As we have already noted, GeoWeb 2009 will focus on the Cityscape – its construction, its maintenance, simulation, and evolution.  These are of course all key GeoWeb themes – building and sharing geospatial information across diverse organizations for their mutual benefit.  GeoWeb 2009 will also retain core concerns like 3D measurement (imaging, lidar etc), security and defense, and environmental protection.

One special component planned for GeoWeb 2009 will be an academic track within the main conference focused on 3D Modeling and Measurement.  This will not be a separate conference, but a special track with peer reviewed papers managed by a separate, academic program committee.  This will run as part of the main conference and users will be able to move freely from one track to another.  Unlike the main conference which consists mainly of presentations, panel sessions and technical workshops, the academic track will be published as conference proceedings and some of the papers from this track may be published in leading academic journals.

Taking this route will enable GeoWeb 2009 to be a little larger without losing the intimacy and networking opportunities that have made the conference so successful.  It will also allow presentation of more technical research than would fit comfortably within the main conference.  Hopefully it will also stimulate interaction between the vendor/government driven main conference and the academic/research driven interests of the 3D Modeling and Measurement track.

Dr. Thomas Kolbe of the Technical University of Berlin, a world leader in cityGML, in particular, and city modeling in general, has agreed to chair the program committee for the academic track.

I view this as a very exciting development.  If you are working for an academic or research institution and would like to get involved – I strongly suggest you attend GeoWeb 2008 and start thinking now about how to contribute for GeoWeb 2009 Cityscapes.

GeoWeb 2008’s conference line-up is exciting, and we are pleased to present our conference program:

Keynote Speakers
• Dr. John Curlander, general manager, Microsoft Virtual Earth Business Unit
• Michael T. Jones, chief technology advocate, Google
• Alex Miller, founder and president, ESRI Canada Ltd.

Invited Speakers
• Dr. Michael F. Goodchild, professor of geography, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Dr. Michael Kay, technical director, Saxonica
• Kimon G. Onuma, FAIA, president, Onuma, Inc.

Workshops
This year’s workshops are promising to challenge our attendees with new and thought provoking concepts and ideas that include:
• 3D Geospatial: Project Implementation Methods and Best Practices
• A Complete Guide to Geo-Spatial Technology at Microsoft
• A Developer-Level Introduction to Using Javascript, REST and Web 2.0 Technologies
• BIMStorm Vancouver
• Creating and Using Geospatial Image and Data Services
• GeoSpatial Data Quality
• GML and Related Technology
• Google Earth Weather and KML Layers
• LiDAR: Understanding the Basics of Pulsing Lasers in the Creation of 3D Digital Point Datasets
• Map Based RIA Development Using Adobe Flex and AIR
• Mapguide Open Source brings Together CAD, GIS and BIM Technologies
• OGC and OGC Standards: An update on activities and current status of key OGC standards.
• Registries for the GeoWeb
• Using Open Source Software to Process Geo-Semantic / Geo-Spatial Knowledge and Visuals – (Part 1 & 2)
• XML and XQuery, and Their Application to Spatial Information

Paper Presentations
With an overwhelming response and an increase of 60% submittals, we are
pleased to have over 50 presenters discussing such topics as:
• Architecture and Semantics of the Geospatial Web
• Business and Policy in the Geoweb
• CAD-BIM GIS Integration
• GeoWeb in Security and Defense
• Data Federation for the GeoWeb
• Municipal GeoWeb Applications
• Community Collaboration
• Real Time Emergency and Public Safety
• GeoWeb for Physical Infrastructure

Vendor Exhibit Hall & Reception
This is a great opportunity to meet all of our vendors and to hear each
of them as they present information on their organization and products.

Spark Panels
This year’s two Spark Panels will include:
• A Look at Three Open Source GIS Servers: GeoServer, MapGuide, and MapServer
• National Critical Infrastructure Data Models: Implications for Local Government and Utilities

GeoWeb’s 1st Student Contest
As the student contest will be closing in less than a month, we look
forward to being able to showcase our winner(s) at the GeoWeb 2008
conference.

Networking Reception & Fireworks
This will be an unforgettable networking event and dinner, while we are
onboard the MV Britannia and sharing in Vancouver’s spectacular
Celebration of Light International Fireworks Competition.

Sponsorships
Our sponsorships are filling up fast. Don’t miss this great event to
help make your mark in the GeoWeb world. For more details please check
out our sponsorship prospectus.

Going Green
In an effort to reduce the environmental impact of hosting a
conference, the GeoWeb organizers are taking the necessary steps to
make the GeoWeb Conference, a more green and sustainable conference.

For full information on the conference, please visit us at www.geowebconference.org.

For media inquiries, please contact:
Stephanie Hughes-White, Galdos Systems Inc.
+1.604.484.2768 or shugheswhite@galdosinc.com

Conventional ideas of Spatial Information Infrastructures (SDI) have been driven by national mapping agencies and have been largely focused on the resources to catalogue and provide access (portals) to small scale maps and related data sets.

Some organizations, including Galdos have been trying to move the concept of SDI more toward real time integration of distributed spatial or spatially related databases, an approach which is more consistent with multiple interacting players, and with real time or near real time information sharing.  Our approach is one that naturally extends to embrace to notion of BIM, and IFC, and in particular the role of SDI (based on BIM and IFC) in a collaborative planning, design, engineering and development of the built environment.  The concept is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.  Spatial Infrastructure Supporting Collaborative Engineering

Note that this approach to spatial infrastructure, emphasizing spatial database integration is equally applicable to the national mapping scenario as it is to supporting the management of built infrastructure.  The role of the spatial infrastructure is to enable database synchronization by enabling the user specified creation/maintenance of publication subscription relationships between the participating databases.  This allows for efficient movement of data, and is relatively non-intrusive with respect to the use of existing design, engineering analysis, engineering and architectural visualization, and mapping tools.
Note further that while we show a set of data suppliers in the bottom part of the diagram, any data consumer (the engineering, architectural etc. tools in the top half) can also be a data supplier.  The data suppliers in the bottom half are distinguished only in that there are typically government and private sector data collection activities (e.g. aerial, land survey, property management) which are not directly part of the engineering and planning process.

One can also view Figure 1. in even simpler terms as shown in Figure 2.

 
Figure 2.  Simplified Version of Figure 1.

As one thinks through the role of the Spatial Information Infrastructure in support of the management of the built environment, several things become clear.  One is the increased importance that we must attach to time.  Participants will not only want to know the present state of what is being built, but also what is to be built next month,  and what is planned for next year.  As time horizons are extended it is important also to be able to distinguish between what is proposed (there may be conflicting proposals) and what has been approved.  Moreover, what has been approved today may be cancelled in the future.  All of this adds an additional level of dynamism to our concept of SDI, so much so that we need to think in terms of spatial-temporal information infrastructure.

The built environment also demands support for more elaborate notions of the management of space.  Structures are inherently 3D and the range of geometric scales is necessarily large.  It is essential that we take a feature-based view of such infrastructure as now being elaborated in standards like Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) of the IAI and cityGML from the OGC.  

Our notion of a Spatial Information Infrastructure must also take into account the process(es) by which the built environment is developed.  This means that the notion of engineering projects must also be supported, so that through the infrastructure disparate teams of engineers, architects and developers can co-operate with one another.  This implies the sharing of project milestones and their associated engineering and architectural deliverables, and possibly deeper aspects of the project architecture (tasks, dependencies) and associated deliverable artifacts.

This is not your father’s notion of SDI.

The deadline for submitting your registration and final submissions is less than one month away.

The objective of the contest is to materially advance the development of the GeoWeb with either:
· A theoretical solution or a piece of software (All
software must be open source and free of any royalties or other
encumbrances)

To help students prepare their submissions for the GeoWeb 2008 student contest, here are a few ideas:
· Generate 3D models for Google Earth, Virtual Earth etc. from CAD drawings automatically.
· To enhance position measurement inside a building.
· Integrate Google or Virtual Earth with Second Life
· Generalize from large scale to small scale in 2D and 3D.
· Generate GML (observations) from KML and KML (by styling) from GML.
· Validate geography and topology automatically using a rule based mechanism.
· To visualize the content of an ebRIM (OASIS) registry.
· Develop visualization mechanisms for travelogues
· Use wavlets to integrate geometry, coverages and observations.

Students may submit a registration of an abstract of their proposal at any time (see http://geowebconference.org/students-academia/contest-information).

Note that both registration and final submissions are due and must be submitted no later than May 15, 2008.

For full contest and conference details, please http://geowebconference.org.

For media inquiries, please contact:
Stephanie Hughes-White, Galdos Systems Inc.
+1.604.484.2768 or shugheswhite@galdosinc.com

• Microsoft Virtual Earth as a new Platinum Sponsor
• Safe Software as a new Gold Sponsor
• GeoWorld Magazine as our returning Industry Media Sponsor

"We are very pleased to announce our two newest conference sponsors, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Safe Software. The partnership with these two companies is important to achieving the ambitious objectives we have for this conference," said Bob Samborski, Executive Director of GITA.
 
Ron Lake, CEO of Galdos Systems, Inc. says "The addition of these industry leaders shows the importance of the GeoWeb for the GI and wider IT industries."
 
GeoWeb is one of the only annual conferences focusing exclusively on the convergence of GIS and the Internet and the economic potential associated with the convergence of XML, web services and geographic information systems.
 
The theme for this year's GeoWeb conference is Infrastructure:  Local to Global.  The key themes of this year's paper presentations are:

• Global aggregators and Data Communities
• GeoWeb in Security and Defense
• Real time emergency response and environmental security
• Neo-geo, user generated data and the GI professional
• CAD-BIM-GIS-Games Integration - 3D Cityscapes (Worlds Real and Virtual)
• Infrastructure for information - building alongside physical infrastructure
• Municipal SDI in the GeoWeb
• Imaging, Coverages and Information Infrastructures

For media inquiries, please contact:   

Stephanie Hughes-White, Galdos Systems Inc. 

1.604.484.2768 or shugheswhite@galdosinc.com

The members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) today announced the approval of the OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML), marking KML's transition into an open standard which will be maintained by the OGC.  Developers will now have a standard approach for using KML to code and share visual geographic content in existing or future web-based online maps and 3D geospatial browsers like Google Earth TM.

"We are pleased to see the adoption of KML as an OGC standard," said Ron Lake, chairman and chief executive officer of Galdos Systems Inc. "We believe that this is a major step forward for the OGC and for the entire geographic information community, as it provides the first broadly accepted standard for the visualization of geographic information."

Read the full release on Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. 

For further information please refer to the following blogs:

Ron Lake 

Google 

KML is a very complementary to Geography Markup Language (GML) the other key encoding standard from the OGC.   Where GML provides the mechanisms to describe geographic feature types, KML provides the mechanisms to visualize these features on a map or globe, and to control the user’s navigation over that map or globe.  This complementary character is illustrated in Figure 1.  Here GML data from a WFS is styled on the fly to KML and using a network link is made visible in Google Earth through the latter’s support for the OGC WMS interface.  The coloured line segments in the diagram are from a dynamic link model of highway traffic using GML dynamic features and show the occupancy and rate of flow of vehicles (in real time) for the Toronto highway system.    Figure 2.  shows a more static picture of roadways near Red Deer Alberta that was part of a recent national CGDI demonstration.  While Google Earth was used as the client in both of these examples, the adoption of KML as an open standard at the OGC, means that many other earth browsers and mapping clients will be usable in the very near future.

Figure 1.  Real Time Traffic Data Styled from a WFS (GML) to KML

As a result of the passage of KML at the OGC we can now anticipate further developments not only within KML itself, but also in terms of other specifications such as the WMS (Web Map Service), Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD), and the Web Map Context specification.  Consider for example, the Styled Layer Descriptor – the Symbology Encoding component in particular.  This provides styling rules to transform feature data encoded in GML into a target visualization language.  In the past this target visualization language was modeled on SVG, and the visualization description now in SLD is essentially derived from SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).  While SVG has some very strong graphics description capabilities, in some areas much stronger than KML, SVG is only 2D and does not incorporate concepts for navigation (e.g.  LookAt in KML has no correlate in SVG, SVG graphics window while supporting images, has  nothing corresponding to PhotoModel in KML).  We can thus anticipate that SLD may be extended in the future to enable more use of KML capabilities.

Figure 2.  GML data (from WFS) styled to KML for visual presentation through WMS in Google Earth

The development of KML has also influence the way OGC itself works, with a greater emphasis on running and adopted code prior to standardization.  This reflects both the widespread adoption of KML, but also the greater maturity of the OGC and OGC Standards in general.

Future developments of KML are hard to predict but I would bet on enhancing some of the graphics functionality, and perhaps a stronger symbolization construct – maybe even modeled on SVG!

The ground work has now been laid for KML as a global standard for interactive map display and map navigation.  Adoption outside of Google is already growing fast with support for KML in Microsoft Virtual Earth already announced and support in many other software products on the near term horizon, including automated validation of KML data streams.

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/04/kml-new-standard-for-sharing-maps.html

Ron Lake, CEO of Galdos Systems, Inc. says “The GeoWeb Conference is a focal point for the geospatial industry – a sort of Davos for geo-industry leaders.  This year we have attracted some of the brightest and most forward looking people in the industry – representing a diversity of points of view and approaches to realization of the GeoWeb.”

The 2008 Keynote Speakers consists of:
•    Dr. John Curlander, General Manager, Microsoft Virtual Earth Business Unit
•    Michael T. Jones, Chief Technology Advocate, Google
•    Alex Miller, founder and President, ESRI Canada Ltd.

The 2008 Invited Speakers consists of:
•    Dr. Michael F. Goodchild, Professor of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara
•    Dr. Michael Kay, Technical Director, Saxonica
•    Kimon G. Onuma, FAIA, President, Onuma, Inc.

"It's these thought leaders that ignite the idea sharing process at GeoWeb, and we're looking forward to seeing their impact on the rest of the conference." said Bob Samborski, Executive Director of GITA.

For media inquiries, please contact:   
Stephanie Hughes-White, Galdos Systems Inc.  
+1.604.484.2768 or shugheswhite@galdosinc.com

The design and development of the built environment is inherently a collaborative and competitive enterprise.  Adding new structures will drive new requirements for transportation systems and hence new supporting structures.  New structures impact the environment in terms of noise levels, thermal loading, security, and demand for a wide variety of services of which transportation is just one.  The phrase BIM/CAD/GIS integration is really about a holistic look at designing and developing the built environment in which we are all cognizant of the inherent dynamics (e.g. feedback loops, process dynamics) of that process.

The phrase also implies the management of information about the built environment on an ongoing basis spanning the life cycle not only of one project (the typical case today), but of all projects and of all structures – in effect to have a complete and continuously evolving information model about the entire built environment.

To do this will require new approaches to information management both from a business and a technical perspective.  

From a business perspective we need to determine who will be the custodian of such information systems.  Traditionally this has been the role of government and certainly such systems do exist on a smaller scale at more senior levels of government.  However, now we require that urban governments or regional governments take on the task of hosting information systems that are likely more complex than what they have been used to in the past.  Perhaps this can be supported also in the private sector by engineering, development and architectural companies, by search engines or a new variety of “information utility” which currently does not exist today.  In any event, there is the clear need to manage complex urban information on a permanent and on-going basis for today, the future and effectively forever.

From a technical perspective we will need a new generation of information systems that combines precise geometric models referenced to the earth, with support for temporal evolution and support for project management and execution.  This will demand support for long transactions so that co-operating and competing interests can operate with one another concurrently.  We can also anticipate registries of physical objects coming into being that assign unique identifiers to all physical objects of importance in the built environment from buildings to culverts to railway switches.  Such things exist in a limited way today, so this is simply a matter of scaling in complexity and geographic coverage.

This evolution to unified design and development of the built environment will not happen overnight; however, there is evidence that we are nearing an inflection point that will rapidly accelerate things in the next 2-3 years.  It promises to be an exciting time.

If you do, then we want to hear from you, as this is open to all full-time students attending an educational institution anywhere in the world.   

Students may submit a registration of an abstract of their proposal at any time (see http://geowebconference.org/students-academia/contest-information).  Note that both registration and final submissions are due and must be submitted no later than May 15, 2008.

Develop software or solve a theoretical problem to:

• Generate 3D models for Google Earth, Virtual Earth etc. from CAD drawings automatically. To enhance position measurement inside a building.
• Integrate Google or Virtual Earth with Second Life.
• Generalize from large scale to small scale in 2D and 3D.
• Generate GML (observations) from KML and KML (by styling) from GML.
• Validate geography and topology automatically using a rule based mechanism.
• To visualize the content of an ebRIM (OASIS) registry.
• Develop visualization mechanisms for travelogues
• Use wavlets to integrate geometry, coverages and observations.

Students may submit a registration of an abstract of their proposal at any time (see http://geowebconference.org/students-academia/contest-information).  Note that both registration and final submissions are due and must be submitted no later than May 15, 2008.

Software submissions must include the following components:

• One sentence description of your software.
• Source code for the software (C, C++, Java etc).
• Build files as required to create an executable program for one of (Linux, Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS). The build file must be executable automatically and generate an executable program with minimal input by the software judges. It should require very minimal effort on the part of the installer to create an executable program.
• Description of the functionality of the software.  
• This description should be limited to two typed pages (12 pt type), and must highlight the key points that you feel the software demonstrates that are advances over existing software technology.
• Presentation (e.g. Keynote, Power Point etc) that you will give if your entry is selected. 

Contest Submittals

Students must register at www.geowebconference.org by May 15th, 2008.

Contest Requirements

Contest entrants will be required to complete a registration form verifying their status as full time students and these details will be verified before any award is granted.
 
Costs
Please note that any costs associated with the submittal for this contest is at the expense of the student.
 
Selection Process
The selection of the contest winner(s) will be made by a GeoWeb committee consisting of leading figures in the GIS industry and will be notified by June 6th, 2008.  

Prizes
Winners of the contest will be brought to the GeoWeb 2008 conference in Vancouver, Canada, and all legitimate expenses* will be paid by the contest supporters. A cash honorarium will also be provided.

*The contest supporters will arrange transportation to/from Vancouver, lodging and meals while in Vancouver, however reserve the right to refuse any expenses they believe are unreasonable.

Complete information on the student contest and conference may be obtained at www.geowebconference.org.

For media inquiries, please contact:  
Stephanie Hughes-White, Galdos Systems Inc.  
+1.604.484.2768 or shugheswhite@galdosinc.com