Enterprise GIS

AGI 2009 Geocommunity Conference - Mainstream? Not yet.

2009-09-29T17:16:00.005+01:00

A good AGI GeoCommunity conference for sure with some thought provoking presentations. There were lots of familar faces and it was good to catch up over a beer or two. I was wondering who would be there this year and what the community would consider the burning questions of the age to be...

It wasn't as I had expected. Steven Feldman, the conference chair, opened the first day with a solid introduction, explaining that the central theme would be 'What' people are doing with GIS, and hoping that over the next year we would be considering more 'Why' questions. This year's conference would not really consider the 'How' as GIS has now merged with the mainstream, and so presumably then, implementation problems are a thing of the past. At least that is how I heard it and I must admit that this sentiment does not ring true to me. Not yet.

In my own travels as a Geospatial Solution Architect I haven't noticed GIS implementation challenges lessen very much - sure some of the standards are beginning to take hold but the problem areas of real multi-user concurrent data editing, application interoperability, data integration, data licensing, and GIS within enterprise architecture are still very much significant challenges. I would have loved to see an implementation stream cover progress in these areas.

The conference was not organised along the lines of the AGI Special Interest Groups which perhaps in itself indicates that we may need to review the topic areas and roles of the SIGs to ensure that they remain relevant to the community. As someone that feels that technical developments are of great interest I enjoyed the Geoweb stream which addressed some relevant (or potentially relevant) technical developments, principally in the area of mashups. I would love to hear more about developments in data storage, server based services (and issues of scalability and availability), systems and data integration - technical issues relevant to enterprise deployment of GIS capabilities.

The AGI Northern Group has organised a follow up conference (Where2.0Now?) in Harrogate on 10th November on the subject of Web2.0 and disruptive technologies. The AGI Technical SIG is also in the process of organising a conference for early next year on the subject of Mobile GIS. I look forward to both of these events and to hear more of the technical developments effecting our industry.

GIS as a member of the mainstream? Based upon the content and attendance of this conference we can't possibly argue that GIS is mainstream yet. Sure, many more people use spatial data and technologies daily in the form of SatNav and online web maps but the IT mainstream was not at the conference. There were no stands from the mainstream IT players such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, FileNet, Google, Informatica, Accenture, Logica, Dell, Sun, Embarcodero, Adobe, etc, etc. in the small exhibit hall. When we start to see these vendors and integrators showing up in numbers then we will know that GIS has arrived. I am not so sure what we will all do after that though!

Thanks to the conference organizers.

What is this Enterprise GIS Thing?

2008-05-18T23:34:00.001+01:00

I suppose if I am going to blog on about this topic then I should really lay out what it is I am talking about, so here goes. It is not going to be straight forward though but hopefully, as my ideas develop, I’ll be able to refine this over time.

“Enterprise GIS” is one of those terms that seems to have been around for a long time, at least since the late 1990’s but it has always had more to do with marketing hype than any commonly understood concept. During my time at Convergent Group in the US we certainly toted many solutions as being Enterprise GIS (and some were pretty cool) but today I am taking a different slant on the notion. To begin with I don’t believe that there is such a thing as “an Enterprise GIS” – that is, there is no single application or architectural component that provides all the GIS capabilities that a large organization could need.

In my experience the term is most commonly used for large spatial data repositories; hubs, warehouses and clearinghouses are often labelled as Enterprise GIS. These central stores of geospatial data can vary enormously in their sophistication, ranging from simple file shares that act as dumping grounds for file based formats, to spatially enabled databases fed by automated feeds from business applications. Repositories are often accompanied by metadata catalogues to assist potential users find and evaluate data – but in the end these are still read-only systems and only provide a subset of capabilities.

To me, the definition of “Enterprise GIS” is a set of capabilities (or services) that are baked into the software infrastructure (the ‘stack’) in order to be made available to any application that needs to use them. What are those capabilities? Well basically they provide the ability to work with spatial data i.e. to capture, transform, transfer, store, analyse, visualise, maintain, validate, manage, secure and distribute spatial data. ‘Baking them into the stack’ means that they are made available to any business application without any dependency on proprietary ‘fat’ desktop client software.

Thus it is not possible to purchase an Enterprise GIS; these capabilities need to be architected and assembled using a blend of platform software, supplemented by specific technology components from the specialist GIS houses. This involves careful selection of appropriate standards and policies to support data interoperability between applications and to enable reliable ‘Create Read Update Delete’ access to spatial data via any channel including desktop, web, sensor, mobile, EAI, etc.

Enterprise-wide GIS capabilities need to exhibit specific ‘enterprise class qualities’ i.e. they must be deployed in a server environment and possess the following qualities:

Scalable – they can grow to support volume and performance demands for current and future (unforeseen) needs;
Reliable – can operate in an unattended fashion to produce consistent and predictable results;
Available – can be configured to support High Availability e.g. support clustering and fail over;
Flexible – configuration can be changed to support evolving needs of the business with relative ease, i.e. without significant downtime or impact on business operations;
Secure – all access to data functions must be securable in line with corporate policies; includes support for directory services, delegation and encryption;
Measurable – it must be possible to monitor all aspects of the operation of these capabilities such that administrators can easily determine that they are functioning correctly and to support problem identification and resolution using standard tools (e.g. HP OpenView);
Standards-based – In order to support use by many applications, these capabilities need to be accessible via open standard protocols and formats;
Discoverable – in future posts I’ll explore this idea more, but the crux is that as we build a set of commonly available geospatial services, they will need to be described, and those descriptions made in an accessible fashion.

This doesn’t sound like GIS today, and in 20 years time may be redundant anyway as the capabilities are increasingly adopted by the major platform vendors. But at the present time I believe that providing spatial capabilities within the common platform is still a highly desirable and achievable vision.

1Spatial and Snowflake Conferences

2008-05-08T22:21:00.003+01:00

In the past couple of weeks I managed to squeeze in the Snowflake GeoxChange conference in Edinburgh and the 1Spatial conference at Stansted. Both conferences turned out to be very good so chairman Peter Woodsford must be doing something right.

Interestingly the INSPIRE initiative featured heavily in both of them, the reason being that this European Spatial Data Infrastructure is an ideal driver for both companies. As public bodies across Europe will be mandated to catalogue and share vast amounts of spatial information in the near future, there will likely be the need to quantify data qualities so enable potential users to assess fitness for purpose (and at the very least not sue the provider); 1Spatial are positioning themselves nicely to provide the ability to do just that.

The company is actively involved in an OGC initiative to define data quality assurance measures for spatial metadata to enable data quality attributes to be reported consistently and its Radius Studio tool provides a means to profile spatial data to divine business rules, report conformance with them, and perform actions to improve data consistency. This looks like a nice niche that will enable data custodians to provide clearer descriptions of their data and assist potential users determine the extent to which it might meet their needs. I think that as practitioners get their head around this concept of spatial data quality auditing there is considerable scope for profiling and improving all those datasets that have come into digital existence in the last 15 years.

Snowflake's tools also look well set to support INSPIRE driven initiatives by enabling the encoding and decoding of spatial data packets in GML format. Given this government's preference for XML centric data exchange standards and even the emergence of Dutch legislation that goes as far as to enshrine GML into law (it's true but unfortunately for some strange reason the GeoXchange presentation that describes this is password protected); Snowflake's tools may have a bright future if they can plug into message backbones to enable the transport of spatial data within the new SDIs.

Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference

2008-04-29T00:03:00.004+01:00

I attended The Open Group's conference is Glasgow last week and was rather surprised to find that geospatial issues didn't really feature. Given how common geospatial is (i.e. it is of interest to many departments within many organizations); how useful the geospatial dimension is to data integration analysis; and how difficult it still is to provide access to geospatial data and functionality - I had expected it to be a well worn theme but that was not the case last week.

I think this is an exciting time as the discipline of Enterprise Architecture is maturing at the same time as GIS technologies are reaching a point where they can contribute core capabilities to the software infrastructure.

I did provide a brief overview of what geospatial is and how it might fit as a set of enterprise capabilities and the ideas were pretty well received. So on the strength of that I've set up this blog to log my thoughts and ideas on the subject - and just hope that I have some!