Digital Earth Weblog

The SIDP Roadshow hit Sydney on Tuesday morning, and it exceeded my expectations, but not by a lot. The overall message, of which I’m still a little dubious, was that the technical standards required for spatial interoperability are now stable, well understood and supported by a range of vendors including the big names in GIS. However, there are still business level issues (hey, people are involved so no surprises there) and no real progress on a shared catalogue service.

All the usual suspects were there, but it was encouraging to see some new faces from both the public and private sector. No doubt this was helped by the three interoperability scenarios being focused on emergency management and insurance issues, rather than a natural resource bias. A rough head count suggested that the vendors almost outnumbered the non-vendor participants.

It was a very pleasant change to see four vendors sitting beside each other (Earth Resource Mapping, ESRI, MapInfo and NGIS), and doing live demonstrations using web services located all over Australia and one in Canada. Apart from a bit of Internet latency and server delay the demonstrations went smoothly. Well done people!

Most of the demonstrations were done using Web Map Services (WMS), which is quite a mature standard, but there was also some Web Feature Server (WFS) action, which was good to see. It would have been interesting to know where the inevitable technical issues arose, what didn’t work as advertised, and whether it has improved since my days supporting the CANRI framework. However, even the technical section of the programme was aimed at a non-technical audience. It got about as deep as “your stuff speaks the same gibberish as our stuff” (quote from Dr Lesley Wyborn at Geoscience Australia) so I didn’t both asking any technical questions.

The number of services available on the Internet is growing, and commercial data brokers are getting involved. However, finding both free and commercial services is still a big challenge. There is still no single well known catalogue in Australia that you can query. Given the number of questions about how to find services that is an issue that needs to be resolved.

Speaking of data, it is still a major issue. The usual questions arose about copyright, quality, pricing, liability and access.

Overall, the message being delivered was that the technology is maturing so the conversation can move “up the stack” from the technical issue to the business issues.