"Qui peut le plus, peut le moins" or "Horses for courses"

These quips mean that, while we may have great tools for complex workflows, such as Mapping Well Data I'll present as AAPG Visiting Geoscientist in Hungary next month, sometimes it's better to pare it down to its simplest form, such as for a friend "looking to map addresses to [a French geographic subdivision]".

Free tools & data to predict hurricanes

Four weeks ago I blogged here about the availability of open data, posting it on the open web and its potential social impact. Two weeks ago I blogged here too about tracking three hurricanes in the Caribbean via the brilliant but closed earth.nullschool.net. In between I compared & contrasted open & closed regimes on my Medium channel... and that 2½ yrs after a previous blog here on same!

Emergency response maps as easy as 1-2-3

Update 5: read here my  new occupation inspired by this 18 months later
Update 4: for a predictive app using Esri & Alexa, see this example in Maryland
Update 3: presented at European Petroleum GIS Conference in London, 2 Nov 2017
Update 2: Medium professional channel posting on Open Data issues raised here
Update 1: Youtube of  freely available data show flood spread from 27 to 30 August

Crowdsourcing for disaster response

To Geo or not to Geo, that is the question...

... at least in oil&gas. I always wondered why petroleum was only 5% Esri's market (unofficial from my tenure as petroleum manager there, they publish no figures as a private company). A current rationalization project at an oil major hinted why - I've 'pushed Geo' for 25 yrs. so I saw that in my previous tenure at Halliburton, but that only crystallized later - whilst a large percentage of data has a spatial component in oil&gas, only a small part of it is stored in spatial databases. GIS are generally for surface infrastructure like geology, plants and pipelines, rather than for subsurface exploration and production. Surface data can actually be seen and measured directly on or near the ground, whereas subsurface are interpolated data from drilling and seismic deep in the subsurface. Indeed the challenges in oil exploration in the news of late revolve around this frontier.

Local maps one year on from Kuwait

Hard to believe it's over a year since I left Kuwait, and I'm back in Cambridge now working west of London - the shortest commute yet, weekly as opposed to every 10 weeks in Kuwait or every two weeks in Milan three years ago - so just out of curiosity I looked for web maps of the area again.

Simple Feature or Full Feature Specification for OGC?

The issue of how to write-to and read-from geographic databases has been around for quite some time. Esri shapefiles were a runaway success partly because of their open specification. As we moved onto spatial databases, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) offered the simple feature specification (SFS) that all the players could read to or write from. This came in especially handy for consuming web mapping services (those and many other specifications have grown since). But it gets trickier when it comes to reading from and writing to spatial databases generically. By that I mean not from the native application but from others', like with shape files.

The Big Easy button

Building geoinfo from the ground up is patent in this Gov2.0 presentation on citizen-focussed geoweb at the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center toward sustainability in the Big Easy:

"East is east and west is west...", or is it?

Geo-meta-data news flashes:

quickly access web resources regardless of resource location via ESRI's geoportal extension

free metadata tools for the EU INPSIRE website using ESRI Irelands Be-Inspired site

quickly add data anywhere in the world, crowdsourcing debut on Google Map Maker

geocode data into the recently increased Google palette in the US at least announced