Integrating with Fix Your Street

So www.fixyourstreet.ie launched on the 1st August to enable “we the people” report issues that we thought needed fixing, to our Local Authorities. It’s a great idea that’s been around for a while and has been looking for someone to champion it.  That someone came along in the form of South Dublin County Council who stood up the service and are running it on a pilot basis for a while with a view to it, or somthing like it, being rolled out nationwide.

The technology behind FixYourStreet is an Open Source platform called Ushahidi – or “witness” and its got an interesting history which you can read at www.ushahidi.org. Now Esri has a bit of form with Ushahidi arising from our work around Disaster Response. I became interested in the possibility of using some of our open source tools to integrate with the South Dublin County Council Ushahidi server.

I contacted Tommy Kavanagh over at South Dublin who encouraged me to try out the Ushahidi REST API. Now this was just what I was looking for as ArcGIS also uses a REST API and its a no brainer as far as loose coupled system integration goes. It took me a while to find the documentation for the Ushahidi API, its here by the way. Once found it told me all I needed to know about sending REST queries to Ushahidi to return XML or JSON responses.

I then downloaded the Esri open source Public Information Map template from ArcGIS.com. Now the Public Information Map template includes a Ushahidi.js file to enable the Viewer render information from a Ushahidi server but it took me a while to figure out how to wire it up.

Ushahidi in the Public Information Viewer

After about an hour – success! I had a working Public Information Viewer including a feed of Incidents directly from South Dublin’s FixYourStreet Ushahidi server.

A simple integration but now we can go on to consider other uses of this information. Display and analysis with Social Media feeds from Twitter, YouTube and Flickr come to mind but also the desktop possibilities for hot spot mapping and time series analysis.

What is significant for me is that this is an example of an integration between two sets of software that are “Open”. One, Ushahidi, is classic Open Source and the other, the Public Information Map, is just open. But because they both use open standards like REST and XML they support easy integration. And because the people who are using the technology are committed to Open Data principles it was possible to for these two complimentary technologies to communicate effectively.

Kudos to South Dublin County Council and all involved.

Total Cost of Ownership……… Music to my ears!

“Costs of proposals should be assessed on as close to a total cost of ownership (TCO) model as possible and at a minimum include the following costs where applicable: licensing; arising hardware upgrades/renewals/replacements; ICT and user training; support; maintenance; and, external expertise.  These should be calculated over the lifetime of the contract proposed or five years if not for a specified term.  Costs should not be evaluated on the basis of initial outlay costs only”

From Circular 2/11 (Clause 3): Additional arrangements for ICT Expenditure in the Civil and Public Service, issued by the Department of Finance, 3^rd of February 2011 (publicly available here http://www.finance.gov.ie/documents/circulars/2011/circ22011.pdf).

Music to my ears! Esri Ireland has, for a number of years now, engaged our customers very much on the basis of TCO when it comes to the innovative use and application of geographic information within and across their businesses.  Our focus is on working proactively with our customers to meet their needs and to keep costs down.  One of the ways in which we do that is to adopt a TCO approach to our commercial propositions.  While this is relatively straightforward where we are fully engaged with customers, it is not so straightforward when engaging customers and prospects under open public procurement.  In these situations it has been my experience that the emphasis around cost has always focussed on the initial outlay (short-term view) as opposed to more medium to long-term view that would encompass measures such as TCO.

The statement from 02/11 above in conjunction with the statement “We will reform public procurement to become a tool to support innovative Irish firms and to allow greater access to Irish small and medium-sized businesses” from the new programme for government, gives me a great sense of anticipation that, perhaps now, company’s like Esri Ireland, who always put a strong emphasis on Value for Money (VFM), Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), will have the opportunity to be evaluated and assessed on such messages and propositions as part of future public procurement processes.

Is there a change on the horizon or is this more “talking the talking”……… time will tell.

Interestingly however, and regardless of the explicit statements above, I have noticed an increase in customers who have started to take their own internal initiatives to seek better VFM and ROI with a view to reducing their overall costs associated with doing business.   While this is most welcome and to be encouraged, my personal opinion is that the only way that we will truly reduce the cost of doing business is to increase the value of doing business.

At Esri Ireland we do this by solving the problems that people care about and by producing results that people value.  This, in my opinion, will only be achieved through partnership and collaboration with customers over medium to long-term engagements, the shared purpose of which is to drive down the total cost of ownership while maximising return in investment and delivering solutions that exactly meet the customers need.

Author:  Paul Synnott, Country Manager

Mapping Land Cover Change through time.

Even since I read about the map comparison template for ArcGIS Online maps I’ve been itching to give it a try. The template enables you to compare three ArcGIS Online maps side-by-side. It can provide real insight into data that is changing over time, or data on different themes for the same place. I can see real uses for this template in comparing County Development Plans between revisions, in comparing Census results between years or even in comparing Census themes to reveal relationships between socio-economic variables.

What I really needed was some good source data to provide a time series to illustrate the power of this sort of mapping. I remembered that the EPA collects Corine Land Cover information on a systematic basis so I contacted them to get a cut of the data pertaining to Ireland for 1990, 2000 and 2006. Very helpfully the EPA were able to provide me with the data for each year in esri shapefile format coded with consistent land use classes and complete with the all important legend file for symbolisation. This was a great starting point for building my maps and my web application.

I took an initial look at the source data in ArcMap to see what the structure of the shapefiles was. There have been some changes to the way Corine data was recorded and coded over the years. As the source materials used as input to the classification have improved there have been corresponding improvements to the classified data. The supplied shapefiles had similar structure and a consistent coding scheme.

For performance reasons its best not to use shapefiles to create web services. So I created an empty Geodatabase using ArcCatalog. I adopted the schema of the 2006 shapefile as the schema for my Feature Classes. I then loaded the data from each shapefile into the its corresponding Feature Class, one for each year taking care to map the relevant source fields to the target schema. Having done that I then created indexes on any fields I would be using for display or labelling. The resulting Feature Classes were in Irish Grid so using ArcToolbox I re-projected them to Web Mercator which is ideal for use with the ArcGIS Online basemaps. My data was ready now I could create some web services.

Getting the data ready.

Using ArcMap I authored a map for each Corine year by simply loading each Feature Class and applying the legend file the EPA had provided. I filled in the document properties and the layer properties with some basic descriptive metadata for my maps. Using the Map Publishing Toolbar I was then able to publish my maps as web services to our Amazon based ArcGIS Server in the cloud. It doesn’t get any easier than this.

Authoring the map.

So now I have three web services, one for each of 1990, 2000 and 2006 in a public folder on my ArcGIS Server. I can now mashup these services any way I please. I’m going to use ArcGIS.com so that I can the use the resultant “webmap’s” in the map comparison template. Now you’ll notice that each web services has a “View In: ArcGIS.com” link on its endpoint. Clicking the link creates an ArcGIS.com webmap which I can then save in my Content Gallery. I take the opportunity to edit the webmap Description, Credits and Access Use and Constraints to acknowledge the EPA.

At this stage have the three webmaps that I want to use with the map comparison template. I open the first map on ArcGIS.com and click the Share button. There are loads of different ways to Share your Maps on ArcGIS.com including Facebook, Twitter, iFrame or web application. I want to make a web application so I choose that option. From the Web Application Gallery I choose the map comparison template and download it to my IIS server. OK so now I need to drop the GUID of each of my webmaps into the downloaded template so that the web application knows which maps it’s supposed to be comparing. It’s not difficult and it’s well described in the template readme document – if you can cut and paste (and who can’t!) you can do it.

Sharing the Map.

The moment of truth! I hit http://46.137.120.35/CorineCompare/index.html and up she comes. The web application lets me navigate to any location and see the Corine data mashed up on the ArcGIS Online Topographic basemap. I can right click to synchronize the scale and location to see how any location has changed through time or I can permanently synchronise the maps. Even the Identify Tool is synchronised – clicking on one Map returns results from all three (sweet!).

The finished application.

A good enough day’s work I think. Except for it hasn’t taken me a day. Start to finish, it’s taken about 4 hours to create and publish this application. So it’s no trouble, if you have some Irish data that you would like to give the “comparator” treatment drop me a line and I’ll try to help you out.

ED

Could GIS have saved Meath County Council €4.06 million?

Last week’s judgement by Mr Justice Peter Kelly against Meath County Council in the case of Darlington Properties Limited makes sobering reading. The Judge awarded Darlington €4,060,000 on the basis that the Council had misrepresented the opportunity available to Darlington to construct a distributor road to link a property it purchased from the Council to the Ashbourne Town Centre.

In fact there was no such opportunity as the Council had previously granted planning permission on adjacent lands to Nuas Investments Ltd. that precluded the possibility of such a road being built. This fact did not become apparent to Darlington until after they had purchased the lands from the Council. In fact it did not become apparent until they commissioned a full planning search on all adjacent properties. However the Council were in possession of that fact, and in the opinion Mr Justice Peter Kelly, by incorrectly making reference to the potential future existence of such a distributor road in the brochure of sale, the County Development Plan and various correspondence and dialogue they were guilty of misrepresentation.

It’s unfortunate for Darlington Ltd., Meath County Council and the ratepayers of County Meath that this situation has arisen. It’s even more unfortunate when one considers that with the appropriate use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) it could have been so easily avoided. So how could GIS have helped?

Recording the polygonal extents of all Planning Applications in a GIS is the practise of many Local Authorities. The topological operators in a GIS can then evaluate issues such as overlap, adjacency or proximity. This would have enabled the Council to become aware that planning permission previously granted to Nuas precluded the possibility of Darlington constructing a distributor road.

Meath County Council's Online Planning System

Publishing these polygonal extents on an interactive mapping system linked to the Council planning database is also now the norm. However the Meath County Council system restricts itself to displaying only the centroids of Planning Applications. Had the full polygonal extents been published Darlington may have had a better chance to become aware of the problem with the lands they tendered to purchase.

Relying on human interpretation of the complex topological relationships between planning applications and other constraints layers such as development plan zoning, heritage constraints or environmental constraints is not infallible. At Esri Ireland we have been working with a number of Council’s to develop a constraints analysis algorithm that will analyse any planning application (or any other shape) for its spatial relationship (intersects, contains, crosses, touches, overlaps, proximity etc.) with any constrains layer published from an authoritative source. Had this software been freely available on the Internet to Darlington they would have been easily able to check any constraints to their intentions on the lands for which they tendered. In fact it would have been open to anyone including the Council to do the same.

As is so often the case the crux of this matter is information – who knew what, about where and importantly in this case, when. I would be very surprised if Meath County Council deliberately misled Darlington at the time of sale. It seems more likely that there was a human error, a process failure or a system failure. I do think that this failure could have been detected much earlier had GIS been used more effectively along the lines suggested above. Likewise had the data underpinning the decisions been openly and publicly available along Gov 2.0 lines all parties could have made more informed decisions.

As a conclusion, we are often asked about return on investment in GIS, here is a case where a very small expenditure could have saved a very large expense!

ED

Geographic Information Underpins new Programme for Government……….but was it by design or by chance?

I have read with great interest the new programme for Government and was pleasantly surprised to see that so many of the promises being made in this document will very much depend on the innovative use and application of Geographic Information (GI) in order to see them through.

From the Programme of Government:

• Geographic Information will be a key component in “developing Ireland as a ‘digital island’ and the first-mover when it comes to information technology by ensuring more progress on e-Government and moving Government services online”
• Geographic Information and systems is Cloud-ready and will have a role to play in “making Ireland a leader in the emerging IT market of cloud computing………”
• The greater use and application of geographic information in the public sector has to be a “target key technology area and sector where innovation can be applied”
• Geographic Information will underpin the “prioritisation of a single farm payment system” for the agri-food sector.
• Geographic Information will be fundamental to “Improving the e-capability of our tourism product” which is identified as a priority.
• Geographic Information will be an important tool in the decision making processes surrounding the “prioritisation of investment in school building, non-national roads, healthcare and job creation”.
• Geographic Information already plays a crucial role in the “key priority areas identified by the Government, including energy, water and forestry” where “we will make significant additional investments, over and above current plans, over the next four years in ‘next-generation’ infrastructures in energy, broadband, forestry and water”.
• The innovative use and application of geographic information and systems will be mission critical to “Irish Water, a new state company that will take over the water investment maintenance programmes of the 34 existing local authorities”. To a next generation telecoms network that will “provide next generation broadband to every home and business in the state”.  To a “21^st century Smart Grid”, and to “BioEnergy Ireland, a new state company that will merge Bord na Mona and Coillte”, two organisations that already make extensive use of geographic information in the management of our natural resources.
• Geographic Information will help with “targeting up to €2 billion in sales of non-strategic state assets”.
• Let’s believe that Geographic Information will be one of the “measures to tackle the problem of social welfare fraud”, which we know is a major untapped resource that will have a positive impact on reducing fraudulent activities.
• The use and application of Geographic Information will be fundamental in reduction of costs associated with implementation of domestic “water metering”.
• “In  local  services,  we  will  establish  a  website  –  www.fixmystreet.ie  –  to  assist  residents  in reporting  problems  with  street  lighting,  drainage,  graffiti,  waste  collection  and  road  and  path maintenance in their neighbourhoods, with a guarantee that local officials will respond within two working days”…..Need I say more other than please Mr. Kenny don’t go and re-invent the wheel, this service is here already!
• Geographic Information will have a crucial role in bringing forward “a coherent plan to resolve the problems associated with ghost estates” not to mention its role “in achieving the best possible value for public investment in social housing”.
• Geographic Information will be a key resource in “tackling anti-social behaviour and the plague of low level crime that is so destructive of community life”.

There are many more but I’ll not go on.

Of course these are all very bold statements and I am sure there are many associated questions, all of which begin with how?

• How will geographic information and associated systems help with fulfilling all of these promises?
• How can Government access this fundamental and vital resource?
• How does the innovative use and application of geographic information and associated systems actually help reduce costs, increase efficiencies and help make better informed decisions?
• How will Government do all of this when we simply have less money, less people, less capability and less time?

Well, Mr. Kenny, in the immortal words of a child’s “knock knock” joke…….. Let us in and, not only will we tell you, we will show you.

There is little doubt in my mind that Geographic Information is an information management resource that must underpin this new Programme for Government.  From page 1 the programme states that “new approaches and new thinking will form the constant backdrop to the coalition’s style of governance” and while, for the GI community in Ireland, there is nothing “new” about the value we bring to the decision making processes in the public sector, it would seem that now is the time for GI to really prove itself in terms on value contribution, business benefit and return on investment.

The key question for all of us GI professionals is; will we be given the chance?

Paul Synnott, Country Manager

So what about Open Source?

I see from today’s Irish Times that the Local Government Computer Services Bord is to move away from their allegiance to Microsoft after nearly 10 years, preferring instead to adopt an “open source view of the world”. They cite the “annual payment cost of 29%” for Microsoft’s Software Assurance as being a contributory factor as well as reluctance to see their data “data to be stuck in old infrastructure where we have to pay somebody to get it out”. This public announcement comes on the back of the Bord setting up an Open Source Practice and engaging with Local Authorities via Open Source roadshows.

Interestingly, at the same time, we at Esri Ireland are seeing increasing adoption of our ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server, ArcGIS Viewer for Flex and our LocalView Fusion platform amongst Local Authorities as the Bord’s previous Microsoft, MapInfo, Intergraph strategy comes apart. In the past few months we have had three early adopters of LocalView Fusion and a number of others taking the first step with ArcGIS Server – so what’s going on?

Well I agree with the sentiments expressed by Tim Willoughby at the Bord that we need to “better prepare Local Government for a future that will involve social media, the semantic web and web 3.0 technologies”. In fact in what we have being doing so far with ArcGIS Server and LocalView Fusion we are seeing a real appetite for a new conversation between Local Authorities and their Citizens, Elected Representatives, NGO’s and other Stakeholders using location based Social Networking along Web 2.0 lines.

The Local Authorities that we have spoken to are very progressive – they want modern, performant open software that does indeed support open standards and enables rapid development and deployment via loose coupled architectures. One only has to look at Fingal’s Open Data website or Dublin City Council’s Community Maps site to see where things are headed and as LocalView Fusion rolls out we will see more use of GeoRSS, map enabled Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

If I have a difference with Tim it’s in that I’m not so sure that Open Source is the only, or necessarily the best, strategy for achieving these objectives. But I would say that wouldn’t I? We’ll yes, but my opinion is based on what I see and hear.

Local Authorities are telling us that they want to use GIS technology that works, has a reasonable cost of ownership and a large degree of flexibility to meet their Gov 2.0 aspirations. Whatever they may need to do, they are telling us that they need to do it with less people, with skills that are easily acquired in the market and above all quickly.

Now these are not necessarily characteristics that one would instantly associate with Open Source software. The poster child implementation here in Ireland for Open Source GIS seems to be the Irish Health Atlas, which although indeed an impressive system involves a myriad of technology components, most of which individually are unfamiliar to Local Government IT professionals and in combination must be a truly daunting prospect. The last time I saw an eTenders contract award for support and development of this system the contract cost was in the many hundreds of thousands of euro.

So is there a strategy for GIS in Local Authorities that adopts Open Standards, offers the advantages of Open Source and above all delivers on the Open Government agenda that is emerging as a mantra of our politicians? Well yes, I believe there is and it’s a hybrid model.

The strategy we have adopted is to use a proven, professionally engineered product stack to provide the functionality, ease of use and supportability that our Customers require at the desktop and on the server platform.  But then to open up this stack completely to web and mobile clients using a huge array of Open Standards,  Free Open Source Software and just plain old free software.

I believe that one of the reasons we are seeing an increasing adoption of our COTS products amongst Local Government Customers is because they do the heavy lifting in a familiar, easy to use and highly productive environment. Our Customer’s can then quickly, easily and cheaply exploit the huge benefits of the mass of API’s, applications and 3^rd party free or Open Source software that then becomes available to them some of which I have listed here;

You can download the ArcGIS Viewer for Flex for free, from here; http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapps/flexviewer/ by far our most popular free software and yes you get the source too!

You can download the Esri GeoPortal Server for free from here; http://sourceforge.net/projects/geoportal/ available under the Apache Licence.

You can access and download our Web Mapping API’s from here; http://resources.arcgis.com/content/arcgisserver/web-apis

You can download our iOS application for free from here; http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/arcgis/id379687930?mt=8

You can download our Windows Phone 7 application for free from here; http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/smartphones/index.html

You can download ArcGIS Explorer for free from here; http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/explorer/index.html

You can access ArGIS.com for free from here; www.arcgis.com

You can download the GeoServices REST Specification from here; http://www.esri.com/industries/landing-pages/geoservices/geoservices.html

And these resources are just from us, the list of complimentary additional free and Open Source resources available from the Esri community of Customers, 3rd Party Developers and Partners  is simply too long to insert here.

So this is a case where I think it is possible to have the best of both worlds. Above all I look forward to working with our Customers and hopefully the Bord to ensure that together we truly exploit the huge social, environmental and business benefits of GIS. Who knows in the future we may even be invited to a few of those LGCSB Open Source Workshops which currently seem to be a bit of a closed shop!

 

 

So what about Open Source?

I see from today’s Irish Times that the Local Government Computer Services Bord is to move away from their allegiance to Microsoft after nearly 10 years preferring instead to adopt an “open source view of the world”. They cite the “annual payment cost of 29%” for Microsoft’s Software Assurance as being a contributory factor as well as reluctance to see their data “data to be stuck in old infrastructure where we have to pay somebody to get it out”. This public announcement comes on the back of the Bord setting up an Open Source Practice and engaging with Local Authorities via Open Source roadshows.

Interestingly, at the same time, we at Esri Ireland are seeing increasing adoption of our ArcGIS Desktop, Server, ArcGIS Viewer for Flex and our LocalView Fusion platform amongst Local Authorities as the Bord’s previous Microsoft, MapInfo, Intergraph strategy comes apart. In the past few months we have had three early adopters of LocalView Fusion and a number of others taking the first step with ArcGIS Server – so what’s going on?

Well I agree with the sentiments expressed by Tim Willoughby at the Bord that we need to “better prepare Local Government for a future that will involve social media, the semantic web and web 3.0 technologies”. In fact in what we have being doing so far with ArcGIS Server and LocalView Fusion we are seeing a real appetite for a new conversation between Local Authorities and their Citizens, Elected Representatives NGO’s and other Stakeholders using location based Social Networking along Web 2.0 lines.

The Local Authorities that we have spoken to are very progressive – they want modern, performant open software that does indeed support open standards and enables rapid development and deployment via loose coupled architectures. One only has to look at Fingal’s Open Data website or Dublin City Council’s Community Maps site to see where things are headed and as LocalView Fusion rolls out we will see more use of GeoRSS, map enabled Twitter, YourTube and Flickr.

If I have a difference with Tim it’s in that I’m not so sure that Open Source is the only, or necessarily the best, strategy for achieving these objectives. But I would say that wouldn’t I? We’ll yes, but my opinion is based on what I see and hear.

Local Authorities are telling us that they want to use GIS technology that works, has a reasonable cost of ownership and a large degree of flexibility to meet their Gov 2.0 aspirations. Whatever they may need to do, they are telling us that they need to do it with less people, with skills that are easily acquired in the market and above all quickly.

Now these are not necessarily characteristics that one would instantly associate with Open Source software. The poster child implementation here in Ireland for Open Source GIS seems to be the Irish Health Atlas, which although indeed an impressive system involves a myriad of technology components, most of which individually are unfamiliar to Local Government IT professionals and in combination must be a truly daunting prospect. The last time I saw an eTenders contract award for support and development of this implementation the contract cost was in the many hundreds of thousands of euro.

So is there a strategy for GIS in Local Authorities that adopts Open Standards, offers the advantages of Open Source and above all delivers on the Open Government agenda that is emerging as a mantra of our politicians? Well yes, I believe there is and it’s a hybrid model. The strategy that Esri Inc., and Esri Ireland have adopted is to use a proven professionally engineered product stack to provide the functionality, ease of use and supportability that our Customers require at the desktop and on the server but to open up this stack completely to web and mobile clients using a huge array of Open Standards, Open Source Software, Free Open Source Software and just old plain free software.

The reason we are seeing an increasing adoption of our COTS products is because they do the heavy lifting. Our Customer’s can then quickly, easily and cheaply exploit the huge benefits of the mass of API’s, applications and 3^rd party free or Open Source software that then becomes available to them. Here is the list;

You can download the ArcGIS Viewer for Flex for free, from here; http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapps/flexviewer/ by far our most popular open source application!

You can download the Esri GeoPortal Server for free from here; http://sourceforge.net/projects/geoportal/

You can access and download our Web Mapping API’s from here; http://resources.arcgis.com/content/arcgisserver/web-apis

You can download our iOS application for free from here; http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/arcgis/id379687930?mt=8

You can download our Windows Phone 7 application for free from here; http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/smartphones/index.html

You can download ArcGIS Explorer for free from here; http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/explorer/index.html

You can access ArGIS.com for free from here; www.arcgis.com

You can download the GeoServices REST Specification from here; http://www.esri.com/industries/landing-pages/geoservices/geoservices.html

So this is a case where I think it is possible to have the best of both worlds. Above all I look forward to working with our Customers and hopefully the Bord to ensure that together we truly exploit the huge social, environmental and business benefits of GIS. Who knows in the future we may even be invited to a few of those LGCSB Open Source Workshops which currently seem to be a bit of a closed shop!

 

So this is a case where I think it is possible to have the best of both worlds and I look forward to working with our Customers and the Bord to ensure that together we truly exploit the huge social, environmental and business benefits of GIS. Hopefully in the future we may be invited to a few of those LGCSB Open Source Workshops which currently seem to be a bit of a closed shop!

The Proof of the Pudding IS in the Eating!

Anyone involved in the Geographic Information (GI) industry will know of the powerful business benefits that such information can bestow on organisations that are willing to embrace it.

Anyone who knows me will know that I fundamentally believe that the innovative use and application of GI can help this country to get back on its feet by doing things differently and better, for the greater good of us all.  Strong words, I hear you say and of course the proof of the pudding is always in the eating …… or is it?

Last week, Chambers Ireland acknowledged Excellence in Local Government, where Fingal County Council took top honours for 2010.  This prompted me to reflect on some of the excellent achievements of individuals and organisations in Ireland who have already been working with GI to do things differently and as a result to help their organisations make better decisions.

• As well as taking top honours, Fingal County Council also took an Excellence in Local Government Award for Innovation in Technology for the Fingal Works Viewer, a solution that enables the spatial deployment of Fingal’s Annual Works Programmes, and shows where public expenditure is taking place across the County in an open and transparent way.    Together with DunLaoighre Rathdown County Council, Fingal also won an award for best Local Authority Joint Initiative for Online Development Plan Submissions.  This online application came about through a collaborative approach to designing, developing and deploying a spatially enabled public consultation process for each Local Authority’s respective draft development plans.
• At the 15-year celebrations of IRLOGI last month, individual, group and organizational achievement awards were presented to Best GIS Person, Best GIS Project and Best GIS Organisation.    Mr. Muris DeBuitleir was acknowledged for his personal contributions to the GI Industry as well as his contributions to the successful deployment of GI at an enterprise level within the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government.
• Loc8 (GPS Ireland) was acknowledged for its innovative use of GI to deliver highly accurate location codes used within the distribution and logistics industry to help move goods quicker faster and more cost effectively to their destination anywhere on the island of Ireland.
• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was acknowledged as Best GIS Organisation for their approach in putting GI at the heart of their business processes.  The EPA is one of the first state agencies to embed GI into a Services Oriented Architecture, IT infrastructure, which will enable the EPA and their stakeholders to make best use of spatial information for their decision making processes.
• Teagasc became the first Irish organisation to be fully featured in ArcNews for the work they are doing on the Irish Agricultural Catchments Programme.  ArcNews has 600,000 strong worldwide readership.
• Earlier this year, The Department of Education, won an Internationally recognised Special Achievement in GIS award for their use and application of GI to help anticipate where 100,000 new school places will need to be created over the next seven years.   Their use and application of GI in this way was featured on RTE’s Six One News.
• And sticking with media coverage, our own Peter Lyon, MD and Eamonn Doyle, CTO, both appeared on Newstalk radio on Down to Business and Business Breakfast respectively.  Russ Johnson, Director of Public Safety and Homeland Security for Esri Inc was featured in the Irish Times discussing the benefits of geographic information for emergency response.

All these individuals and organisations are to be congratulated for their achievements and for their role in putting the use and application of geographic information at the forefront of the minds of the decisions makers in Government.

2010 was a historic year for GI related achievements and I, for one, look forward to an even better year in 2011, where less money, less people, less capability and less time will provide the stimuli for public and private sector organisations to do things differently and do things better with geographic information.

Author: Paul Synnott

The Eureka! Moment

A Eureka moment occurs when a set of people, events, or in the case I’m about to describe, technologies conspire together to create a compelling vision of what might be possible in the future. I wish I could say that I get Eureka moments all the time, but the sad fact is, surprisingly they are rare enough.

The one I’m about to describe happened about six years ago in the unlikeliest of places. I was sitting in the artificially chilled server room of the LGCSB in Conyngham Road, maybe the temperature of the room stimulated the thought process! I had gone there to do some work on an ArcIMS internet map server owned by the then Department of Communications, Marine & Natural Resources. Waiting on an install to complete I walked around to investigate the racks of gleaming black servers with their flashing lights. All these servers look exactly the same, like penguins huddled in the Antarctic winter. They usually have sticky labels on to distinguish them to their owners. Amongst the racks belonging to REACH, various Local Authorities and others I came across a name I recognised the “Geological Survey of Ireland”.

Now I knew that this box hosted another ArcIMS Internet Server, at that time it was unusual to have two internet map servers in the room at once and I got to thinking wouldn’t it be an idea to simply connect the two servers to see what might happen. I went back to the console of the first server, fired up ArcGIS and connected at once to the two map services – hey presto I was looking at a map of bedrock geology overlain on map showing the boundaries of prospecting licences! Unwittingly I had created what might turn out to be the first Irish mashup?

Startlingly, and I’ll admit by pure coincidence, the mashup I had created was actually  useful, it could enable a prospecting company to see opportunities and constraints on a single map, to see their own operations in the context of those of their competitors, to spot potential that was not being exploited. This is what is so compelling about mashups – they only exist if they are useful, they give insight that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent, they reveal things it is otherwise impossible to know. The fundamental concept they rely on, that of spatial overlay of multiple disparate pieces of data to create information, goes to the very heart of GIS.

It became crystal clear to me that elsewhere in Ireland and across Europe and the globe there were many more rooms just such as the one I was standing in, each with many more internet map servers. There were in fact a limitless set of possible maps that could be produced using just the same mashup technique that I had used. This was my Eureka moment. Forget the academic conferences on spatial data infrastructures, forget the piles of arcane documentation on standards, forget the endless discussions on data quality, spatial precision and copyright issues. Adopt the Nike principle – just do it!

Everyone who experiences a Eureka moment immediately wants to tell the world the benefits of their great idea. Along with others, I’ve been articulating the benefits of open standard map services, metadata catalogues, mashups and a spatial data infrastructure for some years now. Over those years, the early lead that the GIS industry had has evaporated; mashups are now in the realm of Google, Microsoft and the KML programmers.

Some Government Departments have made great strides, most notably the Department of Communications Energy and Natural Resources and Geological Survey of Ireland who have had a range of Open Standards web services available for many years. But they are the exception rather than the rule. Other agencies, despite mandating Open Standards compliance in systems procurement have yet to produce even a single publicly accessible open standards based web service. The fact is most internet map servers continue to purr away in splendid isolation – if you don’t believe me try to create a mashup showing the combined planning application register of every Local Authority, or to overlay online the REPS schemes with river catchment’s, or mashup crime statistics with socio-demographic indicators.

There is an opportunity now with ArcGIS.com to wrest the abaility to create informative mashups back from the neo-geographers. An opportunity to use a publicly accessible, free to use and highly available platform for the common good. An opportunity to publish web services so that they can be accessed and formed into mashups by a whole range of stakeholders including acedemics, thier students, Public Servents, elected representatives, Non Governmental Organisations, other State Agencies and even members of the public. All that is required is for those who are holding spatial data to publish that data as publicly accessible web servies.

We should grasp this opportunity to afford all these stakeholders enhanced access to public information and greater insight into a whole range issues which can inform better public policy.

ED.

ArcGIS.com; Let us not avert progress with false inhibitors!

There was a time when limited access to national mapping data was a major inhibitor to progress for the Geographic Information (GI) community in this country.  However over the years, and in particular the last few years, OSi, OSNI and OSGB, have all put in place initiatives such as MapGenie, NIMA and OS Open Data respectively, which have greatly reduced, and in some cases removed this barrier to progress for their respective communities of interest.  However, are we now faced with a new breed of inhibitor? At a time when the GI community is at its most progressive in terms information management, at its most influential in terms of value contribution and at its most innovative in terms of transformational capability, in many, many years.

Unfortunately, it would seem that within the Public sector in Ireland OGC standards and/or INSPIRE compliancy are increasingly being used to stifle progress.  Of course, OGC standards and INSPIRE compliancy are important and will continue to be important but they certainly shouldn’t stand in the way of innovation, growth and progress in terms of geospatial information management, sharing and accessibility.

All too often today, I hear commentary such as “that doesn’t adhere to OGC standards”, “that isn’t INSPIRE compliant”; all too often, the commentator is ignorant of the impact of such statements; and all too often, nothing happens.

We all know that the rate of change in our industry is frightening and with ICT moving along at a rate of knots, this increased rate of change is likely to continue.  As a result the evolution of GIS technologies over the last 3 years has been more in line with ICT and W3C standards than it has with OGC standards.

Without sounding overly dismissive of OGC & INSPIRE and without playing down their importance in the context of geospatial data sharing, interoperability and collaboration, there are things that we can do now that will improve the level of access to geospatial information in Ireland.  In fact, I would be so bold as to suggest that there are things that we must do now if, as Bruce McCormack suggested (at the opening address of IRLOGI last week) that “the GI community in this country is the little chink of light in the current doom and gloom”. Conor Lenihan, Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation spoke (at the same event) of the need for public sector to better embrace geospatial information as one of the ways in which we can transform public service delivery, reduce costs and make better decisions.

Wouldn’t it be truly visionary if we had a geospatial information platform that allowed everyone and anyone in both the public sector and private sector to share geospatial information, online, collaboratively and securely, without having to be overly concerned about OGC standards or INSPIRE compliancy?  Wouldn’t it be truly progressive if we had a geospatial information platform that provided the mapping tools and applications required for everyone and anyone to work with such geospatial information?  Wouldn’t it be truly innovative if we had a geospatial information platform that was free for both geospatial content providers and consumers alike?

ArcGIS.com is one such platform and it would be a real shame for the GI community in Ireland to lose out on an opportunity to be truly visionary, progressive and innovative.   ArcGIS.com is available now, it works and it’s free.  And while, those of us who need to adhere to OGC standards, as well as those of us who must comply with INSPIRE, while we figure out the best ways for us to do so, let us not keep such a resource as ArcGIS.com from the Irish GI community by not providing geospatial information content to this platform for the benefit of all of us.

It is incumbent on both private and public sector to work together to keep that “little chink of light” not only glowing brightly but growing brightly.  Let’s embrace what is in front of us now and let us stop putting up inhibitors to progress, where inhibitors do not actually exist.

ends

Author: Paul Synnott

Doing things differently and doing things better, music to my ears!

This morning I attended Ireland’s eGovernment Symposium 2010 in hopes of better understanding our Governments thinking around “Doing more with Less” and the role that our eGovernment strategy is likely to play in this realisation.  To be honest I was particularly interested in whether GI would figure in anything that was presented and discussed and boy was I pleasantly surprised.

I would commend Tim Duggan, Director of CMOD on his stance regarding “Do more with less” which he effectively dismissed as nonsense.   In our business we have long been advocates of doing things differently and doing things better, two words which held a lot of weight with Mr. Duggan’s view that what we can do as a country is “less with less”, “the same with less”, “things differently with less” or “things better with less” but we simply can’t “Do more with less”.

Those of you who know Esri Ireland will also know that we endeavour to do things differently and we endeavour do things better through the innovative use and application of geographic information as an integral part of the business improvement process for both public and private sector organisations.  There is massive potential for this country to realise the powerful business benefits of geographic information.  These benefits will be realised through; Better Decision Making; in fact more to the point is evidence based decision making; Improved efficiencies and productivity; Risk Reduction; Improved and enhanced public service delivery; Cost savings.

All of which were openly discussed in the context of “Do more with less” by a panel of experts including, Mr Duggan, Joe Horan, South Dublin County Council, Bill Liao, Xing.com, Joe Nugent, Passport Services and Niamh O’Donoghue, Dept. of Social Protection.

What’s more, whether they realised it or not, all the panel experts, at various times over the course of the debate and discussion, alluded to public service provision using words and phrases such as GeoLocation, GeoDemographics, Spatial Planning, Showing where People and Things are, Maps, GPS, and Online Planning.  It was heartening to hear these words and phrases being openly used in the context of some very serious discussion around the circumstances that this country finds itself in.

I for one firmly believe that the geographic information community has a major role to play in helping this country get back on its feet by ensuring that Central Government Departments, Local Authorities, State and Semi-state agencies can do things differently and can do things better, with less.  The public sector must embrace geographic information as being a critical piece of the information jigsaw for the purpose of improving and enhancing public service delivery.  Our colleagues at Ordnance Survey Ireland maintain and manage a critical asset in our National Mapping Database.  An asset that must be better integrated into in the workflows and processes associated with public service delivery.  An asset that must be readily available and accessible to our public sector, if our public sector is truly expected to do things differently and better.

Perhaps our message is not falling on deaf ears after all!

ends

Paul Synnott