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Geo-programming is now more feasible

November 19, 2006

In the old days, programmers and developers required some specialized training and specific tools to help them incorporate geographic and geospatial functionality into their applications. Today, common standards and the switch to XML technology are bringing geo-programming into the modern mainstream.

Overall, today's so-called GeoWeb is that part of the Internet that deals with the real-time or near-real-time sharing of geographic information across various jurisdictions and that provides access to that information.

At the same time, it's also the ability to manipulate it by its end users.

Ron Lake, chairman and CEO of Galdos Systems Inc., a Vancouver-based spatial data infrastructure developer, said municipal governments in particular are deriving strong benefits from GeoWeb technology.

In a municipal environment, City hall is responsible for property information, street signs, traffic accidents and the like. Other groups, either public or private, have responsibility for the delivery of water, gas, hydro-electricity and so on and so forth.

Each specific group, said Lake, needs to know where the other groups’ infrastructure is located and stay up to date with any changes. Today, that would typically be mapped on paper.

“In the context of the GeoWeb, each organization would only be contributing the data it’s responsible for and obtaining data from other members of the community,” said Lake.

Lake also added that significant costs can be incurred by not having access to timely and accurate information.

He gives the example of a highway construction project in Riyahd, Saudi Arabia. The city was building a highway underpass and discovered a hydro distribution cable on the site that supplied a nearby subdivision.

It couldn’t be cut on site without disrupting the hydro service, and the re-routing process caused a three-month construction delay. Lake and Galdos have been involved with the creation of a standard in this space, Geographic Markup Language (GML), that is helping to address these issues.

Programming geographic information, because it’s concerned with the shapes of things and how they’re connected, may require some knowledge of geometry, and even topology.

But Lake said that with the adoption of standards like GML and a move to XML-based technology, geographic information has become quite commoditized at the data level.

“Users are adopting some standard XML tools and editors, where before they might have utilized very specialized GIS software,” said Lake. “It has opened things to a much broader class of developers.”

At the same time, it has also opened geospatial systems to a wider class of applications. In the U.K., a government department responsible for weather forecasting known as the Met Office worked with Galdos to study how the new technology could help it provide better data to its clients and stakeholders.

Graham Mallin, head of IT architecture at the Met Office, said weather forecasting is, by its very nature, geospatial.

“When forecasting the weather, you need to know when and where a particular event is going to happen,” said Mallin. “Therefore, geographic data and the ability to geo-reference forecast model output with geographic features is extremely important.”

U.K. meteorologists at the Met Office have been using geographic data for many years, but Mallin said it was done in a customized, siloed manner.

As the organization moves to a service-oriented architecture-based model relying on common standards, Mallin said the Met Office wanted to see how geospatial programming could help to ensure the best possible delivery channels for its customers.

Source: IT World Canada