http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/ A website about GIS, geospatial technology and related technologies. en-us Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:54:38 MST chris.j.andrews@gmail.com chris.j.andrews@gmail.com Copyright (c) 2007 www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy. All rights reserved. http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-11.html#11 For system integration projects, open source software (OSS) is essential. Developers compile source code with tools such as Ant and Maven from the Apache Software Foundation, a pioneering organization devoted to building reliable, useful OSS development tools. Project teams on many software development efforts use a free tool called XPlanner for tracking tasks and recording time. Knowledge management, software modeling, image manipulation, and many other vertical technologies benefit from OSS d... Fri, 01 Jul 2005 21:38:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-11.html#11 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-10.html#10 In the years that I have been a consultant I have encountered technical managers who wish to implement the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to solve problems ranging from application integration to poor project management. Next to the term "Web," XML is probably the most overused buzzword that I have encountered inside the geospatial industry and out of it. Even experienced developers sometimes abandon reason and tout XML as the solution to problems that require thought and not hype. ... Wed, 01 Jun 2005 21:36:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-10.html#10 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-9.html#9 Every geospatial professional believes fundamentally that one of the best features that geographic information system (GIS) software offers is the friendly, intuitive map interface that allows users to quickly visualize and access data. We also know through trial and error that there is a huge difference between adequate map interfaces and excellent map interfaces. The best interfaces allow users to access data and maps without realizing, or caring, that they are using GIS at all. The worst map... Sun, 01 May 2005 21:34:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-9.html#9 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-8.html#8 In the last two articles, I introduced two concepts that help standardize software architecture complexity and interoperability. Web services standards allow developers to build software components that interact with other components in a predictable manner. Services-oriented architectures provide a standardized framework within which components may interact and be combined into workflows. Distributed computing is the next step in complexity and capability. Distributed computing describes netwo... Fri, 01 Apr 2005 21:30:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-8.html#8 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-7.html#7 The term 'software architecture' describes the fluid infrastructure that merges hardware and function-specific software applications for the purpose of collecting, processing, and storing data. Historically, many companies started off with software applications for focused purposes, never imagining that employee payroll software could someday be connected to a satellite tasking application, for example. As companies grew and looked for new efficiencies, analysts saw that error and time ... Sat, 01 Jan 2005 21:24:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-7.html#7 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-6.html#6 Ten years ago, in response to the proliferation of competing, incompatible geospatial data and software solutions, a group of industry leading organizations formed the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., (OGC). OGC intended to establish publicly useable standards for the communication of geospatial information with the intended purpose of enabling the connectivity of diverse geographic software tools over networks. OGC began developing several pioneering standards, sometimes following new informa... Wed, 01 Dec 2004 21:21:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-6.html#6 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-5.html#5 Models can represent the physical state of an object or they can describe the behavior and interrelationship of objects in a system. In the geospatial technical world, a model is most commonly thought of as a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) or a map projection. DEMs are digital depictions of topography on a part of the globe. Map projections allow three-dimensional features on the Earth to be described, or modeled, on a two-dimensional surface. Fields that use geospatial data routinely employ mor... Mon, 01 Nov 2004 21:20:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-5.html#5 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-4.html#4 Since the earliest days of strategizing and information gathering, scientists and decision-makers have relied upon field observations to support map making. The introduction of aircraft and satellites enabled cartographers to reliably observe visual details of a region from afar. However, precise local observation of an area was not possible until three major technological developments converged. First, the increased accuracy and variety of detection equipment allowed the collection of more and... Fri, 01 Oct 2004 21:18:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-4.html#4 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-3.html#3 Imagine a business process that compares an area of interest (AOI) throughout the day against thousands of project boundaries to alert a user when new projects fall within the AOI. One solution for this problem stores spatial data in a function-poor repository, possibly a database or flat files. This solution uses an application to extract data from the repository and to perform spatial intersections. An alternative solution proposes storage of the spatial data in a database and uses databas... Sun, 01 Aug 2004 21:16:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-3.html#3 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-2.html#2 In the past 10 years, geographic information systems (GIS) exploded from a highly specialized, esoteric discipline into a broad horizontal technology that encompasses hardware development, map making, data generation, and complex software integration. Along the way, GIS technology changed as GIS grew to interact with a variety of hardware interfaces, data storage tools, and programming languages. Despite this diversity in GIS implementation, many GIS professionals fail to educate themselves abo... Tue, 01 Jun 2004 21:15:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-2.html#2 US published-articles http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-48.html#48 I found this attached report that was published back around 2000 and included a section on the Jacksonville Sherriff's Department application that Iwrote, JRAMS.Cool so see that kind of thing! ... Sat, 01 Jan 2000 21:20:00 MST http://www.yakjive.com/TheGISGuy/published-articles-48.html#48 US published-articles