Spatial-data | Mapsys.info

Ingres Db

The latest version of Ingres relational database now also includes support for geospatial data. GIS functions and spatial data types are included out-of-the-box (i.e. do not require additional plug-ins) and make it easy to enable web mapping. Ingres 10S supports spatial applications, such as Esri’s ArcGIS for Desktop and FME but also MapServer and GeoServer.

Ingres 10S is supported by other programming libraries including GDAL/OGR and GeoTools, allowing import, export and manipulation of vector data. Ingres 10S leverages the GEOS geometry and PROJ cartographic projection libraries for manipulating and transforming spatial data between dozens of geographic and planar co-ordinate systems.

Ingres 10S is an open source, enterprise grade database, not as popular as MySQL or PostgesSQL but, as the other options, can be downloaded and used for free. Ingres was first created as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1970s. Since the mid-1980s, Ingres has spawned a number of commercial database applications, including Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, NonStop SQL, but also open source PostgreSQL (which with PostGIS extension is the most popular open source spatial database).

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The Bing Maps Webcasts Now Open for Registration

The Bing Maps Platform from Microsoft enables organizations to easily and cost-effectively deliver geospatial content to the customers and businesses they serve. Not only does this optimize existing investments in GIS and imagery services, it allows organizations to save money using Bing Maps by making strong connections with customers and exposing relevant content easily on a map from Bing.

What’s New in the Bing Maps Platform? | February 16, 2012, 2pm Eastern time, 60-minutes

Attend this session for an overview of the latest capabilities in the Bing Maps Platform. You’ll learn the latest on the Bing Maps Imagery program, how to view the meta data and other features in the platform including the best portal to see the latest new imagery sets.

Using the BingMapsPortal.com and keys with Bing Maps Platform | March 15, 2012, 2pm Eastern time, 60-minutes

Attend this session and learn how to use the bingmapsportal.com, tips for using/hiding your Bing Maps key and other helpful development hints.

Bing Maps Spatial Data Services | April 19, 2012, 2pm Eastern time, 60-minutes

Attend this session and learn how to take advantage of the Bing Maps Spatial Data Services included with the Bing Maps Platform for data hosting and findnearby/bound box queries.

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GIS with Google Earth and Google Maps

This session at Google I/O demonstrated how developers can take advantage of new and little known GIS capabilities in all of our geo services.

We started out showing some of the GIS capabilities in Google Maps API, which amongst other features, lets you calculate distances and angles and overlay map tiles in arbitrary projections.

Moving onto some new and upcoming products, we showed off some of the capabilities of Google Earth Builder, a new platform to manage and publish large amounts of raster and vector GIS data.

In the world of data visualization, previous sessions had showed off new styling features for Fusion Tables. In this session, we showed how you can enable spatial queries on your data, displaying maps and statistics for the closest set of features to a location, or all features within an arbitrary radius.

Google Earth Builder is not the only new product that provides access to our infrastructure for working with large GIS datasets – we also talked about Google Earth Engine. This Google.org project is designed to help scientists easily access massive archives of satellite imagery, and run image analysis and other algorithms on the data within Google’s datacenters. Complex analyses that might take months or years to run on a single machine can now be completed in hours or minutes.

Finally, we showed off some ways you can integrate open source technology, and finished off the session with Brian Flood from Spatial Data Logic, who demonstrated a great example of the kind of GIS services that developers can build using Google’s Geo API’s.

Check out the video to see for yourself, and thanks for reading our Geo API’s Summer Learning Series.

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Bing Spatial Data Services – Next Gen Spatial Search Comes to the Bing API

In August of 2001, we released the MapPoint Web Service that introduced spatial search and data hosting capabilities for our users. Since then, large and small businesses, government agencies and non-profits have used the service to support geospatial functionality such as store locators, fleet tracking, and real estate applications for their customers.

Today, we launched Bing Spatial Data Services, adding next generation spatial search to the Bing API offering. This release offers the benefits of cloud hosting and distributed computing, allowing customers to upload their data to our servers and perform spatial queries under the umbrella of their existing Bing Maps License.

Here’s a little more detail about what the service does and how it works.

- Geocode Dataflow API (Batch Geocode):

Use it to batch geocode large sets of data (upload a process a then download)

- Data Source Management API (Load):

- Use to load, manage (update, delete) data for long term hosting.
- Data can be in a file or a Windows Azure™ Blob Service location.
- Load is required before being able to query with Query API.

- Query API (Spatial Query):

- Used to query hosted data; a query response can contain a maximum number of 250 results (the new Bing Maps AJAX v7 makes light work of displaying large numbers of points on a map)

By Area <aka FindNearby>:

· Either specify a center point (radius search) or bounding box to search for matching entities. Use built in filters to refine the response. Results are “as the crow flies”. Example:

How many matching entities fall within this specified area (circle or rectangle)?

By Property:

· Search a hosted data source for one or more entities by specifying property values. Example:

Return all entities (customers) with sales person John Smith.

By ID:

· Specify an entity ID and receive in response all related information for the given entity. Example for Contoso Corporation:

For entity of ID “Contoso Store 1200”, return all associated property information (store #, address, open times, WiFi, etc)

For entity of ID “Contoso’s Best Coffee Store 5”, return all associated property information (store #, address, open times, WiFi, etc)

For more details, you can check out our documentation, or sign up for our upcoming webcast on March 1^st. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Max Artemov
Senior Program Manager
Bing Mobile

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The Lost Archives of the Google Geo Developers Series

Back in December of 2009, five leading scientists from the American Geophysical Union trekked
to the remote Google office in downtown San Francisco. Lost until now, the video of their
presentations have resurfaced. So, for the first time ever, we present, the Lost Archives of the
Google Geo Developers
Series

Jeffrey Cardille of Universitie de Montreal discusses , a new
virtual globe application for the submission, storage, and sharing of point-based ecological
data.

Thijs Damsma of Deltares discusses his use of KML to visualize coastal data.

Ross Beyer of NASA and SETI discusses his work visualizing Mars data
and imagery using Google Earth.

Tyler Erickson of Michigan Tech Research Institute discusses his tools for to visualizing 4-D atmospheric carbon monitoring data using KML and Google Earth

Yaxing Wei of Oak Ridge National Lab discusses his Spatial Data Access Tool which enables visualization and access of geospatial data using
OGC services and Google Earth.