and others in their desktop applications. However, The Carbon Project...responded to this challenge with a software development framework called CarbonTools PRO."
Check it out if you get a moment. A few of the code examples got a bit mangled in the editing process, so let me know if you have any questions.

Jeff



Friday, February 15, 2008

SDI 1.0 Extension for ArcGIS to Launch at ESRI Federal Conference

Courtesy and Copyright ESRI, 2008


The Carbon Project will release a major update to CarbonArc PRO, its Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) 1.0 extension for ArcGIS, at the 2008 ESRI Federal User Conference on February 20 in Washington, DC. SDI 1.0 is a selected suite of OGC standards endorsed as part of ongoing efforts by government agencies to promote interoperability. CarbonArc PRO 1.5 brings a new generation of SDI 1.0 compliant data discovery and production tools directly to the ArcGIS desktop.

CarbonArc PRO 1.5 wraps the OGC SDI suite of standards into a new generation of user friendly data production tools for the ESRI ArcGIS 9.2 desktop.

“The Carbon Project offers excellent support for OGC standards. This release of The Carbon Project’s SDI 1.0 ArcGIS extension provides ArcGIS users more options for enhanced interoperability,” said Satish Sankaran, Product Manager for Interoperability and Standards at ESRI.

“This release of CarbonArc PRO provides new and enhanced feature data production tools based on OGC SDI 1.0, a key need for federal users,” said Nuke Goldstein, CTO and COO of The Carbon Project. “By plugging into ArcGIS, CarbonArc PRO lets people use SDI 1.0 services and data as an integral part of the GIS, including WMS, WFS, WFS-T, WCS, Filter Encoding (FE), Gazetteer, GML, GMLsf and Catalog Services (CS-W). In addition our Microsoft Virtual Earth extension allows access to tile based world maps all as an integral part of the GIS.”

CarbonArc PRO has been selected by multiple government customers and has been featured in many recent interoperability demonstrations.

To learn how CarbonArc PRO can help your organization please visit The Carbon Project in booth 720 at the 2008 ESRI Federal User Conference. You can also contact info@thecarbonproject.com or visit http://www.thecarbonproject.com/carbonarc.php for more information.
See you next week!
Jeff

Thursday, February 07, 2008

NSF Grant Awarded for Peer-to-Peer Social Networking Application

The Carbon Project announced today that the National Science Foundation has awarded the company a grant to develop a new geosocial networking application called ((Echo))MyPlace®.

((Echo))MyPlace is a “real time, real place” social networking application that combines 2D and 3D mapping from Microsoft Virtual Earth with a peer-to-peer network featuring dynamic streams of location-based digital news, video content and geographically-targeted marketing.

((Echo))MyPlace has a very modern and exciting look and feel that will appeal to a wide range of users. It’s designed to let local entrepreneurs target their message to the people most likely to be interested in their products and services and enhance the value of their advertising.

A beta version of ((Echo))MyPlace is expected to be released mid 2008. For more information on ((Echo))MyPlace contact info@TheCarbonProject.com.

This work is being support by the National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program.

About The Carbon Project

The Carbon Project is an innovative, high-energy software and technology company specializing in mapping and Geosocial Networking™. The Carbon Project serves professionals, software developers, government agencies and businesses that develop mapping solutions or use geospatial data. The Carbon Project also provides geographically enabled social networking solutions for distributing real-time digital news, video content and geographically targeted marketing. Headquartered in Boston, The Carbon Project is a privately owned company backed by individual investors. For more information please visit: www.TheCarbonProject.com

The Carbon Project, ((Echo))MyPlace and Geosocial Networking are trademarks or registered trademarks of Carbon Project, Inc.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.