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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 12/11/06 issue

Stocking stuffers

Cheap, fast geomapping

By Joab Jackson and William Jackson, GCN Staff

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If you’re a chief information officer or a system administrator, pat yourself on the back—you survived one of the most challenging years in information technology so far. Whether you worked to raise system security to new levels, plotted a move to the next Internet Protocol, or found ways to take advantage of new, inexpensive technologies, you likely found yourself in uncharted territory at one time or another.

And down the road, you can probably expect more of the same. Here are 11 of the biggest disrupters—both good and bad—GCN has seen this year, and how they could affect your operations in the years to come. And if we’ve only whetted your appetite here, enter 719 in the GCN Quickfind box at the top of this page for links to more coverage of these issues.
Geographic information systems have been around for well over a decade, though 2006 is certainly the year agencies started to get their hands on cheap geospatial capabilities, thanks to free and open-source offerings by Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Autodesk Inc. of San Rafael, Calif., and MetaCarta Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. Google Maps, for instance, offers a free application programming interface that others can link to from their own applications. Developer Adrian Holovaty created the Web site Chicagocrime.org by pulling crime data from the city of Chicago’s own Web site and placing the locations of the crimes on a Google map.

Elsewhere, the Defense Intelligence Agency picked up MetaCarta’s GeoTagger for its User Knowledge Environment Information Management System. GeoTagger analyzes documents for geographic references and then creates coordinates for those references that can be placed on maps.

Other offerings also show promise for creative geomapping. Microsoft upgraded its Virtual Earth 3D online map and data service that compiles photographic images of cities and terrain, which can be used to generate textured, photorealisitc 3-D models with engineering-level accuracy. Autodesk integrated several of its mapping programs with Google Earth’s geographic information system capabilities.
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More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Authentication / Identity Management, Content / Record Management, Defense IT, Geospatial, IPv6, Software Applications, Web Strategies