Camels

Well, the final report on the Camel project has officially been released. Here is a link where you can download it. There is a separate report (54) for the stuff I worked on. THis was incorporated into chapter 11 of the main report. Essentially it is a multi-criteria evaluation using weighted linear combination. There is python code in the appendix for performing (modularly) a weighted linear combination, including calculating weights. To calculate the weights you need NumPy.

SQL Server 2008 Express

I've finally gotten a chance to play around with SQL Server 2008 express edition. In case you haven't heard 2008 introduced native spatial support. I'm not sure how the internals store spatial data but you can add geometry (or geography) data types as Well-Known Text or Well-Known Binary. Well-Known Text is pretty easy to understand and work with. It's pretty easy to work with SQL Server using the Management Studio Express Edition. If you have MapInfo 9.5, or Manifold version 8 you can directly connect to express edition and edit geometry that way. I don't think there is support for this in ArcGIS 9.3 without SDE (personal or otherwise) which means you probably need an ArcEditor license. I happened to have an XML file with latitude and longitude locations in it that I used to store locations for a mini (personal) google maps project. Using VB.NET 3.5 I could easily connect to both the xml file and sql server to add the geometry as point locations.

Here is the code that I used. It is server side code, with the connection string stored in the web.config file.



    Dim xDoc As New XmlDocument
    xDoc.Load(Server.MapPath("cities.xml"))
    Dim cNodes As XmlNodeList
    cNodes = xDoc.GetElementsByTagName("marker")
    Dim i As Integer = 0
    Dim con As Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection
    con = New Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings _
("baseBSWstr").ConnectionString)
    For Each XNode As XmlNode In cNodes
        Dim ac As XmlAttributeCollection = XNode.Attributes

        Dim lat As Double = CDbl(ac.Item(0).InnerText.ToString)
        Dim lng As Double = CDbl(ac.Item(1).InnerText.ToString)
        Dim name As String = CStr(ac.Item(2).InnerText.ToString)

        con.Open()
        Dim cmd As New SqlCommand("INSERT INTO geograph_data
VALUES (" & i & "," & "geometry::STGeomFromText('POINT
(" & lng & " " & lat & ")', 0), '" & name & "')", con)
        'cmd.CommandText = "INSERT INTO geograph_data
VALUES (" & i & "," & "geometry::STGeomFromText('POINT
(" & lat & " " & lng & ")', 0), '" & name & "')"
        cmd.ExecuteNonQuery()

        con.Close()
        i += 1

    Next

This was just run on my hard drive with a local instance, so I wasn't too concerned about security. From what I understand using parameters is meant to be more secure. Here is an example.

Now if you want to play around with sql server 2008 with just management studio here are some tutorials.
Boston GIS
JasonFollas - this describes the difference between geometry and geography...pretty good series.
Developer Fusion
MSDN

Book Recommendation

A colleague let me glance over this book by Chang. I have to say it is one of the better introductory GIS texts I have seen. I've owned a few. The one for my undergrad courses was weak, but in fairness it was one of the least expensive textbooks I had to purchase. Longley et al. produced a nice one as well. I would go with Chang over Longely, though. Chang's book is ESRI-biased, but I think it is of value to everyone. There are a number of worked examples that show how the little black box works, e.g. affine transformations, and ordinary kriging. I'm not talking about point and click, I mean actual mathematics. My colleague also said the section on modeling is excellent, but I didn't look through it in great detail.

Unfortunately the book budget is a little low right now, as I've made a number of purchases recently so I don't own a copy. Speaking of which, I also recommend Bivand et al.'s spatial statistic book for R. This fills a void in Spatial Statistic books that has been growing. Most spatial stat books focus heavily on theoretical, which is fine, but for someone like me that is not in a course there is a lack of worked examples. Waller and Gotway's book is theoretical and has exercises, but now answer key so who knows if I produced the "correct" results....Andy Mitchell's book is a great start, but doesn't go into much depth (doesn't talk much about first and second order effects, doesn't talk about inhomgeneous k-functions, etc...)

More Anti-Geoweb Rhetoric

Ok, like I've said before - I don't see the Geoweb as GIS, but I do see it as part of the same spectrum. Here is more evidence that the Geoweb is not GIS. Just learned about the Google Visualizations API. Sounds pretty cool, and looks like a more advanced API than their Google Charts. Instead of using a URL you actually use Javascript. One of the first examples of a visualization in their gallery is a World Map of Population. Fist off, they call it an "Intensity" map which doesn't make much sense to me. In reality they are creating a choropleth map where color indicates a change in a range of values. For one, this is an inappropriate use of a choropleth map. The numbers should be derived not raw numbers. So instead of population, it should be population density or deaths per 1000 or something like that. Secondly, they do not divulge what type of classification scheme they are using (Jenk's Natural Breaks, Quartile, Equal Interval, etc..) That's particularly important when creating a map of this type, because the type of classification used can create very different maps. So I guess that is my problem with the Geoweb. Making this available to everyone is not necessarily a good thing. More often than not, there will be inappropriate uses. I guess this is probably the same complaint of specialists everywhere. I'm sure statisticians everywhere shudder when I use Excel for basic statistics. I think though, it is even worst when the creators of the GeoWeb like Google are giving inappropriate examples themselves. Its one thing when a user does it wrong, that's out of Google's hands, but when they do it wrong...

Anyway, that's my rant of the day...

Amateurs and Professionals Unite

The information business is being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of of a hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves.

Andrew Keen - Cult of The Amateur

I was led to that quote in a round about manor via Jame's Fee's blog to an entry by Sean Gorman. There is an interesting discussion on the tensions between the Geoweb and the GIS industry (ESRI, MapInfo). In short, the GIS industry apparently considers GIS is what professionals do and the Geoweb is for amateurs. I don't really agree with this, but don't see too much of a problem with the terms used. I do agree that the Geoweb is not GIS, at least not at this point. I see a little danger with people who do not understand fundamentals about maps creating maps, but you get this even with so-called "professionals." Plus, the people, generally speaking, who build the Geoweb do have an understanding. I see GIS and the Geoweb on the same spectrum supplying different services around spatial data, they aren't the same but aren't too different. People who do Geoweb are professionals at Geoweb, and I'm definitely an amateur. I'd like to think of myself as a professional at GIS, and a person who does Geoweb probably would be an amateur at it. Everybody is a little defensive (me too) about their industry, and a little protectionist, for example just tell a Geoweb zealot that it isn't GIS. When I say it, it isn't meant to be an insult. There's just a lot of capabilities that I have in a GIS that isn't there in the Geoweb, just like there is a lot of capabilities that isn't in a GIS. The problem with ESRI is that they want their software to do everything. It's not practical or possible. I agree with James Fee's sentiment about all getting along, after all we are all under the same Geography hat. Sean Gorman had a link to the Cult of The Amateur book which had an excerpt you could read. I found the bits that I read of this book interesting. I don't agree with his points entirely. In the end the web is a bit of a quasi-market, and the users gravitate to the best sites, best blogs, best news organizations that meet their criteria. If a film review blog is filled with boring analysis and misspellings, then it is not going to be popular and not overshadow someone like Roger Ebert. This blog is proof positive that people avoid crap (except for 7-10 people one of which is my Mom). Even Wikipedia has had to tone down their encyclopedia for everyone to edit and now use "experts" to do the writing or monitoring. I do think the inclusion of a comments section on news articles is ridiculous, and although it is sometimes entertaining, they are usually filled with vulgar bigoted remarks. I forgot who's axiom it was about Usenets/newsgroups but if they go on for long enough eventually someone will start to call someone else Hitler or a Nazi. That is perhaps where the Web's greatest enemy lies is the anonymity. Which makes it difficult to tell where certain information comes from, but unlike Keen I'm pretty sure Web 2.0 users can tell that a blog is going to be a form of an OpEd piece, and if you visit the Ford blog you can expect propaganda. I think perhaps the greatest flaw in Keen's argument is that the "quality of public civil discourse" has been declining since before Web 2.0. Personally I point the finger at the political pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coultour, Michael Moore, Al Franken, and on and on; who leave little room for "civil discourse" and bifurcate an already bifurcated system. Anyway, that's way off topic and probably not the type of info you would read a GIS blog for. So I apologize, but I've typed it and it would take too much effort to remove it.

MapInfo 9.5

The geoblogosphere seems to be all a twitter (no relation to twitter) with the release of ArcGIS 9.3. I made the mistake of getting my knickers in a twist when 9.2 came out. I installed it wanting to try the new features, but unfortunately I used it to work on some project work when the rest of the office hadn't upgraded from 9.1 (or 9.0 in some cases). That was dumb on my part, so now if I happen to receive a copy, I don't think I'll upgrade till SP1 comes out. Though, sometimes service packs can lead to more headaches as I found with 9.2 sp3 and the loss of some of my python tools in the toolbox...weeeeee!

Anyway, all the talk around 9.3 has overshadowed the pending release of MapInfo 9.5. Its fairly obvious from my posts that I am primarily an ESRI user, and have given a fair share of MapInfo criticism. They must have heard the call (I'm certain I wield such influence), because it sounds like they have made some substantial changes. They are a little behind the times on some things, like the .NET MapBasic features. ESRI has had that for over a year now. I'm not too impressed by having support for MSSQL, because it sounds like everyone will. Although, I bet MapInfo won't require any extra extension to handle it. I am hopeful but very much doubt that there will be direct support in ArcGIS 9.3 without the need for ArcSDE. MapInfo should also add PostGIS support in my opinion. It seems to be gaining some commercial acceptance through Manifold, ArcSDE, zigGIS (also ArcGIS), etc...

I'm downloading an evaluation copy of 9.5. I can't test everything, but I read that they designed the interface with .NET, so I'm hoping it doesn't look like crayon on sandpaper anymore. I also hope they replaced workspaces with something more functional. I'll post my findings here.

Why am I always the last to know?

Apparently the term GIS died...How come I'm always the last to know these things...

:)

And when did GIS just become data and mapping?

New Media

I've noticed this topic in a few blogs recently, sparked by a presentation given at Where 2.0 this year by Dr. Lisa Parks. I did not attend this conference or see the presentation, so all my information is second hand. I think this is an interesting topic, repositioning GIS as not a tool but as media, or a form of communication. Her topic revolved much more around Satellites and the lack of public knowledge or information about satellites (metadata). Here is a transcript and notes on the presentation. There has been varied reactions, some quite critical. Personally, I think the criticisms are coming from the pragmatic or post-positivist stance so commonly found in the GIS as tool perspective. I don't want to put words in her mouth, but my interpretation of her presentation is that the GIS (Geospatial, neogeography, etc...) community needs to recognize that satellites are not impersonal objective eyes in the world. They serve a purpose, their lens' are not focused arbitrarily on the world, but pointed at places, for profit in most cases. I think this is a perfectly ok stance to take. I think that it is good to leave aside the notion that GIS is an objective tool and recognize it as a communication devise that serves a purpose. Not only that, but that the information stored in a database is inherently unobjective as well. We have the notion that raw data is objective, but regardless that data is stored in a format that was "invented" and the structure of the data "invented." Right off the bat, there is a western bias to the structure of the data, because it revolves around western thinking. The primitive geometric structures of a GIS are western biased and evolved from the western cartographic tradition. I'm not criticizing the formats, just recognizing the problem.

Obviously, communication can be twisted (see How to Lie with Maps). I think it is even easier to lie with satellite imagery. If a satellite image is shown in a presentation and you are told it is of a certain location at a certain time, you just have to accept or not accept that as the truth.

The link above was mostly critical of her critique of the Darfur project. Again, following my explanation, then the point is that the unbiased imagery begins to serve a biased purpose (or second biased purpose if you count the original acquisition), that of stopping the Darfur crisis. I'm not arguing against or criticizing the Darfur project, but recognizing that there is a goal behind showing the geographic information...

Anyway, when it comes to working in GIS, I use it as a tool, and I'm very much a pragmatic post-positivist (if I may mix epistemologies). I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see more conversations like this popping up, especially with more and more geographic information becoming readily available, and programs like Google Earth gaining in popularity...

“Trust in Allah, but tie your camel”

I was doing some AJAX today, trying to dynamically load markers from points stored in a geodatabase. Basically, just an XML response formatted specifically for my data, and parsed using Javascript. It works, surprisingly given my programming skills :). Anyway, probably wouldn't have gotten finished if it weren't for FireBug. A handy little Javascript debugger that lets me know when I have errors in my code. I use Visual Web Developer express for ASP.NET programming, and the 2005 version doesn't really have anything like this for Javascript (I think I read version 2008 does). FireBug works with Mozilla Firefox, but I think there is an alternative version for Internet Explorer. Be sure to disable FireBug when not debugging because it will report errors on any website, and slows down Gmail...

So I've started work on another project. I am a little unsure of confidentiality, so I won't list all that are involved. I'm sure the project will be made public, or at least the publication will be. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to guess who this work is for if you are in Australia. I'll be modeling camel management plans...while it is tempting (and easier) to just turn in a set of photographs of myself shooting camels, I'm of course referring to GIS-based models. Since the turn around time on this is pretty quick (2 months!), the model is a fairly simple Multi-Criteria Evaluation. I'm planning on using IDRISI (Andes?) to do this, but in the back of my head I'm thinking of writing a plug in for MapWindow. Two months isn't long, and IDRISI has a number of built-in tools for performing a Multi-Criteria Evaluation, as well processing rasters (distance surfaces, friction surfaces, etc...). The reason I want an open source solution is to create a user interface that could be used by anybody. That way a land manager could come in, and given a set of criteria (most-likely predefined), they could spit out a map showing potential locations for different camel management plans.

As idyllic as camels look in the Australian desert, they aren't native species. They were brought in as pack animals, and in many cases the train routes and road routes actually follow the same route as the old camel trains. Now their population is approaching one million, and they can be quite destructive to infrastructure, and biodiversity (or vice versa). Probably the unique part of this model is it is trying to identify locations for management plans based on a perspective, and also including perspectives in the model. Obviously, when a question is asked it comes from a certain perspective, and to answer that question certain criteria will be relevant. On top of that, there will be a layer that explicitly shows where certain management plans cannot be implemented based on the community, land owner, etc... This will most like be a constraint factor...but also could be a distance surface I suppose...Have to think about that one.

I'll keep you up-to-date on it.

GIS Recognition

I recently moved to Australia a few months ago, from the United States. My goal was always to continue in my GIS career, but in case that wouldn't be practical I was prepared to go another route (like work in a bookstore). Luckily, though, finding GIS work has not been a problem.

Of course finding work in Darwin isn't that difficult. If you can't find a job here, you're not looking, or you don't actually want one. Actually, you probably don't even need to look, and a job will fall into your lap. This probably refers mostly to "skilled" labor.

I'm sure the job market has something to do with all my new found work, but I think there is a deeper issue going on. I believe that Australians are more open to the spatial side of life. Spatial awareness seems to be much more prevalent here. Even on the bus the other night, I overheard a mobile phone conversation (not that you cannot overhear someone talking on their phone in public) and he said, "Do you want me to do a presentation on the geographic study?" In the states, I felt I constantly had to insist on the value of GIS and Geography. Here it is more like: "Oh, you do GIS, would like a job?"; instead of "You study rocks?[glassy eye look]" It just seems that Australians are already thinking spatially. I've worked for a company where I tried to implement GIS, and it was a struggle (despite already using CAD extensively). Actually, it really never happened. Then I've worked for a company where GIS was already established, and continued to invade every aspect of the firm's services. Once GIS is there, then it is there to stay. In the least, most everyone in Australia has heard of GIS, if they are not able to explain it, and are definitely open to the value of maps. Some people are skeptical though. As in one case, I was told that it is silly Google Earth (I believe "flashy technology" was used) is the motivator for data collection initiatives. In other words, this flashy technology was what they were using to push for more data. I resisted the urge to state that this person had just slapped an entire industry in the face by calling GE and GIS by extension "flashy technology", and calmly explained that the true value lies in the capability to analyze and display said data geographically. I asked, "Wouldn't it be useful to consolidate thousands of pages of financial data and display it on a map, where one can quickly identify where the resources are and are not?" There is probably a paper in there somewhere about the impact GIS has had on policy and policy/makers.

I think Australia, and probably all of the commonwealth, gives geography a higher place in education than Geography has in the United States. Let's face it, we Americans really aren't geographic people. The Geographic Literacy survey shows that. I think the downfall of Geography is well documented in the American Geography community. From the loss of Geography in Ivy League Universities to the advent of social studies, Geography lost its ground in the 20th century. Take a look at Why Geography Matters for a good read. It's coming back though; the American Association of Geographers is reporting record membership and conference attendance numbers, Harvard has even made steps to reintroduce Geography. I'm sure we all know that this is partially due to the Google Maps and Google Earths. These technology have made Geography extremely accessible.

Moving too Australia has definitely been a good career move for me.

Google Earth and Charts Tutorial

This isn't really a tutorial in the proper sense of the term, but just a posted example of using a combination of KML, NetworkLink, ASP.NET generic handler (ashx), and Google Charts to create a dynamic symbolized map for Google Earth.

I started by downloading some 2000 census data in census block format, along with SF1 data, from ESRI's free download area. Then I brought it into Manifold selecting just a few census blocks for all of Fort Collins, Colorado, and created their inner centroids. I filtered some of the data that had 0 population from the SF1 table. Clearly, when/if you open this up you will find that I should have weeded a few more points, but on the other hand it shows how quick this runs. My server is pretty slow, and I tested this on a wireless internet connection that didn't have a very strong connection (plus I was streaming both Google Earth and some music). In Manifold, I related the two tables and exported it back out to a shapefile. On export I added two columns for lat and long.

In Visual Web Developer Express I created a generic handler (ashx). Instead of going into each line of code, I'll just summariz(s)e. Below is a link to a zip file where you can download both the KML file and the ASHX file. I used Sharpmap 0.9 to connect to the shapefile and read the table's contents. I just took the percentage of Males and Females (number of males / population, number of females / population) for my working statistic (truly groundbreaking stuff :)). You can see from the code that it basically just writes out the KML file, creating a Google Chart api url as it goes.

You can view the final product by opening this KML file in Google Earth. This KML file contains very little KML, and basically just has a Networklink back to the address of the handler.

If you want the files used, they are available here.

As always, any suggestions, comments, questions are much appreciated.

Here are some other examples I've found:
http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-chart-api-in-kml-for-quick-data.html
http://www.barnabu.co.uk/interactive-spiders-and-charts/

EDIT:
Just noticed the Thematic Mapping Blog also has a post on using charts in Google Earth. Here is the link: http://blog.thematicmapping.org/2008/04/using-google-charts-with-kml.html
or with open layers http://blog.thematicmapping.org/2008/04/openlayers-and-google-chart-mashup.html

More Fun With Goolge Earth

This is a bit of a continuation with the previous blog entry. Instead of using the networklink I wanted to create something dynamic but portable. So basically, it consists of the same process of generating a kml file and images of pie charts, only this time the kml isn't written as a response but to the server. Then the whole folder is zipped up to a kmz including all the images. To do the zipping I used an opensource solution called #ziplib (sharpziplib) which worked very easily and only required a few lines of code (below).

Of course I'm not the first or last person to do this dynamic kmz creation with ASP.NET, and a brief search will produce essentially the same process using #ziplib. Although, I don't think many people or dynamically creating graphs at the same time (could be wrong, if so please correct). I really want to use Google charts to do this, because they have some nice looking charts, but due to some proxy server issues this became more hastle than it was worth. I think if I do a tutorial or something, I would use Google charts instead. Again this has probably been done somewhere.

Here is a fix to a problem I was running into. You need to set the size of the file before adding it as an entry: http://community.sharpdevelop.net/forums/p/6986/19897.aspx#19897

On a side note. I keep delving more and more into programming. I do think it is a necessity. I can handle working with vb.net, vba, javascript, and python. Definitely more of dabler than developer. I keep telling myself that I should start to learn C# to take things to a more advanced level. A lot of these language structures look similar to c#: javascript, python, java, j#, etc. At least to me anyway. But what can I say - I love VB. As I've read elsewhere, it is such a verbose language you can read it like a book. I just think it is so easy to use, and in a lot of ways so portable with VBA, VBScript (I've used this with dos to repeat creating a directory structure over and over again), VB.NET, VB6. I can use it in so many different environments. It's hard to resist the temptation to come back to it...and so C# will have to wait some more.

Here is a copy of the code I am using:

Private Sub ZipFolder(ByVal currentFolder As String)
Dim Filenames() As String = System.IO.Directory.GetFiles(OutputPath & currentFolder & "\")
Dim s As New ZipOutputStream(System.IO.File.Create(OutputPath & currentFolder & ".kmz"))
s.SetLevel(9)
Dim buffer() As Byte
ReDim buffer(4096)
For Each file As String In Filenames
Dim entry As ZipEntry
Dim fileInfo As New System.IO.FileInfo(file)
entry = New ZipEntry(fileInfo.Name)
entry.Size = fileInfo.Length
s.PutNextEntry(entry)
Dim fs As System.IO.FileStream = fileInfo.OpenRead
ReDim buffer(fileInfo.Length)
Dim sourceBytes As Integer = 1
Do Until (sourceBytes <= 0)
sourceBytes = fs.Read(buffer, 0, fileInfo.Length)
s.Write(buffer, 0, sourceBytes)
Loop
fs.Close()
fs = Nothing
sourceBytes = Nothing
entry = Nothing
Next
s.Finish()
s.Close()
Filenames = Nothing
s = Nothing
buffer = Nothing

End Sub


Mmmmmm Goooooogle Eaarrtth....

I have to admit, I didn't much bother with Google Earth when it first started making headlines (however many years ago that was). Sure like any Geonerd I downloaded and goofed around. "Oooh spinning globe (Wheeee!)." The imagery, of course, was stunning. It wasn't until recently that I've really found a use for it and started to delve into it. Now, I'm quite enamored with Google Earth.

The current project I'm working on is for the Department of Employment, Education, and Training....and water sports. The NT government has some good department names. I'm under the education department and there is currently a push to be able geolocate all the schools and associate this with their excellent data warehouse. The Northern Territory has some very remote communities (some still are lacking in power/electricity). I'm sure to fellow GISers it is obvious the need to be able to locate where your resources are going, and not going. A map is a simple way to do this. I'm the only GIS user working there and only on a part time basis at that, so it is important for everyone to be able to view the data when I'm not available to create a map. Their data warehouse is already running on SQL Server, and so I've been building my system on top of that (or next to). MapInfo was chosen as the GIS, and I'll describe my woes with this program later. I got into Google Earth, because another department had set up their on Google Earth server and had a site license for GE Enterprise. That's when I started to explore what we could do with it.

This is what I've come up with. I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this, but I thought I would at least share my methodology.

KML has a special section called network link. This allows the KML creator to instead of populating a file with the coordinates and geometry, to tie it to a web based server side script. This was extremely easy to do. I created a generic handler (ashx) in asp.net, and wrote a small class that created the response in the kml/xml format. The class pulled all of the coordinate information directly from the database server. Pretty cool to have the dynamic capability built into Google Earth. and only requiring a little server side scripting. Maybe 50 lines of code if that.

That's good, but it is just the location of schools. Obviously the description for the info window that pops up when the location is clicked can be populated with various data from the warehouse, but this might become a bit tedious to code. Instead I just placed a link to a profile page I had already set up. Unfortunately, you can't place an iframe in the window, because it isn't sophisticated enough to handle every scenario. No big deal.

What I really want to do is be able to display the data as a symbol. I could easily classify the symbols using some sort of nominal data stored in the database, or even some continuous data. I had originally created some maps with pie chart symbols in MapInfo showing the break-up of enrollment. I was asked if there was a way to click on the map and see what the numbers actually were. Well, this was a PDF, so the answer in that case was "no." I started to think if there was a way to do this with Google Earth, that would allow for the creation of a much more interactive environment. Using GDI+ and .NET, I was able to create a png image of a pie chart from the data in the warehouse, while programatically creating the kml file. Originally, I manually took this data and created a KMZ file. Then I started to use network links and tied my pie chart code in with my server side script. Now I have a dynamic kml file that creates pie charts on the fly as it is shown in Google Earth (images stored on the webserver). Now whenever it is opened up, it will reflect the current changes in the data warehouse. I plan on achieving the same effect with a proportional symbol. .NET has assemblies that allow me to compress data, so I could easily create a fixed kmz file based on this same method.

I would also like to do something similar using 3D. I attempted to create an extruded polygon based on the data. Unfortunately, these do not change their scale based on zoom. I looked around, but did not find anything. I'm thinking I could do this using regions. But at this point, I'm a little confused how regions work.

Anyway, it isn't difficult with a little programing to create a highly interactive map with Google Earth and ASP.NET.

Is Geospatial a Bad Word?

So I "discovered", in the same sense Columbus "discovered" America, a new podcast available through ITunes. It is the Penn State Department of Geography Coffee Hour to Go, http://www.geog.psu.edu/coffee_hour/. Basically they have prominent Geographers discuss current research and the like. The one that I listened to was Dr. Michael Goodchild's presentation on the impact of GIS in Geography. It's an interesting take on the importance of GIS in the discipline of Geography, worth a listen. But, in the lecture, Dr. Goodchild uses the word "Geospatial," saying it somewhat disdainfully. He doesn't elaborate on why this is the case, but it is clear he doesn't like the term. I'm sure I've used the term before, in speech or in writing, but I've never really thought about. The first thing that popped into my head when I really thought about it was that it seems redundant. Wouldn't Geo imply Spatial? Maybe to a Geographer it would. Mostly, though, I'm curious why Dr. Goodchild would be opposed to the term. So I'll toss that question out to cyberspace in hopes that it comes back with a response - Is Geospatial a bad word?