CalGIS 2007 daily review notes & commentary
Paul Ramsey, President of Refractions Research and promoter of open source geospatial software posted his daily notes from the CalGIS conference.
Below are quotes relevant to the Farallon presentations.
CalGIS Notes: Day 1: “Very nicely presented talk from a Farralon consultant on a basic Virtual Earth web mapping project they did for Boston Redevelopment. Good thoughts on resisting creeping featuritis, focusing on the real end user and stopping there. Good demonstration of the value-adds you get for free building on the VE API (or, as the presenter noted, the GMaps or Yahoo APIs). Good free base data, geocoding, nice UI. Some very nice shots of how VE provides multiple views of the same data. They put some red data dots on their map (yawn), flipped to oblique and there the dots are on the side of the buildings (huh?), flipped to 3D and there the dots are on the tops of the 3D buildings (nice!). Very impressive demonstration of how VE ties together the three views under one API.”
CalGIS Notes: Day 2: “Next up was another (!!) Farallon consultant, with an app that appeared to automate data interchange between a cost modeling application, GIS database, and scenario manager. A bit of a hair-ball, to say the least, but apparently quite successful at streamlining an ugly prioritization process for road maintenance dollars.”
“Completing my tour of the Farallon (!!!) staff, was a talk from Adam Lodge, which recapitulated the points they raised on their day one talks, about the many benefits of building business apps against the Google/Yahoo/Microsoft APIs. Adam added some points about the usefulness of open source components that his colleagues largely omitted from their talks. I spoke with him briefly after the talk, and he is a recent refuge from county GIS—he seems to be enjoying his new freedom to work with a range of tools.”