GeoPDF

New TerraGo Blog

2010-09-14T14:46:00.003-04:00

After a pretty good run -- more than five years! -- we're closing down the GeoPDF blog and moving over to the TerraGo blog. The first post is rounding up folks to join us for webinar wherein we discuss deploying assets with TerraGo GeoPDF.

Comments have been disabled here. If you have something to say, please come say it at the new site!

(Geo)PDF is open and is more than graphics

2010-07-30T08:52:00.004-04:00

I just got back from an interesting GeoWeb 2010 in Vancouver, BC. There I was asked why we picked PDF and not something "open" like SVG?

There are two problems with this question. I'll defer the "open" question and deal with the more insidious one: the conflation of PDF with simple graphics formats like SVG. By simple, I don't mean uncomplicated, just that they're only focused on one thing: graphics. PDF is better thought of as a document-centric container format, which includes in its definition a powerful page description syntax. It also defines ways of making annotations, adding interactive features, organizing pages and other document structure, embedding metadata related to the document, page contents, and almost any other element contained within a PDF file.

All of these elements are specified by an ISO standard: ISO 32000. Adobe made special arrangements with ISO to be allowed to freely distribute the draft specification that was adopted by ISO. You can find it on the all things PDF spec page, along with their latest extensions. Before it was a de jure open standard, it had always been a de facto open standard. Adobe made the spec open years ago. I've been referring to it since 2000. If you would like to read that sentence with a reverberating baritone "The Year 2000", feel free.

PDF is open under almost any reasonable definition of the word, I'd say.

TerraGo adopted PDF as the container format for GeoPDF products, because it *was* a de facto open standard for the delivery of interactive documents. By adding interactive features that guided people through a workflow, or allowed them to navigate through one more efficiently, TerraGo turned a collection of interactive document into an application.

When TerraGo creates a map book or other a GeoPDF compostiting application that brings down layers from ArcGIS Server and smushes it into a GeoPDF in the field, we're building applications -- not just pictures and images -- and we're building them on completely open standards, best practices, and published methods. No user or work-flow data is hidden in proprietary data structures in a GeoPDF product.

GeoPDF, while not a format, implies open. There is nothing to prevent someone from implementing software and applications that consume GeoPDF products and every byte of user data they contain without *any* reverse engineering. It's all right there!

Happy Birthday, TerraGo!

2010-06-30T12:35:00.002-04:00

TerraGo turns five today. Has it really been five years? Wow! TerraGo has very much transcended being "the GeoPDF guys", but I guess we're still that, too. GeoPDF will continue to evolve, and there is some exciting stuff on the horizon. I'm particularly interested in how to embed secure applications to help guide people through work-flows and manage ad hoc data collection. You know, I think that on-the-fly application configuration would be a racket worth getting in on...

IETF releases "Requirements for a Location-by-Reference Mechanism"

2010-05-17T14:41:00.002-04:00

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) released Requirements for a Location-by-Reference Mechanism, or RFC 5808. Place, or unambiguous identification of location, can get complicated quickly, especially when things like security and context come creeping into the equation.

Being able to identify a place in space and time in a (mostly) context free form seems to be of value to me. If I leave my Namiki M90 in my desk at the office, I can ascribe several locations descriptions to it: where I left it, in my drawer, at the office, etc. It's actual location could be used equally well to describe other things: where I left it, my drawer, the office, etc. Time is important, too, since I am prone to pick it up, move it around, write letters, etc. Also, what if an earthquake shifts my desk 3 meters to the West Southwest? What about reuse? Expiry? Confidentiality? Interesting stuff!

Publisher for GeoMedia 5.0 Released

2010-05-13T14:48:00.002-04:00

It's been a long time coming, but I'm happy to say that we've pushed Publisher for GeoMedia 5.0 out the door. Hot dang! I won't here repeat what's in the press release. One of the cool things about the product doesn't have anything to do with geo, but rather printing. We've had a provision for mapping RGB values to CMYK for color separation, but we've added some tweaks. Before you had to hack an XML file and do some acrobatics to encode the numerical values, but now there is a editor that does that for you, along with a simplified syntax in the XML for the Emacs set.

GeoMedia is a suite of products for doing all things geo from the friendly people of Intergraph. Back when I was still slinging code for TerraGo, I wrote a low-level library for munging PostScript that was integrated into what was at the time called Map2PDF for GeoMedia and Map2PDF for Digital Cartographic Studio (DCS). We announced those products in April 2006... Anyway, I mention the PostScript to point out that Publisher for GeoMedia uses Adobe Distiller to create the ultimate GeoPDF file. Distiller can be tweaked to produce optimized PDF files with different properties and features. Distiller is a utility for converting PostScript to PDF and ships with Acrobat. This peek behind the scenes offers insight to my round-about methods for demonstrating what we do, but my love affair with PostScript goes back long, long before GeoPDF.

GeoPDF is not a Format

2010-05-12T14:32:00.003-04:00

The name of this blog is GeoPDF. The word GeoPDF has its roots in PDF which is itself is an acronym for Portable Document Format. PDF is defined by an ISO specification. Words like "format" and "specification" might make one think that GeoPDF is a malamanteau of sorts or a perverse play on GeoTIFF. In some sense, the latter is partially correct. GeoPDF has its history in application delivery whereas GeoTIFF has a background in data interoperability. What is GeoPDF? With all due respect to Magritte:

I like to think of an aspect of GeoPDF -- and PDF -- as an application delivery platform. GeoPDF is the platform on which to build GeoApps. There will be a day when the CamelCased suffixing of Geo to everything will be so redundant as to make no sense, but that day has not arrived. So, on we go with the suffixing. A GeoApp is an application that treats geospatial information as first-class citizens and co-equals of all of the business logic components. But that is for a different post...

Today, GeoPDF is a registered trademark of TerraGo. It's used to brand the mapping products (and GeoApps!) created by TerraGo software. Whether the GeoPDF trademark can withstand xeroxification or genericide of the marketplace remains to be seen. If everybody on the planet uses the word GeoPDF 11 times a day to refer to the geospatial file they mucking with at the time, my job is done and I really won't care if it's generic or not. I imagine a lot of other wonderful things would have had to have happened for that to go down as well.

Today, if a file is created by TerraGo software, it is a GeoPDF file. If it is not created by TerraGo software, it is not a GeoPDF file. This is definitional and the position of TerraGo. I'm not going to defend or debate the rightness or the good-ideaness of the situation in this post, although I welcome comment and debate. GeoPDF encompasses a variety of geospatial encoding flavors, including that described by the OGC best practice as well as Adobe's supplement to ISO 32000. If the georegistration is encoded using OGC, that file is not necessarily GeoPDF. If the georegistration is encoded using Adobe's encoding, that file is not necessarily not GeoPDF. Encoding is irrelevant to GeoPDFness.

GeoPDF is not a format, but it is based on publicly documented format standards and industry best practices. GeoPDF is not defined by its georegistration, but GeoPDF necessarily requires georegistration. GeoPDF is not a data interop or exchange technology, but it certainly can be used for interop if care is taken for those purposes. More on this latter point in a subsequent post.

GeoPDF® is a trademark, but that is of (almost) least interest to me.

As always, the stuff I write here is not the official word-o-TerraGo, but my opinion. I have attempted to describe the official position, but this is not an official position document. Just trying to fill in between the lines...

Links Restored!

2010-05-06T09:30:00.002-04:00

We recently upgraded the TerraGo website, and in the process lost a file cache to which we linked from this site. The links are now restored. LMK if you find things differently.

Origins of GeoPDF: Getting the Data Out There

2010-05-05T16:56:00.004-04:00

Many, many moons ago, I worked on a project where we worked to get data out of the engineering groups into the hands of the maintenance groups within and across a conglomerate of telcos. I'm not sure that I can name names even to this day, so I won't. The secrecy never made a lick of sense to me even having considered it from a variety of perspectives, but a customer's confidence is inviolable. ANYWAY, I came across A Room with a Viewer by John Audley that illustrates the environment in which we were working and how people were approaching the problem and the remarkable efforts folks took to whittle away at the problem. We went with normalizing all of the engineering content to PDF and constructing map books by hyperlinking adjacencies, bookmarking street intersections, etc. We even "productized" what we did into somehting called LGIView, as mentioned in a previous post. It wasn't long before people were asking, "Hey! Wouldn't it be neat if we could read out coordinates?" As the picture shows, coordinates made it into LGIView...

Arcane trivia: MPLR = Mechanized Plant Location Records. If you knew that, LMK!

Collaboration with Adobe Acrobat and Reader with PDF Naughty Bits

2010-04-30T12:39:00.005-04:00

In an earlier post, I discussed some aspects of Adobe's collaboration infrastructure built on top of Acrobat and Reader. It's probably worth talking about some of the details of how this works without the GeoPDF geoconflation. I try to think about how things work, so I'll describe things from that perspective. Let's start with the PDF file.

A PDF file has provisions to store, among other things, two aspects of an electronic document: document content and document structure. For its paper analog, content would be what's printed on the pages and structure would be the order of the pages. Being electronic (why does "electronic" sound dated? maybe "digital" would be better...), PDF can accommodate more bells and whistles than can be placed in a paper book or letter or map or memorandum or summons or fatwa or proclamation or manifesto or whatever: things like interactive bookmarks, hyperlinks, and metadata. In addition to content and structure, PDF has a provision to store annotations. PDF annotations are analogous to sticky notes: they stick on top of the content at a particular location, but are not part of the content. Although perhaps not as ubiquitous as sticky notes, the PDF analog is much more flexible. PDF provides for a variety of annotations, including geometries like polylines and polygons, stamps, clouds, callouts, measurments, interactive 3D, videos, etc. Annotations are not content. They are, in the internals of the PDF file entirely distinct. Addition, removal, and modification of annotations don't modify the PDF content, just as putting a sticky note on that TPS report doesn't change its contents. Yeeeaaahhhh.....

FIG: An Adobe PDF Annotation in Action.

Most annotations can be placed on PDF files out of the box by Adobe Acrobat. Some annotations, like 3D annotations, have to be placed with Acrobat Pro or Pro Extended. Adobe Reader usually cannot modify a PDF file. That's why they call it Reader, and not Modifier, Manipulator, Monkeyer, Munger, or Acrobat. However, Adobe hides little permission bits inside the PDF file that when flipped enable hidden markup tools in Reader and grant permission to use them. In business speak, this is one ways how Adobe "monetizes" Reader. There are two ways to flip those bits: Adobe Acrobat Pro or LiveCycle. The Acrobat method is intended for small work groups and LiveCycle is intended for enterprise work flows.

So, if you want you or someone you love to mark up a PDF file in Adobe Reader, you'll need to have that file enabled for comments by Adobe software. If you don't want to hassle with comment enabling, use Acrobat. Those are the options.

Toolbar is hosted by Acrobat and Reader and plays by the rules dictated by its host environment. If you can't use Adobe's markup tools, you won't be able to use TerraGo's. But that's not the whole story... ready for some geoconflation? Good!

Just as Adobe uses comment enabling to monetize their free Reader, TerraGo uses GeoMark enabling to monetize its free toolbar. Current Publisher and Composer products GeoMark enable by default, but that's only enough to grant TerraGo permssions -- Adobe permissions are required, too. TerraGo Composer can GeoMark enable other geospatial PDF files, such as those created by ESRI ArcMap, Bentley Microstation, and Safe FME.

One thing that's important to note is that this has nothing whatsoever to do with formats, encodings, and openness of standards. TerraGo GeoPDF files are just as open and standards conformant as any other. Just as whether you can markup a PDF file in Reader has nothing to do with the openness of ISO 32000, whether you can access functionality in Toolbar has nothing to do with the openness of the OGC best practice or Adobe's proposed geospatial extensions. Toolbar understands both and Publisher and Composer encode both. Toolbar functionality is tied to permission, not format.

Geotrans 3.0 Released by NGA

2010-04-29T15:38:00.003-04:00

Geotrans 3.0 has been released. Geotrans was the coordinate conversion library used in the first implementation of the GeoPDF Toolbar. I think we used 2.2.3 for the first go around. If you don't know what Geotrans is, it's a coordinate conversion calculator, batch tool, and library. More at the Geotrans homepage.

This latest version has a significantly overhauled coordinate conversion interface implemented in C++ and the Geotrans application looks like it's all Java all the time for the GUI. There are a few bug fixes in there as well.

This is 3.0 with the dead sexy Unix skin. If you're wondering what the acronym MSP stands for, it's Mensuration Services Program. Also, it's nifty that 90 W 30 N has LA in the GARS coordinate string.

The core library descends from a very modular and portable C implementation. It's been C++ized, but that is mainly for the revamp of the coordinate conversion interfaces. 3.0 ships with source code and source data for those who are into that kind of stuff.

GeoMarks and Marking up GeoPDF Files with Toolbar

2010-04-27T07:32:00.004-04:00

Hrrmm... it's been a while, I see. High time for a new post!

We recently got an email from a customer who, let's say, had some justified questions about our marketing message and how he perceived our products to behave with respect to GeoMarks and markup. The Toolbar provides a set of tools for placing geospatial markups, or GeoMarks, on GeoPDF files. If you have the Toolbar installed in Adobe Acrobat of any flavor, you can markup GeoPDF and other geospatial PDF files such as those created by ArcMap or Microstation that have been GeoMark enabled. GeoMark enabling is essentially permission from TerraGo to use the markup tools in Toolbar. However, TerraGo's is not the only permission needed to mark things up using free tools: there is also Adobe's when using Reader. If a GeoPDF file is to be marked up in Reader with Toolbar, the file must be GeoMark enabled by TerraGo software and enabled for commenting by Adobe software.

GeoMark enabling can happen two ways. First, any GeoPDF file created by recent versions of TerraGo software are automatically GeoMark enabled. Easy enough. Second, TerraGo Composer has the capability to GeoMark enable any supported geospatial PDF file. As mentioned, GeoMark enabled geospatial PDF file can be marked up by the Toolbar in any flavor of Acrobat capable of hosting it. Using Acrobat has many, many advantages over plain Reader because Adobe's comment enabling restricts a variety of modifications and access to the PDF file that could be useful in different workflows. If Reader is required, then PDF files must be comment enabled by Acrobat software. The requirement is not unique to TerraGo's markups -- Adobe's markup tools share similar restrictions.

Adobe's comment enabling can happen in a couple of ways. The first is PDF file can be brought into Adobe Acrobat Pro or Pro Extended. There are two ways to get to the goods:


Commenting->Enable for Commenting and Analysis in Adobe Reader...

Advanced->Extend Features in Adobe Reader...

The other way to enable commenting in Reader is to use Adobe's LiveCycle server.

There are a variety of licensing issues surrounding comment enabling with Acrobat, so I kindly refer you to your friendly neighborhood Adobe account manager to explain the intricacies of their licensing policies.

To summarize:
* to markup any PDF file, use Acrobat
* to markup a PDF file in Reader, it must be comment enabled by Adobe software
* to apply GeoMarks to a geospatial PDF file, use Composer
* to apply GeoMarks to a geospatial PDF file with Toolbar, the file must be GeoMark enabled by TerraGo software
* to apply GeoMarks to a geospatial PDF file with Toolbar in Reader, the PDF file must be both GeoMark enabled and comment enabled

Hope this helps!

TerraGo Desktop 5.0.2 Patch Available

2009-11-19T08:09:00.002-05:00

A bug fix release of TerraGo Desktop -- the free plug-in to Adobe Reader and Acrobat for working with GeoPDF files -- is available at the download page.

US Army Geospatial Center is a MAX Finalist

2009-10-02T09:34:00.002-04:00

The US Army Geospatial Center is a 2009 Adobe MAX Finalist in the Public Sector category. From the site:

From the battlefield to the densest urban center, Army warfighters now have instant access to advanced digital topographic and geographic information delivered in PDF. The application was developed using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro and Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, as well as TerraGo Composer, a plug-in for Acrobat.

Congratulations to Ray Caputo and all of the hard-working folks at the AGC. Please show your support for their efforts by voting at the MAX Finalist site.

Tomas Lopes' Presentation Online

2009-07-27T08:27:00.002-04:00

Tomas Lopes' webinar is archived. Enjoy! More than 300 folks showed up. I hardly had time to take in any of the presentation because I was typing away at answers to the many questions that came flying in.

Ben Franklin Digs GeoPDF

2009-07-21T08:44:00.004-04:00

FYI, Ben Franklin announced new world use of geospatial PDF at James Fee's Spatially Adjusted. Of course, James used "geospatial PDF", and I'm using GeoPDF to stir up the pot... We like to GeoPDF it up around here.

In the post, James kindly provided a pointer to the upcoming webinar wherein Tomas Lopes plays Ben Franklin, discussing how to integrate Acrobat into work-flows with geospatial contexts.

I think that there is something in the previous sentence that often gets lost in the obsession with the arcane details of format and who should do what for how much by when: Adobe Acrobat offers value for people who work with GIS and geospatial work-flows. Although I haven't seen the script, I'm sure Tom is going to go over this in some detail, so I won't try to grind through all of that here.

It seems that folks like to talk about the things things can't do or don't do to satisfaction. Acrobat, PDF, and GeoPDF are not exempt, nor from what I hear is ArcGIS. If there is something that you wish Acrobat would do, you can tell Adobe. If there is something that you wish Reader should just do for free, tell Adobe. If you want more features added to PDF exported from ArcGIS right out of the box, tell ESRI. If you want ArcGIS to interact more seamlessly with PDF files and Acrobat and LiveCycle work-flows right out of the box, tell ESRI. I can't recommend this more strongly. The more robust the platform, the better. Platform is the job of the platform providers.

If you want to get somthing that finds maps and items of plant using easy-to-use geospatial contexts into the hands of your field crews, talk to TerraGo [mailto]. If there is something you'd like to see in platform that you're not getting from the platform providers, say it here and stimulate some discussion. Maybe TerraGo will implement it in between the platform providers' release cycles, maybe not. Likely no one will if no one knows why it might be a good thing to have.

It would be interesting to hear how you think things should be. The more Adobe and ESRI hear how people want to solve problems, the more they will provide tools and interfaces that play together nicely. Sometimes TerraGo can help bridge the gap between what is being done and should be done by the platform providers.

What would be more interesting yet would be to hear your what data distribution and data collection problems and pain-points are, and who suffers. The ArcGIS jockey may feel no pain in a work-flow, but myriad linemen might be suffering at the other end. That's the person in whom I'm keenly interested.

If you don't want to work with TerraGo for whatever reason, you're always free to roll your own tools and solutions or talk with third-parties to help you do so. Like ArcGIS, Acrobat, and Reader, TerraGo's tools are proprietary. The Portable Document Format and the geospatial extensions thereto (GeoPDF!) are not [OGC] [Adobe/ISO]. I'll even try to hook you up as best I can. GeoPDF is an open platform, regardless of what anyone says to the contrary.

Although I strongly encourage use of this forum, if there is anything that you want to discuss, but don't want to do so publicly, email me directly [mailto], and I'd be glad to discuss it with you.

Getting Geospatial With Acrobat

2009-07-17T14:48:00.002-04:00

Tomas Lopes is putting on webinar about using Acrobat in geospatial contexts. From the abstract:

Join Tomas Lopes, a geospatial database specialist at Farallon Geographics, on Wednesday, July 22, as he demonstrates how easy it is for GIS professionals to facilitate data maintenance workflow for individuals in the field by using Acrobat 9 with professional desktop GIS software. Combining traditional GIS software with Acrobat 9 is proving to be a fast and cost-effective way to create content that is easy to use in the field and easy to maintain in the office.

I'm going to be answering questions during Q&A. I actually have no idea about the details of the webinar beyond what's written on announcement on Acrobat User's, so I'm curious to see how it goes.

History of GeoPDF: PDF Map Books, LGIView, and LGIDict

2009-05-05T07:58:00.005-04:00

GeoPDF has a history that goes back to the 1990s. Using PDF files for engineering applications was the brainchild of Phil Lee, one of the founders of TerraGo. In 1999, Phil, then vice president of Layton Graphics, bid on a project to deliver maps and engineering drawings to telecommunications maintenance crews. The maps and drawings came from scanned paper maps, AutoCAD and Microstation design files and backed by different database systems maintained by different engineering groups. Phil was an avid Acrobat user -- fanatic may not be too strong a word. He knew more about getting stuff done with Acrobat than anyone I knew then or since. Taking all of these heterogeneous formats and data to PDF and exploiting the features of PDF and Acrobat was obvious to him. The PDF solution was compelling because it was not tied to any CAD or database system, secure, and easy-to-use. The solution was to render all of the engineering data to PDF, add bookmarks and hyperlinks to ease navigation, and organize the resulting map book with an interactive index map. My nominal role in all of this was for the rendering AutoCAD DWG files to PDF, along with extraction and analysis of the data that they contained for creating links and metadata. Alan Stewart headed up the Microstation side of things. Alan had been writing software to manipulate and render DGN files for quite a while. He arrived at Layton Graphics with Michael Bufkin some years before in an acquisition of Michael's company Cad Share. Michael ran Layton Graphics' engineering group. Michael, Alan, and I are all still working together at TerraGo.

The PDF map book project was a big success for Layton Graphics. We delivered the first map book set in the fall of 2000 and last in 2005. We built a custom system that consumed the raw design files and databases and churned out 2500 map book updates quarterly, burned them to CD and delivered them to the different maintenance groups. These map books were popular with the crews, and soon received requests for new features. These features were usually exposed by creating plugins to Acrobat. This was the responsibility of JB Freels. It was increasingly obvious that a combination of software and carefully prepared data was a compelling application that could be used in numerous contexts. It seemed that everyone we showed our map books to wanted them.

One of the first attempts to productize a collection of PDF files specifically configured for engineering applications along with Acrobat plugins was called LGIView. Adobe profiled LGIView as a success story. Patrick Graves was brought on board in 2002 to serve as chief software architect and run the software development group. One of the LGIView features was a coordinate finder. Engineering design coordinate systems are almost invariably Cartesian, but they are sometimes aligned with some mapping coordinate system like UTM or a State Plane system. Since the working coordinates were Cartesian, it was a simple matter to embed a rotation, scale, and translation that mapped the engineering coordinate system to that of the PDF. This metadata was encoded in the PDF file as a PDF dictionary called LGIDict. My notes indicate that Alan came up with the LGIDict version 1 schema. I Ling Xu initially documented the schema and I gave its name: LGIDict -- LGI Geospatial Information Dictionary. At the time, I didn't know about Acrobat developer's prefixes, and JB didn't bust me on it.

Even as LGIDict version 1 was being drafted in 2002 -- we had deadlines and product to ship! -- the limitations were obvious. In 2003 I started working on a second version with provisions to drive a coordinate transformation engine. The LGIDict version 2 was cut in November of 2003.

OGC Publishes GeoPDF 2.2 as OGC Best Practice

2009-05-01T12:02:00.002-04:00

After much anticipation, GeoPDF 2.2 has been published as an OGC Best Practice. From the page:

The intended audience of this document is a developer of software for creating GeoPDF. It specifies how to create the necessary PDF objects that identify a region of the PDF page as a map and describe the map’s coordinate systems. Map creation and rendering to a PDF page are not addressed. The underlying PDF file format is not addressed. The file format is specified in PDF Reference .
The reader will need knowledge of PDF objects and document structure. An understanding of cartographic projections and datums will also be helpful. Information about these can be found in Map Projections A Working Manual .
Though written with the PDF 1.7 file format in mind, this Best Practice is believed to be valid for all versions of the PDF file specification prior to PDF 1.7.

Things Get Quiet When Adam's Not Around

2009-03-27T14:43:00.003-04:00

TerraGo's amiable and prolific blog poster and all around social media butterfly Adam Estrada has signed on with a three-letter acronym agency with some sort of if-he-told-me-he'd-have-to-kill-me sort of gig. Everyone at TerraGo and certainly I wish Adam all the best in his adventures.

Despite the quiet on the outside, we're full tilt on the inside working on revs of all of our software and I hope to have some news to share soon. If I can shake free of the mountain surrounding me at the office, I hope to get back to the technical series on how geospatial PDF files work and how to make them. If there is anything you'd like to know about this or anything else GeoPDF or at TerraGo, drop me a line.

TerraGo is at ESRI Federal User's Conference

2009-02-17T12:50:00.002-05:00

TerraGo has got booth 123 at the ESRI Federal User's Conference. CEO Rick Cobb will be there, along with most of our sales crew.

TerraGo Composer for (ArcGIS) Server

2009-02-17T12:41:00.003-05:00

TerraGo is announcing a new product today called TerraGo Composer for Server. It works like this: you interactively select an area of interest (AOI). Composer grovels around ArcGIS Server finding files and documents associated with the AOI. You pick the types of information of interest, and Composer creates a GeoPDF index map of the AOI with hyperlinks to the documents you selected.

First ARGON Mapping Satellite Lauched 48 Years Ago Today

2009-02-17T08:42:00.002-05:00

The first ARGON mapping satellite was launched 17 February 1961. The ARGON satellites carried film cameras and ejected film canisters. The imagery was declassified in the Clinton administration. The CORONA, ARGON, and LANYARD satellites exposed more that 2 million feet of film between 1959 and 1972. You can get the imagery and more information from USGS.

GeoPDF and GeoPS with Adobe-Style Payload

2009-02-13T13:05:00.006-05:00

Here are the companion (Geo)PostScript and GeoPDF maps to those generated for the worked example. It took me less than 10 minutes to map the TerraGo sytle to the Adobe. We'll delve into the details of what I did in a subsequent post.

Isn't that PostScript GeoPS?

2009-02-13T07:59:00.002-05:00

The PostScript file from georegistration worked example post contains a full georegisration. If you put some metadata in there to reliably extract that information, well, that PS is GeoPS!

What's up with the parens in the GeoPDF CTM?

2009-02-13T07:14:00.004-05:00

In the georegistration worked example post, we calculated a CTM that takes the page coordinates in points into projected coordinates in meters:


[35.28267 0 0 35.28267 205188.64 3207094.8]

In the PostScript and PDF files, there are CTM entries:


[(35.28267) (0) (0) (35.28267) (205188.64) (3207094.8)]

Same numerical values, just the values in CTMs in the files have parentheses around them. What's up with that?

PostScript and PDF share a similar object system that provides a rich set of types. We'll go into the details of the PDF object system in a later post. However, we'll talk about the types in the two version of the CTM. There are three types present: numbers, strings, and an array. Arrays are delimited with the square backets []. Strings are delimited with parens (). There are actually two types of numbers: integer and real. These types were implemented in earlier versions of Acrobat as 32 bit objects. Real numbers used a fixed point scheme that traded precision for range. That range was too small to hold values often used in geodesy. More recent versions of Acrobat used IEEE 754 single-precision floats, the precision of which is not sufficient store values for geodesic calculations. Rather than try to shoehorn a syntatic extension that used native PDF numbers directly, we stashed the values into strings and extracted the values based on whether a string appeared in a numeric context.

Bonus link: David Goldberg's What Every Computer Scientist Should Know about Floating-Point Arithmetic [PostScript].

GeoPDF Map for Worked Example

2009-02-12T14:20:00.004-05:00

As promised, I created a PostScript file using the information we calculated in the worked example post. I created a GeoPDF file by running the PostScript file through Ghostscript to create a ~~PostScript file~~ PDF file that looks like this:

PostScript hacking is fine companion to cubicle lunching...

HT Klokan!

Georegistration: A Worked Example

2009-02-12T08:09:00.002-05:00

We're going to work through making a quad sheet and georegistering it. The quad is going to be [90W 29N 89W 30N]. If you're wondering why that quad out of all of the possible quads, it's because I know that 90W 30N hits one of my favorite spots: New Orleans. Let's pick a scale for our quad to be 1:100000, and let's give ourselves one inch margins. We're going to use UTM zone 16 WGS 84 as our coordinate reference system, and I'm going to use GEOTRANS to do the calculations. The the table of longitudes (λ), latitudes (ϕ), eastings and northings is:


  λ  ϕ  E(m)    N(m)
-90 29 207729 3211697
-90 30 210590 3322576
-89 30 307085 3320469
-89 29 305179 3209635

The bounding eastings and northings are:


[207729 3209635 307085 3322576]

Taking the difference between the upper right and lower left values and scaling the result leaves us with a rectangle 0.99356 m by 1.12941 m. To put us into PDF world, we're going to convert the meters to points and add 144 points to the result to give us our one inch margins. The resulting media box is (rounded values):


[0 0 2960 3345]

The neatline falls an inch (72 points) inside the page media box at:
[72 72 2888 3273]
What we've done here is aligned the axes of the projected and page coordinate systems. Moreover, we constrain the scales to be constant regardless of direction. This let's us reduce the problem from solving:


|a c H||h|   |x|
|b d V||v| = |y|
|0 0 1||1|   |1|


|a 0 H||h|   |x|
|0 a V||v| = |y|
|0 0 1||1|   |1|

The solution is given by:


a = (x1 - x0)/(h1 - h0)
H = x0 - a h0
V = y0 - a v0

Using the values:


x0 = 207729
y0 = 3209635
x1 = 307085
h0 = v0 = 72
h1 = 2888

yields:


a = 35.28267
H = 205188.64
V = 3207094.8

In PDF notation, the full CTM would be:


[35.28267 0 0 35.28267 205188.64 3207094.8]

This matrix defines the relationship between a point on the page and a point in the projected coordinate system. It's inverse takes the projected coordinate system into the page coordinate system:


[0.028343 0.0 0.0 0.028343 -5815.5645 -90897.17]

Using this, we can discover where the corners of the map neatline will fall:


  λ  ϕ  E(m)    N(m)  H(pt) V(pt)  
-90 29 207729 3211697   72   132
-90 30 210590 3322576  153  3274
-89 30 307085 3320469 2888  3215
-89 29 305179 3209635 2834    74

In a later post, we'll draw this map...

Why Two GeoPDF Specs?

2009-02-11T17:51:00.005-05:00

An anonymous reader asked

I'm not sure that the community needs two specs. What am I missing?

This is a hot question, but I hope I can cool it off a bit. The community doesn't need two georegistration techniques, I suppose, but it does have two, so as software providers we need to deal with it. And that's only for PDF. How many ways can you georeference, say a TIFF file? Well, there's world file, at least three different combos of GeoTIFF tags, different metadata payloads cooked up by GIS vendor X, etc. DGN? DWG? DOC? XPS? FOO?

What TerraGo has done with releasing the georegistration technique it used to create and have had created hundreds of thousands of GeoPDF files is to document what we did. This is why it will be published as a best practice rather than a OGC-endorsed specification. People have invested heavily in GeoPDF map libraries that use that technique and we're going to make sure that investment is protected. Similarly, GeoPDF files can be created using the extensions that Adobe has cooked up. We can deal with that, too. Ultimately, I hope that the people who ultimately use, enjoy, and profit from GeoPDF maps and imagery neither know nor care about the details of the arrangement of the bits and bytes that make the georegistration -- just rest easy in knowing that GeoPDF is built on open standards.

If you really get down into the details of how the two techniques differ, there are some contexts which one might be preferable to the other -- and vice versa. Neither is fully baked, IMO, so there will be extensions and revisions. However, GeoPDF's situation is much more akin to GeoTIFF's than a VHS v. Betamax. It's more a matter of flavor than variety. From my perspective, both flavors are delicious. From a GeoPDF user's perspective, it all should "just work".

I will be delving into the details of both techniques in subsequent posts.

GeoTIFF CTM in ASCII Art Glory

2009-02-10T08:20:00.004-05:00

Did I mention that I love the GeoTIFF spec. Allow me to reproduce for you the ASCII art version of the section on it's CTM provision:


ModelTransformationTag
      Tag  =  34264  (85D8.H) 
      Type =  DOUBLE    
      N    =  16
      Owner: JPL Cartographic Applications Group

This tag may be used to specify the transformation
matrix between the raster space (and its dependent
pixel-value space) and the  (possibly 3D) model space.
If specified, the tag shall have the following
organization:

      ModelTransformationTag = (a,b,c,d,e....m,n,o,p).

where

        model                              image
        coords =          matrix     *     coords

        |-   -|     |-                 -|  |-   -|
        |  X  |     |   a   b   c   d   |  |  I  |
        |     |     |                   |  |     |
        |  Y  |     |   e   f   g   h   |  |  J  |
        |     |  =  |                   |  |     |
        |  Z  |     |   i   j   k   l   |  |  K  |
        |     |     |                   |  |     |
        |  1  |     |   m   n   o   p   |  |  1  |
        |-   -|     |-                 -|  |-   -|

Some of dat!

GeoPDF Map Frames

2009-02-10T08:17:00.001-05:00

We've discussed the concept and mechanisms of georegistration -- the alignment or registration of two Cartesian coordinate systems (one of which is a projected coordinate system (PCS)) via a coordinate transformation matrix. We take this explicit relationship between a PDF page and a specific PCS, give it a name, delineate a region on the page for which the relationship is valid, and name a preferred display coordinate system, and roll it all up into what we call a map frame. I don't now remember from whence the name, but this one turned out OK, IMO.

So here are the map frame pieces:

map frame description or name
map coordinate system
preferred display coordinate system
page area of map (bounded by neatline)

You'll notice that there isn't anything particular to PDF in there. GeoPDF georegistration and map frames, although talked about here largely in PDF jargon, are by design not solely applicable PDF. You could georegister a portion DVI, AI, (E)PS or HTML page among others, or any file that references some Cartesian coordinate system like DGN or DWG. GeoTIFF has a provision for a CTM that maps pixels to a projected coordinate system. Lovely spec, that. I strongly encourage everyone to read it and profit from the work of Niles Ritter, Mike Ruth, and the GeoTIFF crew. I guess what I'm getting at is if there is a map or image in bits and bytes format, it should be georegistered! Perhaps this post should have been titled The Map Frame Manifesto...

A final note about map frames is that they are only implicitly tied to the content in or image on the page (we'll that's not exactly true with a variation of Adobe's georegistration technique, but I'll leave that for another post...). A page can have several map frames and they can "stack". For instance, maps in that road atlas under the Hanna Montana coloring book and crayons in the back of the car has a map of Utah in it, with insets for Salt Lake City and Provo obscuring Colorado and Nevada. In GeoPDF, that map would have three map frames: a base map for Utah and adjacent states with two insets on top for SLC and Provo, respectively. Map frame stacking is an important implementation detail, because it controls how you determine what you're looking at when, say doing roll-over detection for mouse movement. More on this, later.

So, georegistration is what makes GeoPDF GeoPDF?

2009-02-09T19:25:00.002-05:00

Well... maybe yes, probably no. Or vice versa. It's become confusing. When TerraGo products create a GeoPDF file, they do more than just take data, make a picture of it, and stuff a little georegistration payload in the result. For instance, as Adam has pointed out, we take advantage of PDF features to provide a richer, more interactive, PDF file. However, many features often associated with GeoPDF are not unique to GeoPDF. Layers are not unique to GeoPDF. Object data are not unique to GeoPDF. These are "just" features of PDF that anyone with the time and patience can implement. ESRI, Bentley, Safe, and Cadcorp have all done it, although I'm not certain they all embed georegistration payloads.

In my mind, it's not GeoPDF without georegistration, that's for sure! As we work through the history and some of the implementation details in the history of GeoPDF, maybe we can sort this out to everyone's satisfaction.

Just where are Adobe's geospatial extensions to ISO 32000?

2009-02-09T13:44:00.002-05:00

Reader GCP Maps provides a pointer to the where to actually see the Adobe extensions to ISO 32000, which I'll repeat here: Section 8.8.1 Geospatial Features in Adobe Supplement to the ISO 32000 BaseVersion: 1.7 ExtensionLevel: 3 [PDF]. That's page 49 if you want to jump right to it...

The GeoPDF CTM and Units: An Implementation Note

2009-02-09T08:58:00.002-05:00

Like many projects, GeoPDF escaped from the lab before it was fully developed. An implementation detail that may seem bizarre at first glance are the units of the parameters CTM which defines the a GeoPDF georegistration. Recalling the CTM:


[ a b c d H V ]

the parameters a, b, c, and d are in units of meters per point. Parameters H and V are in meters. A point in PDF is defined as 1/72 of an inch. What's up with that?

If you take it all the way back, it goes back to the arcana of printing. We'll take it back as far as PostScript, where a unit in what's called default user space was defined to be a point, and a point defined as exactly 1/72 of an inch. See the Red Book [PDF] for more. The point unit default user space lives on in PDF, and, in GeoPDF.

Many of the interfaces for dealing with PDF pages take and yield values in points. The GEOTRANS projection engine we used at the time works in meters. The points-in-meters out (and vice versa) interface was convenient for bridging the two worlds and helped to make the georegistration concept -- this part of the page is "registered" to this part of the world -- concrete.

There's even a reason it's meters per point rather than the other way around. The eastings and northings associated with projections used for many practical mapping applications tend to be "large", often ranging around the hundreds of thousands or millions of meters. Points tend to range from zero to the low thousands for most practical page sizes. A ratio of points per meter often yielded fractional values that could not be encoded as a in a PDF file as a PDF number without significant loss of precision. Also, the H and V often took on values that could be recognized as being associated with this or that coordinate reference system. We ran into other issues with limitations of PDF numbers, the solution to which we'll leave for another time.

GeoPDF and Georegistration

2009-02-06T13:11:00.002-05:00

One of the key concepts behind GeoPDF is georegistration. We define georegistration as a specific form of georeferencing in which a projected Cartesian coordinate system is registered to a page Cartesian coordinate system using a linear transformation. That is, the relationship between a point in a map to a point in a projected coordinate system is given by:


x = a h + c v + H
y = b h + d v + V

where (x, y) is the projected coordinate, (h, v) is the page coordinate and a, b, c, d, H, and V are the parameters that define the linear relationship. In matrix notation, this can be represented as:


|a c H||h|   |x|
|b d V||v| = |y|
|0 0 1||1|   |1|

We call the matrix a coordinate transformation matrix, or CTM. We encode this in a more compact form in PDF object notation as:


[ a b c d H V ]

where the square brackets delimit an array. More on PDF object notation later, but Adobe's PDF Architect and Senior Principal Scientist Jim King's tutorials give a nice overview.

Who does geospatial PDF?

2009-02-06T07:49:00.003-05:00

I know that Adobe, ESRI, Safe, and Cadcorp all roll their own geospatial PDF files using Adobe's geospatial PDF extensions. Let me know if you or some one you know does as well.

Adobe groks GeoPDF.

Today GeoPDF files are created from software from TerraGo (naturally!), Adobe, ESRI,Cadcorp, ERDAS, Intergraph, and BAE Systems.

GeoPDF files are consumed by software from TerraGo (naturally!), Adobe, and ESRI.

Since we support Adobe's geospatial PDF extensions and are going to use them under the hood moving forward, the distinction between the georegistration techniques from an us-v-them perspective are, more or less, moot.

How do I get my hands on spec?

2009-02-06T07:33:00.003-05:00

If you would like to create a geospatial PDF file, I strongly recommend georegistration using Adobe's extensions to ISO 32000. Apparently, OGC 08-139r1 has not been posted yet to the OGC best practices repository. I'm lobbying to post it on our corporate website... we'll see how that goes. If you want to get your hands on the spec to get cracking making an indexer or something like that, let me know and I'll get you a copy and some implementation notes. If you want to just see how we did it, open the PDF in a text editor and search for LGIDict... I would like to start dissecting what we did and why on this blog in a series of posts.

Closing out Bug 1584 "Make GeoPDF Open Source"

2009-02-05T16:43:00.003-05:00

Customer IANT logged the following enhancement request:

I know it's not going to happen but had a request to make GeoPDF open source and allow how we store all of the georegistration information publicly available.

IANT, it happened. Bug 1584 is closed, resolved "fixed". Cheers!

What's Your Beef with Calling OGC 08-139r1 GeoPDF 2.2?

2009-02-05T16:23:00.001-05:00

I've been asked by different folks why I think that conflating GeoPDF with the details of a georegistation technique is not a good idea. My main beef is that it confines GeoPDF to some implementation details and sets it against/in contrast to whatever is georegistered using Adobe's proposed extensions to ISO 32000. I always had a more inclusive vision for GeoPDF. There are several PDF standards: PDF/A, PDF/E, PDF/X, PDF/UA... I imagine that there might be a PDF/G some day (or, perhaps, extensions to PDF/E, e.g., PDF/EG), and I would like to say that "this is a PDF/G-compliant GeoPDF file!" I would like this blog to be a natural home for all things geospatial PDF.

However, this is merely a matter of opinion and taste. What more concerns me is that it creates the false illusion that there is some sort of specification competition where there is none. Adobe has promulgated extensions to ISO 32000 and that's the path toward the future of PDF/G (or whatever) standard is coming down the pike to be considered and approved by ISO. We support this in our products and our planning.

What's delightful is that there is a published and unencumbered specification of a technique for georegistering PDF files -- finally! This is something that I've fighting for and been working to see since 2003. I'm looking forward to Google and Yahoo! bringing me beautiful maps and imagery with queries like "battle of atlanta" or "landsat new zealand 1999-2009" and being able to actually look at it because it's in the PDF and play with it because it's georegistered. By publishing our old technique, search engines will be able to index GeoPDF files out there on the web regardless of how they were georegistered.

OGC Approves GeoPDF 2.2 as OGC Best Practice

2009-02-05T15:12:00.002-05:00

GeoPDF 2.2 OGC 08-139r1 was approved as OGC Best Practice. Personally, I think that the use of GeoPDF was unfortunate, for various reasons, but I'm happy to see the georegistration technique published. If you'd like to roll-your-own geospatial PDF, I'd recommend using Adobe's proposed geospatial extensions to ISO 32000. Our software supports this georegistration technique, and we're already moving in that direction.

Placemark Balloon Enhancement in GE 5.0

2009-02-04T11:06:00.005-05:00

Many of you may have noticed that the KML generated from your application does not properly reference any placemark balloon attachments when viewed in Google Earth. This is because those attachments are referenced with a local file path rather than a valid URL that Google Earth is looking for. There used to be a gross work around to get those attached files to display properly which involved web servers and modifications to the KML itself. No More! Google Earth 5.0 added a provision to accept local file paths so now all referenced files in the KML will work regardless of whether or not they are on a web server!

To enable this functionality, download Google Earth 5.0 and then go to Tools --> Options --> General tab and check the box that says “Allow placemark balloons to access local files and personal data.”

I understand that Google Earth is more of a wiz-bang visualization utility than an actual geospatial analysis tool but darn it, people use it! This small modification now offers the KML from 3rd party applications whos users don't always have the ability to place their data web server a chance for tighter integration...

Google Earth 5.0 is released!

2009-02-02T12:44:00.006-05:00

Google announced today that Google Earth 5.0 has officially been released. This latest release appears to have a few interesting new features that will allow you to view historical imagery from around the globe, ocean floor and surface data as well as the ability to record your GE session! Check out the online tour by clicking here. Enjoy!

UPDATE: More information can be found on Google's official blog site...

2008 NAIP Data

2009-01-29T17:03:00.001-05:00

Jarlath mentioned recently that 4-band 2008 NAIP (National Agricultural Imagery Program) data is currently being processed for public dissemination. I am not completely sure which states, other than Vermont of course, have acquired the NAIP data with the near IR band but these status maps certianly help. These county-wide, 4-band datasets are going to be shipped in the JPEG2000 and GeoTIFF formats and if you're like me, your network gets flooded with usage during the day so downloading a large dataset gets tricky. Not to mention that the shear number of files that get shipped with a large dataset get complicated to manage. See below that there are over 10 files that are shipped with each county set.

More often than not those of us who do download these data are really only interested in a small area like a city or county so wouldn't it be nice to be able to download a single file that ultimately holds the same information as the eleven or so files that come with the JPEG2000 Dataset? All of that information can now be contained in a single PDF file. See Below:

What about the 4th Band from the input image? No problem because there are a total of 4 bands in the GeoPDF file that can be dynamically reassigned to RGB depending on what questions you are asking from your data! Are you trying to find areas of dead or dying vegetation? You will need to look for areas with dark red to brown pixels in a color infrared image. To view the data as a color infrared view state, adjust the bands dynamically in the PDF Layers tab to 4, 1, 2.

To view the data again as natural color adjust the band combination to 1, 2, 3.

For more information on using color IR data, please check out the video by clicking here. He gives a very good desription of how to use histogram stretching in your raster data which is invaluable for producing quality mapping data! Thanks Jarlath...

Adobe blend methods and remotely sensed data

2009-01-28T08:44:00.010-05:00

I mentioned in a previous post that an option to rid your imagery of the pesky collar data is to adjust the neatline to exclude it from the map frame all together. Another way to get rid of the collar data when mosaicking a set of GeoPDF files is to utilize a couple of the default Adobe blend methods. You can see in the graphic below that there is a fair amount of collar data (No DATA pixels) in the GeoPDF file.

A quick way to create a seamless mosaic from a set of GeoPDFs is to apply an Adobe blend method to the properties of each input file.

You can see in the above graphic that there are specific properties for each file that can be adjusted. These properties include, the path to the input file, the page number, description, transparency and blend mode.

Map Assembler has provided an interface between the GeoPDF and most of the Adobe Blend methods. There are 16 blend methods to choose from and depending on your data and what the situation calls for they are all pretty useful. For continous raster data like aerial photography and satellite imagery that has collar data with all black pixels, its best to use the lighten blend method. For raster data with all white collar data, it's best to use the darken method. All in all, trial and error usually prevails like in most mapping applications! I have had the best luck with lighten and darken and that is what I recommend for this particular situation. The final seamless mosaic of all 4 adjacent tiles is below...

How to remove NO DATA pixels from your map series

2009-01-26T09:48:00.012-05:00

A very common issue in working with orthophotography and satellite imagery is that once the final image product has been created, there is often a fair amount of collar data (NO DATA) pixels in the image. This is caused by the inherent rotation that is applied to the image when resampling each pixel in the orthorecification process. Anyway, there is no easy way to completely delete these pixels from your imagery but there are work arounds when playing in the PDF space. Please observe the NO DATA pixels in the image below.

If there is no method of blending or cut line editing that takes place as part of a preprocessing step, these pesky pixels appear to overlap the areas with good "image" pixels when mosaicking adjacent tiles together. Observe the map that was stitched together using TerraGo's Map Assembler.

To fix this, we have to modify the neatline for each GeoPDF which will force the map canvas to cover only the image extent so that Map Assembler can stitch it together properly. Please see the before and after snap shots of the edited neatline.

After editing the neatline, you can clearly see that the NO DATA values in the graphic on the left are now removed in the graphic on the right (highlited in yellow). I edited all four images in this series to get a seamless output county mosaic. This quick and dirty edit created a single 30 megabyte GeoPDF that covered approximately 735 square miles.

Enjoy...

GeoPDF Example Gallery

2009-01-23T13:51:00.008-05:00

If you are looking for more information on or possible uses for the GeoPDF file format, check out the newly created Geospatial and Mapping Gallery on AcrobatUsers.com. Adobe has done a wonderful job in getting this up and running and so far the community response has been outstanding!

A more in-depth gallery is on its way to the TerraGo website as well so please stay tuned!

Inauguration Map

2009-01-16T16:36:00.011-05:00

Check out the Inaguration Map for the upcoming election on the AcrobatUser.com Geospatial Gallery! Glenn beat me to the initial announcement yesterday but I thought I should expand upon what is in the map. This GeoPDF file was created using the TerraGo Composer Suite and there are a couple things that I think are pretty cool!

1. There are a few Bookmarks that help to identify the parade route. For a novice map user, Bookmarks are a key element for navigating through the material.

2. Each Bookmark takes the user to a specific location in the map.

3. The Bookmarks also take you to data that was collected from the TerraGo Mobile product while out in the field on a smart phone.

The data behind each push-pin for this example is a snap shot of that area. Note that the JPEG photos are stored in the PDF!

3. Finally, we have included a link to the Google Maps page with the Street View open for each section. I think the more elegant approach would have been to embed the Street View link directly in the PDF but this'll do...

Thanks to all of you who worked on this...Good Job! Download the TerraGo Toolbar to measure and GPS track on the map.

BrightKite and Emergency Response

2009-01-13T17:03:00.009-05:00

I've mentioned before how Twitter is being used to send out updates based on live events from the field that anyone in the world can access. With that said, posting a comment with pictures (and other media) along with a location is an emerging pheonomenon on the web known specifically as a Location Based Service (LBS). There are many of these LBSs to choose from but the one that has really caught my attention is called BrightKite. This small startup out of Colorado enables users from anywhere to "check in" to a location and then share their experience with other users in the same general area. Moreover, it allows you to create a private friends list which keeps you in touch with people who might have similar interests (like a group of first responders during a major natural disaster!). They also feature the BrightKite Wall which is a utility that broadcasts what is going on with your list of BrightKite buddies through a simple flash-based interface. This is a cool feature but I don't have enough buddies setup to see any kind of real action. There are literally dozens of applications for this technology and I would encourage everyone to check it out...How can your company use a Location Base Service like BrightKite? I would love to hear from you!

GeoPDF to TIFF

2009-01-12T21:45:00.003-05:00

There has been a decent number of inquiries lately about exporting GeoPDF to TIFF. You can do this quite easily out of the box using Acrobat version 9.0 Pro Extended. Simply open your GeoPDF file in APEX and export it out as either a TIFF or JPEG2000 image.

Once the image has been exported from APEX, you can bring it in to other software applications for further processing and analysis. See the IMAGINE GLT below...

There are a few more options available to you for this so please feel free to ask!

Searchme: Next Generation Web Search!

2008-12-30T14:43:00.008-05:00

This search tool is REALLY cool and useful too! Now we can see the page before browsing to the actual website! From the Searchme.com "About Us" page:

Searchme lets you see what you’re searching for. As you start typing, categories appear that relate to your query. Choose a category, and you’ll see pictures of web pages that answer your search. You can review these pages quickly to find just the information you’re looking for, before you click through.

We’re just getting started on our first step towards creating an entirely new way to search the Web. The quality of our results will vary as we make Searchme better and better. If you have comments or suggestions we’d love to hear from you. We love feedback.

There also appears to be quite a few Searchme apps for download including an iPhone app...Find them by clicking here. I personally have never seen this type of technology before but WOW! I am really impressed...

Change Detection with GeoPDF

2008-12-30T09:46:00.028-05:00

By definition, change detection in most remote sensing software applications is the calculated difference between two images of the same or similar spatial extent. The output from that calculation is another image that highlights the changes that might exceed a user-specified threshold. This is very useful in those instances where your decision makers need to see before and after images of a partcular area. A good example of this was with the large-scale devistation from a Category 3 Hurricane known as Katrina which swept through the city of New Orleans back in 2005. Below, you can see that we are able to mashup recent and archived imagery to perform an accurate analysis of the area in a single PDF file. I created this particular file from QuickBird data acquired on June 23rd 2005 and then on September 3rd 2005 which gives us a good before and after shot of this area in New Orleans.

With GeoPDF, we are able to stack several GIS layers (both raster and vector) on top of each other in a single PDF file. We are also able to view multispectral data by manipulating the image band combinations all in the same GeoPDF file. As you can see below, we switched from true color to color infrared (false color) on the fly to help identify vegetation that was damaged in the storm.

Once the GeoPDF has been compiled and delivered down range, it can be marked up and then sent back to a GIS Analyst to help make better and more informed decisions about how to respond! Or, the opposite of that can be applied here as well and a non-GIS savvy respondant hired to do "GIS" work can mark up the PDF before sending it out to save time down range.

Set PDF Bookmarks to display specific areas of interest to your audience! Refer to this previous post for more of what can be done using Adobe Bookmarks...

Happy New Years Everyone!

Google Chrome out of Beta

2008-12-12T15:40:00.004-05:00

The official Google Blog announced yesterday that their browser, Google Chrome, is now officially out of beta! I downloaded this version and must say that it is quit fast although I can't really recall how much faster it is as compared to the beta program version. At any rate, less is more and this browser is definitely the "no frills" speedster I use every day! Happy browsing everyone...

Landsat Archive to GeoPDF?

2008-12-12T10:00:00.009-05:00

Jesse mentioned again that the entire Landsat data archive is now available to download FOR FREE! This really opens a lot of doors to those of you who require this moderate resolution data type that has been so successful all over the world for the past 35+ years.

But, what if you don't have a buly image processing application like IMAGINE, PCI, or ENVI and still need to work with these data on your desktop? The PDF file format certainly bridges that gap!

Adobe has published that there are something like 750,000,000+ desktops with the free Adobe Reader on them! That is more desktops than there are Windows operating systems, right? If not more, it's certainly close! Anyway, I noted in previous posts that we now have the ability to create a single GeoPDF file that contains all or selected image bands from the source file. Imagine having everything you need from the input data source stored in a single document. With the inherent compression of the PDF format I have been able to get a 140meg file down to less than 10 megs! Moreover, imagine a single file that contains Landsat imagery from several different dates! What about a single PDF file that has a Landsat scene with all 7 bands as one layer, a Leica ADS80 image from the same spatial extent as another layer and then one of the free USGS topographic maps ALL IN THE SAME PDF! Wow! Several image sources stored in a single file that can be sent through fire walls and network filters as a single document is already of great benefit to folks all over the world! Coupled with the free GeoPDF toolbar, the analysis that can be done on image data in a single document is tremendous...

Landsat 7 courtesy of NASA

I hope those of you out there who are using Landsat data can see the true value of working with remotely sensed data in the GeoPDF format...

LandSat 7 GeoRSS Feed

2008-11-20T09:07:00.008-05:00

October 1st 2008 marked the day when the entire LandSat ETM+ data archive was released to the general public completely free of charge. They have also started publishing the latest editions to their archive via GeoRSS. What better way to visualize this feed than in a map! I put together a Yahoo Pipe that processes this feed and plots it out in a Yahoo Map. It took approximately 2 minutes to create and publish this pipe, however the Blogger style sheet is doing funny things with the Pipes Badge! Try clicking on the link below to see the full feed directly in Yahoo Pipes.

Interested in viewing LandSat 7 data in the GeoPDF format? Click here for a previous post. As always, gain access to the GeoSpatial content in the PDF file by downloading the free TerraGo Toolbar.

GeoServer and GeoPDF

2008-11-19T15:10:00.012-05:00

Earlier today, Dave Gura forwarded me a pretty interesting website that takes full advantage of both GeoServer and the GeoPDF file format. This website, hosted and maintained by the University of Wisconsin Department of Soil Science and the NRCS, is a great example of how to get a lot of valuable data out to a large audience. More importantly, because the data is published to the GeoPDF format the end user can download and take with them any or all of the tiles they are interested in working with. Click here to jump over to this web mapping application.

There are many ways to publish your spatial data! I have mentioned before that with TerraGo's suite of tools, you are able to index and publish your data directly on a web server like the NRCS did with the University of Wisconsin. From there you can access it through something like GeoServer or a medium as simple as KML like you see below...

I have grown quite fond of the "KML" method and see great potential as a way for those folks with a lot of data to get it out to those who need it. I guess the question is, are your users (who have no clue what GIS, KML, GeoServer, Google Earth, etc.) going to know what to do with a KML file and the data it references?

Chris Spagnuolo on Social Media...

2008-11-19T10:34:00.002-05:00

Check out developer/geo-blogger Chris Spagnuolo's facts on "The power of social media". Isn't it absolutely facinating how fast a popular article can spread throughout the world wide web? Thanks to Chris for passing along the statistics of one such article!

ERDAS GeoPDF Webinar

2008-11-14T08:27:00.006-05:00

This is just a quick reminder to register for the ERDAS webinar next week entitled, "Create High Quality PDF Maps in ERDAS IMAGINE (Map2PDF for IMAGINE)."

20 November 2008

Do you need to quickly and easily create intelligent maps and images? This webinar introduces Map2PDF for IMAGINE, a new tool that combines TerraGo Technologies’ Map2PDF (now part of TerraGo Publisher Suite) with the power of ERDAS IMAGINE®, the industry’s leading and most complete collection of software tools designed to manipulate, process and understand imagery and vector data. Map2PDF for IMAGINE puts highly advanced maps and images in the hands of soldiers, emergency responders, utility workers, property assessors and others, so they can respond faster, make better decisions and be more productive. With Map2PDF for IMAGINE, you can transform and optimize any map or image into a geo-enabled PDF, also known as a GeoPDF®. Professionals who have limited or no knowledge of complex GIS systems can now access and interact with intelligent maps and images.

Click here to register for this web event...

Integration with Google Earth

2008-11-13T17:24:00.010-05:00

It is often overlooked that a GeoPDF file can be placed on a web server and viewed in a browser. The TerraGo Toolbar also works in this environment which means that you still get all the great functionality in a web browser as you would on the desktop. This includes the coordinate display in MGRS, USNG, UTM, State Plane, etc..., the advanced measurement tools and the GeoTool used to connect the PDF to other applcations.

Integration with Google Earth is easy because once a map book is created from Composer for Acrobat, you may use the KML file that is generated in the process to view your map book contents directly in Google Earth. If your GeoPDF files are stored on a web server, anyone with access can view your data over the web.

To test for yourself, create a map book from your data set and use the KML that is generated from the process to launch Google Earth...

Zoom in to one of your tiles or search for an address and find the closest pushpin to select.

Launch the GeoPDF directly in Google Earth to get the best of both worlds! You get everything Google has to offer as well as all the attribute data from your data set as its stored in the GeoPDF file.

Use the Adobe search capabilites in the GeoPDF file to search for attributes from your own data. To get more information than what you have stored in your file attribute table browse through the Google archive of street view data, traffic, weather, etc...

Finally, extend the GeoPDF interaction with Google Earth with the help of Adobe Live Cycle and GeoJavascript. With these workflow enhancement tools, you are able to add custom context menu options to the GeoTool in the TerraGo toolbar and also enable the file for direct KML support between the file and Google Earth.

Image Interpretation with GeoPDF

2008-11-03T09:27:00.025-05:00

Image interpretation has traditionally been a specialty task within most military organizations. By this I mean that the Analysts would typically go through a specialty school where they are trained on what to look for and more specifically, how to use the software needed to view the remotely sensed data. Some of the more popular applications used for this type of image interpretation are (and certainly not limited to) ERDAS IMAGINE, SOCET GXP, ArcGIS, etc. These are all very powerful image processing applications that are worth their weight in gold but, not everyone who might need to see the data are going to have access to a full-featured desktop application. This is where the GeoPDF comes in handy!!! We are able to stack several images of the same spatial extent on top of each other in a single PDF to show any change that may have occurred at a specific location. Please see the screen shot below which depicts 2 input images that equaled nearly 600 megabytes in their raw form and only 54 megabyte as a GeoPDF.

We are able to capture view state using Adobe Bookmarks which means that the Analyst creating the map could set a Bookmark for a specific date or to zoom to a specific location in the image space.

As you can see from the screen shot below, a Bookmark was created as an area of interest at this particular facility. By selecting this Bookmark, the end user can zoom to the "Submarine Dry Dock" where they can perform further analysis in the GeoPDF file. This can be something as trivial as marking it up as a confirmed area of interest or digitizing the perimeter of the dry dock for export to another system.

Now that we know that certain features in the area have changed, we can mark up the document and export those markups as KML or SHP for exploitation in other applications if need be.

Download the full GeoPDF by clicking here...Select the "Download" icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and as always, make sure you have the TerraGo Toolbar properly installed.

Software used in this example: Map2PDF for Raster and Map2PDF for Acrobat Professional

Free Adobe Flex Training

2008-10-22T15:20:00.005-04:00

I've been seeing a lot of chit chat lately about Adobe Flex so I figured I would point out their free online training class. Click here to access the FreeFlexTraining website. Also, please visit the Adobe Flex page for more information about what Flex is and what a rich internet application (RIA) could offer you. Happy programming!

Map2PDF for IMAGINE

2008-10-21T08:42:00.004-04:00

ERDAS announced today that the ability to export to GeoPDF is now standard in IMAGINE 9.3. Now anyone with this version of IMAGINE can export to GeoPDF from any of its 135 formats as well as from the Map Series tool. With the Map Series tool, the author can use existing templates or create their own to publish their maps with.

This tool is ideal for Defense customers, or any organization that needs to deliver data in a simple, free format that anyone can access. In Adobe Reader, end users can easily view, annotate, access coordinate information.

Click here for the full article...And as always, please download the FREE TerraGo Toolbar to gain access to spatial content in each GeoPDF.

Multiplexing USB GPS Devices

2008-10-15T11:46:00.009-04:00

We all know that the USGS has made its Topographic maps available for free download in the GeoPDF format. Folks out in the field use these maps for a wide variety of different applications and a lot of the time, GPS tracking is involved. The problem that we are seeing is that there are so many flavors of GPS hardware and protocols out there that supporting all of it is tough. We came across a piece of software that helps bridge the gap between several different protocols and your integrated COM port. Check out the Franson GPS Gate product for more information. Could this application help ease the pain of integrating YOUR GPS device in to your workflow?

Mobile for the People

2008-10-14T06:55:00.005-04:00

TerraGo announces the release of its mobile application. Please see the blurb from the TerraGo website and then click on the link to access the white paper.

TerraGo Mobile makes it easy to power-up your remote workers with geospatial information from anywhere.

As geospatial information becomes a part of mainstream business and government decision-making, giving your field workers, partners, and constituents the power to easily view, annotate and configure maps is becoming more and more important.

With TerraGo Mobile, which delivers configurable maps in PDF format to mobile devices, you can provide anyone instant access to detailed maps and images without lengthy, expensive training programs.

And you get the added benefit of having your people capture real-time information in the field that can then be easily imported into your GIS system of record, helping you automate the process of updating maps and systems.

Using common technologies, like Windows Mobile, Adobe Acrobat and Google Earth, TerraGo Mobile powers peer-to-peer collaboration as well as enterprise collaboration with the GIS experts.

Click Here for the white paper page.

First GeoPDF from GeoEye-1

2008-10-09T09:37:00.006-04:00

If you've been on Planet Geospatial lately, you have probably noticed that GeoEye-1 is now releasing data. I found a screen shot on Frank Taylor's Google Earth blog that I figured I could work with without getting arrested so I downloaded the JPEG to my desktop. I dragged and dropped JPEG in to Acrobat and then used the TerraGo Composer to georeference the PDF. Note that all my registration points were collected from Google Earth!

I collected 4 points and defined my map frame and voila...GeoPDF. See the GeoPDF file below.

If you do view this PDF, be sure to check out the bookmarks that show off the areas of interest in this image. Cheers

The New Face of TerraGo

2008-10-08T08:47:00.005-04:00

TerraGo Technologies unleashed its new branding today in celebration of its recent additions to the executive team and release of its latest technology! Check out the updated website for more information on TerraGo's updated product line.

The History of ERDAS

2008-10-06T13:30:00.008-04:00

ERDAS announced today that LPS 9.3 is now available for download. Please read Ryan's list of the new functionality therein...I also came across this pretty interesting YouTube video on the history of ERDAS. Thanks Brad...

UPDATE: Once again, a YouTube video has caused Internet Explorer to crash and once again I have to replace it with a link to the page on their site. Click here to see it...

Gigapan Systems Beta Release

2008-10-03T07:21:00.004-04:00

Gigapan Systems announced today that their beta program is officially underway. For the next 10 weeks, those of you who sign up and get on the beta list will get a discount on the system. Check out this example to see what this technology is capable of. Wow...

Note that you are able to view these panoramas in you local KML viewer (i.e. Google Earth)

UPDATE:

This was too funny not to post...Where is Waldo?

Why Open GeoPDF Now?

2008-09-26T10:20:00.003-04:00

I've been asked here and elsewhere, "what is the link between the submission of GeoPDF to OGC and Adobe's geospatial extensions in Acrobat and Reader 9.0?" There is a link, to be sure, but the primary reason that TerraGo has submitted its legacy georegistration technique to OGC is our customers demanded it. There are terabytes (petabytes?) of GeoPDF files out there that use the technique and they wanted to be confident that their investment was secure. That's quite reasonable by any measure. It would be one thing to just post a specification for the technique, a la ESRI's shape file spec [PDF], but wouldn't carry the imprimatur of a standards organization that our customers demand.

So, where does that leave folks who want to make geospatial PDF files? That depends. If you have PDFs that you want to make geospatial, you can use Acrobat Pro Extended 9.0 (APEX) or Map2PDF for Acrobat installed in some flavor of Acrobat. The benefit of using Map2PDF is that you gain access to the geospatial functionality available in the free GeoPDF Toolbar. This is an important point: GeoPDF is *not* about a georegistration technique -- we'll be using ISO32000 under-the-hood going forward as well as supporting the legacy format. GeoPDF can use either. GeoPDF is all about configuring maps and data to be used by the free Toolbar to actually do something.

If you have ArcGIS 9.3 and the Adobe's functionality is sufficient, you can get ESRI's geospatial PDF extension. If you want to access GeoPDF Toolbar functionality and finer control over the PDF creation process, then you'll need Map2PDF. In principle, you could use ESRI's extension with Map2PDF for Acrobat to create GeoPDF files that use the proposed ISO extensions for georegistration...

For the ambitious, you can get the PDF spec, er purchase ISO 32000, snarf Adobe's proposed extensions to ISO 32000 and roll your own. These could be used by Map2PDF for Acrobat to create GeoPDF files suitable for use by the GeoPDF toolbar, just like files created by APEX, or files created by ESRI 9.3...

The question remains, why didn't we do this sooner? That's a question best answered over a cold beer. Personally, I'm delighted to see georegistration open, published, and free to use in PDF files. It's what I've been working toward for many years, and Adobe and ESRI have vindicated this effort.

Mapping with Mathematica

2008-09-25T19:48:00.003-04:00

I received an unholy ration of *you know what* when I used the words "kurtosis" and "Mathematica" in a mapping context... Um... Analyzing U.S. 2008 Elections with Mathematica, anyone?

TerraGo Submits GeoPDF Spec. to OGC

2008-09-23T17:47:00.003-04:00

From a current press release:

“Today’s announcement further demonstrates our commitment to meeting the needs of our customers who require software solutions that leverage open standards,” said Patrick Graves, chief software architect at TerraGo Technologies. “By opening the GeoPDF specification through the OGC, the large number of maps and images that have been published in GeoPDF format by our customers can now be accessed by the entire geospatial community.”

TerraGo software solutions enable peer-to-peer and enterprise collaboration among non GIS-professionals who need geospatial information to make better decisions, respond faster and be more productive. TerraGo customers can extend map, imagery and attribute data to virtually any user, making geospatial application available via the Web, mobile device or desktop. More than 250,000 users leverage the TerraGo Toolbar, and hundreds of terabytes of data are available in GeoPDF format.

Click Here for more articles...

SpatiaLite 2.2 Release Update

2008-09-17T13:04:00.009-04:00

In light of some recent comments on this blog about the direction TerraGo is heading with its product line, I thought it would only be fitting to announce the latest release of SpatiaLite. I have posted about SpatiaLite before and it was very well received which makes it apparent that this is a highly desirable database technology in our industry.

2.2 is the current stable release supporting:
full UTF-8 SQLite internal data storage and locale charsets for input and output
a GUI tool supporting DB management in an user friendly way
PROJ.4 latest version (4.6.1), this including an updated EPSG dataset
SQLite's latest version (3.6.2) implementing the definitive R*Tree Spatial Index
an alternative Spatial Index implementation using MBR caching
added the new Virtual Table module VirtualText supporting direct SQL access to CSV and TxtTab files

There is a Google Group that has been been created to use for public support and announcements related to this project. You can find this group here and I encourage everyone to participate...

What can this technology do for you? We've seen basic attribute queries in other software applications but imagine taking enterprise-level spatial query capabilities to your desktop in a completely redistributable package (aka. single GeoPDF). Given the nature of the SQLite engine, the data publisher (YOU!) will be able to package multi-source data layers in a single file and then import/export as needed.

Thanks again to Alessandro for continuing development on the SpatiaLite project...

My first Fire Eagle badge!

2008-09-17T08:06:00.006-04:00

I have not messed with Fire Eagle that much since it was officially released a couple months ago so I figured it was my time. In the App Gallery, I decided to go with a website that uses your Yahoo account info to create a badge that can be embedded anywhere on the web...Fire Eagle Badge for more info. When I update my location in Fire Eagle all my FE Apps should update too! How useful is this? How are other folks using this technology?

Update... Fire Eagle Badge does not work in IE so it had to be removed.

Mapping with Adobe PDF Bookmarks (Part 1)

2008-09-15T10:05:00.014-04:00

There are quite a few very useful tasks that can be accomplished using Javascripts in a PDF file but not everyone is familiar with how to go about implementing them. The two most popular ways are:

The folder-level script that will work with any PDF file open on your desktop and
An embedded script that is distributed with each individual PDF file

It is my preference work with the folder-level scripts because they tend to be easier to edit in my favorite text editor (rather than in Adobe's) but if I were going to create a mapping application to send to a wide audience, I would definitely embed my scripts in the the PDF itself. The following example is a script that parses the contents of a form and then updates a database through ODBC. This particular example looks for a web service flag in a form field and if one is not available, it will insert the contents to a SQLite database.

var geo = TGO.PDFPointGetGeo(gti.mapFrame, gti.pdfPoint);

var lAppName = this.getField("app.name").value;
var lAppTask = this.getField("app.task").value;
var lAppLat = this.getField("app.lat").value;
var lAppLong = this.getField("app.long").value;

var lWeb = this.getField("web").value;

if (lWeb == "Yes") // we are submitting via a web server
{
var fieldsToSubmit = new Array ("app.name","app.task","gti.lat","gti.long");
this.submitForm("http://127.0.0.1/jobs.asp#FDF",true,false,fieldsToSubmit);
}
else
{
var con = ADBC.newConnection("fieldform");
var statement = con.newStatement();
var query = "INSERT INTO jobs ( name, task, lat, long) values ('" + lAppName + "','" + lAppTask + "','" + lAppLat + "','" + lAppLong + "');";

statement.execute(query);
}

Keep in mind that this example does use GeoJavascript which is installed with the free TerraGo Toolbar. This allows us to get map information from the GeoPDF file for use in the form...

What about implementing this as a custom Bookmark? Look in the Bookmarks tab in the Acrobat Navigation Panel. Create a new Bookmark and then choose the option to "Run a Javascript".

When you select the "Add" option, you will be prompted to copy and paste your script in to the Adobe Javascript Editor. Select to "Save" the file and then test your changes. You can debug your script by selecting "ctrl J".

This functionality is incredibally useful for working with forms like in this example but you can also use it to send and recieve information to web services like Google Maps and Yahoo. Download the Javascript example GeoPDF from here and test the Bookmarks for yourself. To access Adobe's Guide to Javascripting click here. Happy programming!

Intelligence Operations with LiveCycle and GeoPDF

2008-09-03T16:05:00.002-04:00

Adobe on Intelligence gathering with the GeoPDF...

Department of Defense and Intelligence

Nowhere is the accurate and timely sharing of information more important than within the agencies that run defense and intelligence operations. From military strategic plans to training programs for deployed troops to top secret dossiers on potential threats, information is the cornerstone of citizen protection. With lives literally at stake, these agencies need to collect, analyze, and disseminate information as quickly as possible, while preventing it from falling into the wrong hands.

Bobby Caudill, a solution architect from Adobe, has created an excellent example of how the GeoPDF can be used as part of a powerful intelligence-gathering “GeoApp.” His demo includes several different applications that are just now catching on in the geospatial community. Click here to view Bobby’s short video description of how Adobe applications work in harmony as a stream-lined geospatial mashup. The technology used here is as follows...

GeoPDF
Flex / Flash ( time-line scrubber bar tool & patrol activity report)
Adobe Connect for real-time collaboration
LiveCycle Reader Extension
LiveCycle Rights Management
Flex & Adobe AIR ( Document Search & Report builder )

How do you envision an Adobe/TerraGo solution working in your organization?

Google Chrome (Google's answer to the Web Browser)

2008-09-02T09:43:00.004-04:00

Looks like Google is going to release their own web browser sometime today! Click here for their blog post... Google has also put together a "comic book" explanation of what Chrome is. If you have the time, go through the ~30 pages to learn more.

Twitter and Emergency Response

2008-08-27T18:23:00.007-04:00

I realized today that my mobile carrier (who will forever remain nameless) dropped Twitter as a service regardless of what plan you are under. Naturally this p1$$ed me off enough to Google for a reason as to why this happened. I came across another blog whose main commenter was an official with the Los Angeles Fire Department. After reading his comments I realized that the LAFD uses this social network website to broadcast what is happening in Los Angeles. This means that anyone who goes to the LAFD Twitter page can see what the LAFD "Twitters" are contributing to their network!

Imagine the possibilites with this! With more and more phones and intelligent location services being offered for free, I would think that this would catch on in the main stream for more than just telling your buddies what you are eating for dinner.

Anaglyphic GeoPDF

2008-08-26T16:00:00.007-04:00

Anaglyphs are used to provide a stereoscopic or 3-D effect to an otherwise 2-D display. The idea is to trick the eyes in to thinking that the image is 3-D by offsetting the red and blue/green/cyan bands just enough to cause the depth effect. The result when viewed with special anaglyph glasses is an image that appears to be in 3-D. Download the full file from here.

Use the overview tool in Reader:

These images can be produced out of remote sensing software applications like ERDAS IMAGINE or manually like this and then import to the GeoPDF format so that anyone, anywhere can view them. This is an awesome application for the GeoPDF and I can't wait to hear form the field on how folks are using it.

Remember to use your Red and Blue anaglyph glasses.

Photosynth is finally available!

2008-08-21T08:43:00.005-04:00

Microsoft finally released Photosynth to the general public. This is a long awaited release for this very cool 3-D panorama creation solution. I have fooled around with OpenPhotoVR but did not have the time or patience to get it working properly. Photosynth will "synth" your world for you! Check out the Photosynth gallery to see all the cool scenes already in the archive. Be careful when you create your own...your photos will be publicly available.

Read Photosynth updates on their blog. Well done, Microsoft!

GeoPDF Round-trip

2008-08-20T17:13:00.002-04:00

In previous versions of Map2PDF for ArcGIS there was no way to view the GeoPDF back in ArcGIS. The latest release of this application allows you to do this! We are now able to bring in all the PDF map frames and layers then toggle them on and off just as you would a standard ArcGIS layer. Because it is treated as a standard ArcGIS layer, you can also export the content back out as a GeoPDF. Create GeoPDF --> work with GeoPDF in Reader --> View GeoPDF and annotations back in ArcGIS for further analysis. Sounds kinda like a round trip to me..

The following VBA code is for those hackers out there who already have Map2PDF for ArcGIS version 4.0 and would like to wrap their heads around the GeoPDF View COM Interface. Note that first the “Map2PDF for ArcGIS View” type library must be added to the project from the VBA editor's Tools->Reference command. This Interface will allow the developer to control view state, annotations, scale, etc...

Cheers!

More on Multispectral GeoPDFs

2008-08-19T08:30:00.000-04:00

For more than 3 decades the Landsat program has been collecting data all over the globe. Uses for these data are vast and can include support for modeling of carbon fluxes to the atmosphere, marine protection, and of course terrestrial disaster relief. Check out the application matrix for this sensor...These data can be downloaded very inexpensively and processed in a variety of different ways. Why not export all bands as a completely dynamic GeoPDF? I used the pre-alpha release for Map2PDF for Raster to export all 7 bands from a Landsat scene and then set up the document to display 10 different band combinations on the fly. Let me demonstrate how I did this.

1. I first created the GeoPDF by choosing all the available bands from the input data set. My default display mode is "true color" or band combination 3, 2, 1. This was a 127 meg TIFF file that was exported to a 25 meg GeoPDF! I was actually able to get it down to less than 5 megs but of course there is resolution loss when doing this...

2. Open the Layers tab on the left-hand side of your Acrobat Reader and note how the layers are being handled. We can now adjust the band combinations by assigning a single image band to display as red, green or blue in the PDF space. Each group is treated as a radio button and will allow you to only choose one at a time!

3. Bookmarks are generally considered to be a way to define an action like zooming to a particular location on a certain page in your PDF. That is absolutely true BUT you can also use them to maintain view state, run a script, etc... I used bookmarks to "define" 10 different band combinations in a single PDF. This is the equivalent of viewing 10 different images or changing the view state in an expensive Desktop Remote Sensing application. Note that I was able to add a pretty long description for each band combination to help explain what is actually being displayed. Very cool...

4. Finally, we can utilize all the options on the TerraGo Toolbar in addition to what Adobe has to offer with their core functionality. I find the Pan & Zoom window especially useful as it provides a quick overview of your image.

When I finished working on my GeoPDF, I published it to my free Acrobat.com account so that other folks can use my file. I find that this is the easiest way to disseminate files that are larger than 5 megs. On Acrobat.com, download the file to gain access to everything mentioned above. This website in our geospatial domain is only good for previewing the data not for making use of everything that the GeoPDF has to offer. I also strongly recommend downloading Acrobat Reader 9.0 because of its beefed up rendering speeds and advanced analysis tools.

Map2PDF for Raster is not limited to any one particular sensor type or even input format type...This example is simply another way to get Landsat data to the general public. Enjoy!

Map2PDF Advanced Features

2008-08-11T13:42:00.001-04:00

As per last week's Press Release, the GeoPDF can now be imported back in to ArcGIS! This functionality is in addition to the advanced Export Configuration options and the new global Preference Editor.

Dynamically select which layers are going to be exported and then choose what Feature Attributes are going to be converted in to PDF Object Data.

Configure the Properties for the GeoPDF in ArcGIS for use as a base map for raster data or as an addition to your vector data set. Annotations created in the GeoPDF can also be imported and inspected in ArcGIS.

Refer to an earlier post about how to maintain full resolution for your raster data out of ArcGIS. Additional functionality in this release of Map2PDF for ArcGIS includes preserving hyperlinks, scale dependent rendering and better compression than in previous versions.

Photogrammetry and KML

2008-08-07T09:19:00.005-04:00

Ryan Strynatka over at the Fiducial Mark blog announced today that the latest version of LPS will support a KML export to quickly preview the extents of your block file.

This is the first Photogrammetric application that I have seen to support any kind of KML integration. Pretty cool stuff, Ryan...If you want to view the KML directly in Google Earth, download it from here.

Google 411 Service

2008-08-06T10:34:00.009-04:00

Google 411 is a free service (around since January 2007) that allows anyone, anywhere to call the 1-800 number for an instant connection to a specific business in the Google directory. What is really cool about this is that it will send you access to a Google Map if you choose the "Map it!" option so I assume it's using the exact same directory listings that they use for the entire Google Maps archive. This works out really well for those of us who claim to always know where we are going...I personally still get lost in the city that I have lived in for almost 18 years.

This is especially useful for those of us who still use an old-school cell phone with poor internet access...(1-800-466-4411)

Properly Printing Portable Documents

2008-08-05T17:31:00.010-04:00

Those of you who know and use GeoPDF technology for producing high-quality maps from ArcGIS have probably ended up with low resolution background imagery at some point or another. This happens even though you have 1 foot pixel or better aerial photography that you would otherwise expect to see someone sitting on a park bench. Why is that? ArcGIS uses a print driver to produce PDFs which means that you have to account for dots per inch (DPI) rather than the actual spatial resolution (GSD) of your input data. Hopfully these next few steps will help you produce better GeoPDFs...

In ArcGIS, select File --> Page and Print Setup
Find the total rows and total columns for your input image and divide each by your default DPI. For example, my NAIP image for Cobb County GA is 10000 x 15000 pixels. (10000/300 DPI and 15000/300 DPI) == 33.33 inches x 50 inches.

Save the settings and export your data from Map2PDF for ArcGIS and you will see a GeoPDF that is pretty close to the resolution of your input data set...

SpatiaLite Google Group

2008-08-01T17:53:00.007-04:00

I posted something on SpatiaLite earlier this week and the web traffic specific to this technology has been huge. This made it very apparent that there is a lot of interest (from around the world) for a light weight, multi-platform spatial database engine. After a bit of investigating I came to the conclusion that there is no mailing list or forum group specifically for SpatiaLite so I started one using Google Groups.

http://groups.google.com/group/spatialite-users

Hopefully this will spark more community response to this cool database technology! I would love to see it become more popular and maybe even as a rudimentary exchange format for vector data????

SpatiaLite: An Alternative Spatial Database

2008-07-28T10:02:00.008-04:00

We all know about ESRI's Personal GeoDatabase (MS Access), Refraction's PostGIS, Oracle Spatial, etc... but how many folks are familiar with SpatiaLite? SpatiaLite is the spatial extension to SQLite and after a few initial rounds of testing, I think we have a decent light-weight alternative to the bigger players in the spatial DB game.

First off, what is SQLite?

SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine.

SQLite is the most widely deployed SQL database engine in the world. It is used in countless desktop computer applications as well as consumer electronic devices including cellphones, PDAs, and MP3 players. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain.

This means that the SQLite engine is deployed in more computing environments than any other database technology in the world.

Alessandro Furieri, the author of SpatiaLite and VirtualShape, created these extensions knowing this! Good job Alessandro!

The latest release of SQLite will include better R-Tree indexing and a wide variety of other enhancements that conform to the OpenGIS Standard for Spatial Data Processing. See below for the SpatiaLite 2.1 Quick Intro.

SQLite is a popular DBMS, simple, robust, easy to use and really lightweight
each SQLite database is simply a file; you can freely copy it, compress it, send it on a LAN or WEB with no complication at all
They are also portables; the same database file will work on Windows, Linux, MacOs etc
the SpatiaLite extension enables SQLite to support spatial data too [aka GEOMETRY], in a way conformant to OpenGis specifications
- supports standard WKT and WKB formats
- implements SQL spatial functions such as AsText(), GeomFromText(), Area(), PointN() and alike
- the complete set of OpenGis functions is supported via GEOS, this comprehending sophisticated spatial analysis functions such as Overlaps(), Touches(), Contains() and so on
- supports full Spatial metadata along the OpenGis specifications
- supports importing and exporting from / to shapefiles
- supports coordinate reprojection via PROJ.4 and EPSG geodetic parameters dataset
- supports locale charsets via GNU libiconv
- implements a true Spatial Index based on the still experimental SQLite's RTree extension
the VirtualShape extension enables SQLite to access shapefiles as VIRTUAL TABLEs
- you can then perform standard SQL queries on external shapefiles, with no need for importing or converting them
the GUI tool supports all this, in an user friendly way

How to get started with SQLiteGeo (SpatiaLite, VirtualShape, and SQLite3 combo):

First, try downloading SQLiteGeo. Simply download the ZIP file or Linux Version and extract it anywhere on your local file system.
Follow the tutorial to import, index, and analyze your data.

Version 2.1 GUI Tool:

There is also a GUI tool that will keep you from having to go through the command line. Click Here for all available options!
Download the Windows version here and the Linux version here. Extract the files to your local system and go! There is no installation...

Also, try the SQLite ODBC Driver. I have been able to import/export data through Access and Excel without very many problems.

I'm certain that there are a wide variety of uses for this self contained, file-based, spatial database technology so please feel free to comment on any interaction you may have had with it.

Multi-band Raster GeoPDFs

2008-07-23T15:29:00.005-04:00

Over the past few months, the raster team has been working hard to iron out the plans for the next generation of Map2PDF for Raster. There have been many interesting developments that have come out of it like adding the ability to query for and display more than just 3 bands of base data at a time. I posted an article about creating a GeoPDF out of AVIRIS data with 224 bands and got mixed reviews as to why this would be useful. The problem was with the way we used Adobe's blend modes when interactively turning visual bands on and off in Adobe Reader. There are quite a few blend modes to choose from and most of them are not applicable to the world of GIS and Remote Sensing! It's ok though as we have found a couple methods that work and are actually pretty useful.

Difference: Subtracts the darker of the two constituent colors from the lighter color (which is the background for the PDF).
Exclusion: Produces an effect similar to that of Difference mode but lower in contrast.

In previous examples, I used blend modes that completely covered the base map data with other bands of sensor data. The Hyperspectral example was ultimately botched because of this. Well...that and we were not stretching the histogram for each band added after the RGB base map.

The graphic that you see below represents a very small QuickBird scene with an IR band that is displayed as Band 4 in the Layers Tab. Open the PDF and click on the Layers Tab to see how blending modes are implemented in the PDF space. This PDF was created with low image quality to save space!

Download the GeoPDF Toolbar to gain access to all the spatial information!

Enjoy!

Gigapan and Global Connection

2008-07-21T10:01:00.005-04:00

Gigapan is an interesting project to say the least and it looks like the Global Connection Project is making full use of the technology. Commercial Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that creates these panoramas that (starting in August) can be uploaded and compiled for free! They also mention that this will be released as an open source project which is cool too...
Check out the impressive list of folks contributing to the Global Connection Project. I always end up coming back to FlashEarth.com which was developed by Paul Neave who is also noted as a team member for the Global Connection Project. The Gigapan viewer is a flash app that I suspect Paul had a lot to do with. Because this is a Flash viewer, we can take it to the web as well as to the desk top through applications like Acrobat 9.0 and Google Earth.

Pretty soon, we will not have to leave the house for vacation!!! We will be able to visit anywhere on earth via a Google application.

ERDAS Image Web Server

2008-07-17T08:59:00.008-04:00

Do you own large amounts of raster data? The ERDAS Image Web Server is a COTS solution that easily allows your organization to quickly integrate raster data in to your GIS. ESRI has a similar solution in the ArcGIS Image Server but wouldn't it be more adventageous to manage your raster data through a product whos main focus is the speedy delivery of large volumes of raster data? There are pros and cons to both products I'm sure...for example, both applications provide a way to extend the core functionality. ESRI gives you an API (more than likely through ArcObject programming) while ERDAS gives you the Image Integration Framework. I would be really interested to see a side by side comparison for both!!! NOTE: Leica (now ERDAS) acquired ERMapper last year.

vs.

GeoEye-1 Launch Announcement

2008-07-11T09:18:00.005-04:00

GeoEye-1 is set to launch on August 22, 2008 and it looks like this satellite is going to surpass the imaging capabilities of IKONOS and QuickBird. We on the commercial side will get half meter resolution while the DoD folks get about 16 inches with a return time of <3 days. It will also collect in three camera modes, panchromatic only, multispectral, and then simultanious panchromatic and multispectral (pan-sharpened). It looks like it will also collect in stereo...

Hopefully, data on the commercial side will be affordable or at least help to drive its competitors to lower their prices! Visit the GeoEye website for more details...

On GeoPDF

2008-07-10T11:56:00.003-04:00

GeoPDF is, always has been, and always will be PDF. It has its roots in publishing utility drawings in different to utilities operations and maintenance field workers to PDF file sets augmented with feature data and convenient navigational features derived from different databases and other data stores. In order to place things like hyperlinks to detail drawings on a map, we had to derive the relationship between the real world location of some item of plant and the corresponding location on the PDF page.

Once this association can be made, it's relatively straight forward to generalize it. There a bunch of ways to skin that cat, we chose a georegistration technique that relates the PDF coordinate system to a projected coordinate system similar to the way it's done in GeoTIFF. Just as GeoTIFF uses TIFF constructs to embed georegistration metadata, GeoPDF uses PDF constructs to embed georegistration metadata. Emacs and a GeoPDF file reveals all. Just as GeoTIFF *is* TIFF, GeoPDF *is* PDF.

Our georegistration technique was designed for internal use and compatibility with internally-developed tools and libraries -- not with standardization in mind. As things happen, our customers liked the tools we made for our projects and the powers-that-be declared we'd be commercializing our tool set.

GeoPDF remained proprietary for pragmatic reasons -- it wasn't praticable for standardization and we didn't have the bandwidth to drive the standardization process. Moreover, it's obvious to anyone in the space -- including us! ;) -- that the days of proprietary formats have passed and at some point a well-documented standard would be promulgated. Although the PDF specification is now "owned" by ISO as ISO 32000, Adobe is still the primary shepherd of PDF, and has promulgated an open 2.0 version of our georegistration technique. Adobe is the right company to drive the standardization process -- not TerraGo -- but we're going to help in any way we can. They've done a great job with it and have done some clever things and I'll review the technique in detail when I get back from floating down the Green River in a couple of weeks. We are ecstatic that Adobe has validated our vision of ubiquitous access to geospatial information with their extensions to ISO 32000 and are working hard on having all of our products support it. Moreover, we are thrilled that ESRI has validated in the marketplace what we've been saying all along -- people other than GIS users need access to geospatial information.

Georegistration is enabling technology -- not an end in itself. Adobe is providing a platform for the development of geospatial applications on top of their technology. We've been building such "GeoApps" for almost a decade and working closely and collaboratively with Adobe [PDF] for a long time.

To get overly hung up on GeoPDF as some sort of file format is to miss what it's all about: letting professionals who don't grok GIS use geospatial information effortlessly to get their jobs done. If people don't know that they're using geospatial information on their way to making the right decision then we're doing our job.

TerraGo + Adobe = GeoPDF

2008-07-07T08:24:00.008-04:00

TerraGo Technologies and Adobe announce their partnership today! The following is directly from the press release...

TerraGo Technologies Announces Geospatial Alliance Agreement with Adobe ATLANTA, GA – July 7, 2008 – TerraGo® Technologies, the visionary provider of tools, technology and know-how for building collaborative geospatial applications (GeoApps), announced today that it has signed an Alliance Agreement with Adobe Systems Incorporated. As part of the agreement, Adobe will provide support for TerraGo’s GeoPDF® in the new Adobe Acrobat® 9 software. In addition, TerraGo will fully support consumption of geo-enabled PDF files from Adobe and other vendors, allowing customers to easily build and deliver GeoApps for use by anyone, anywhere, regardless of data format or application source. “Our expanded relationship comes at an exciting time when the demand for geo-enabled PDFs and GeoApps is increasing significantly,” said Richard M. Cobb, president and CEO of TerraGo Technologies. “In working with a global leader such as Adobe, who provides the best platform for geospatial documents, we are confident customers will benefit greatly through the development of innovative new geospatial tools and technology. This alliance further demonstrates TerraGo’s commitment to providing collaborative solutions that meet the unique needs of geospatial data users who are often not GIS experts.”

“As long-time developers of solutions on the Acrobat platform, TerraGo has for several years delivered value to customers who need to consume geospatially-enabled documents in a widely available format,” said Rick Brown, director of Acrobat product management, Business Productivity Business Unit, Adobe. “With support for consuming GIS attributes in PDF now natively available in Acrobat 9 and Adobe Reader 9, TerraGo’s solutions will be even more broadly accessed by existing and new customers alike.”

TerraGo, now a Gold Level Adobe Partner and Adobe LiveCycle™ reseller, expects to further expand its geospatially enabled offerings through close integration with the rich capabilities of the LiveCycle suite of server products.

Click here for full details...

Acrobat Reader 9.0 Released!

2008-07-02T12:12:00.005-04:00

Install the latest and greatest Acrobat Reader today! To view the feature comparison chart click here.

This marks the beginning of some really innovative mapping technology! More to come...

Google Earth it!

2008-06-30T15:08:00.010-04:00

Using GeoJavascript, you can very easily collect a pair of coordinates and launch Google Earth to view the location. This is in addition to the functionality that is already in place called, "Google Map it!". Here's what you do...

1. Create a folder-level .js file in your ACROBAT_INSTALL/JavaScripts folder and copy the following code in to it. Download the file from here.

2. Open up your GeoPDF file and select the GeoTool, then right-click and select the TerraGo context menu.
3. Choose the newly created Google Earth it! option.

If the stars are aligned properly, Google Earth should open and it should zoom to the location you had selected with the GeoTool.

** Please note, if Google Earth is not your default 'KML' viewer on your Windows system, it will open the app that is associated with 'KML' files.

Please refer to this earlier article with more information on how to do this and thanks again to JB Freels for putting all this together. There is a LOT of cool stuff we can do with GeoJavascript. More to come!

Choosing a GIS that is right for you (Part 2)

2008-06-27T15:09:00.011-04:00

This April I posted something entitled, "Choosing a GIS that is right for you". I would think that most advanced GIS users out there would agree that a GIS is all about finding a solution to a problem. Each vertical market has a similar problem they are trying to solve, which is basically, "how can I get my spatial information in to the hands of those who need it?" For example:

DoD/Intel - The DOD/Intel community has a tremendous amount of spatial data that is needed to support the wartime effort, OR a Homeland Security initiative that effects millions of people. How do they get this data distributed to the field? A web application? A specific file format?
Utilities - Utilities is a generalized category that includes Electric, Gas Distribution, Oil/Gas Pipeline, Telecom and Water Management. Utilities have tons of geospatial data especially the pipeline operators who have thousands of miles of pipe...how do they maintain all their data? The more data to work with, the more sophisticated the GIS requirement. If there is a gas leak in a residential area, how can the operator get the GIS data out in to the hands of those who need it?
Public Sector (State and Local Government) - As your local road network changes and as population increases, so does the landscape. This leads to tons and tons of updated spatial information...A good example of this here in Atlanta is the 14th street Bridge in Midtown. It is completely torn down for the next year and someone now has to update the road network in the Fulton County GIS.

These are the types of GIS-related scenarios that we as geographers concern ourselves with every day. What is the best all-encompassing solution? Is there one? Even if you buy a great big COTS GIS application, chances are that you will still need to buy plug-ins and extentions or create some kind of custom code to make it do exactly what you want it to. Take your accounting system for example...SAP and a GIS marry together perfectly, but it is a royal pain in the a$$ to make it work correctly! There is nothing more valuable than a man/hour and it takes quite a few of those to get to this kind of solution.

The USGS did a great job recently with getting their Topographic maps out online in an EASY and understandable search mechanism, and it just so happens that they were all converted to GeoPDF files which means that ANYONE with Adobe Acrobat Reader can view them. As I mentioned earlier, you must download the GeoPDF Toolbar in order to view the geospatial information. I would really encourage everyone to browse to the USGS Store and download a couple GeoPDF files just to try it out! They are 100% free to download and free to view!

If you want instant access to all the spatial data as well as GPS support, markups, KML/SHP integration, etc...please download the GeoPDF Toolbar from the link below.

Thanks to all of you who provided feedback at SpatiallyAdjusted.com! I enjoy reading everyones comments and I completely understand that TerraGo feeback is due. All I can say is there are a lot of things to look forward to in the near future! Cheers...

Quick Interactive Flash Map!

2008-06-26T10:57:00.009-04:00

I have been experimenting with FLEX and MXML and have come up with a pretty quick way to compile an Actionscript or other javascript to be placed in any website or blog.

Download the FLEX SDK
Create your MXML File. I copied some code from the Yahoo Maps! website and pasted it in to the CDATA tags in my MXML file. Don't forget to download the swc file from Yahoo to link against in your build!
Compile your SWF and plug it in to a website or PDF (Now available with Acrobat 9.0). To learn more about compiling the code, check out this link.

Now that I have my swf file, I can plug this in to a website or blog, I can embed it in to a document to use as a quick reference, or convert it to an AIR app and deploy it to run on my desktop. All of this was done in less than 10 minutes!

Hyperspectral GeoPDF

2008-06-23T16:14:00.007-04:00

Hyperspectral Imagery has been an interest of mine for some time now and I think I've found a pretty good way to display it in a map. I used Map2PDF for Raster and quickly added the first 54 bands (out of 224). I assigned each band an arbitrary color of my choosing for this example but a more qualified Remote Sensing Scientist could assign any color they want to as many bands as they want. There is NO LIMIT on the amount of bands a user can display. This image is NOT geo-referenced so please don't look for any spatial information in there but I would encourage you to download the data from here or from the Menu option in this flash viewer.

Again, this is AVIRIS data that I quickly converted to GeoPDF and uploaded to Acrobat.com so that anyone can download and view it. When you do download the entire file, open the Layers tab to gain access to all 54 bands. I think a qualified eye will be able to see the possibilities with this one! Enjoy...

Why GeoPDF?

2008-06-20T08:16:00.012-04:00

The question "Why GeoPDF?" has come up a lot lately primarily because Adobe released their GeoSpatial PDF format. I would like to share what I know about this format and possibly clear the air about the question at hand...

What is GeoPDF? GeoPDF is a geospatial extension to the Adobe PDF file format, from TerraGo Technologies. It is used to present GIS and mapping data in a standard Adobe Systems PDF. This extension adds a coordinate transformation matrix and other metadata to allow transformation of PDF coordinates to a projected Cartesian coordinate system. GeoPDFs often include other advanced PDF features such as layers and object data which can add significant GIS functionality to the file, particularly when used with the TerraGo Technologies plugin to Adobe Reader.

GeoPDF is still a PDF which means that ANYONE with Adobe Acrobat Reader can view your map data (look in the link to see that whoever added the Adobe Acrobat definition in Wikipedia, chose to display a graphic of a map!). It's true that you must download the GeoPDF Toolbar to gain access to the GIS functionality but wouldn't you expect to do this in most applications to access the intended functionality? I often write about Google Earth, Photosynth, and a variety of other GIS/Visualization Tools all of which require a download of some kind! A key benefit of the GeoPDF Toolbar is that you get GPS Tracking functionality.

What information can I include in my GeoPDF? There is quite a bit of data that can be added! For example, let's say that I am using Map2PDF for ArcGIS and in my map layout I have a raster image as a background, a shapefile for my streets data, an ArcSDE layer for parcel data and finally I create custom symbology and labels for each layer. I can export each one of these features to GeoPDF (with hyperlinks and annotations) in a separate layer in the final map. How is attribute data maintained? The GeoPDF export creates the equivalent for attribute data which is called Object Data. By creating object data in your output map, which is optional by the way, you can search for all the attribute data just as if it were in its original form in ArcGIS. With the ability to Zoom To a selected feature, you have a pretty powerful geo-search tool.

Map2PDF for Acrobat add-ons included GeoMark tools that allow users to add shapes and standard or custom stamps with comments. MapAssembler lets users combine maps and grids to create Map Books. Map2PDF for Acrobat lets users turn any PDF-based map into a georegistered map - a GeoPDF file - simply by entering two coordinates. But, there's much more to Map2PDF for Acrobat than that.

Map Book, Map Book, Map Book!!! What the heck is a Map Book? A Map Book is a a set of GeoPDFs that are indexed together to create a seamless interaction between the end user and the data. Check out the Map Book that I posted earlier this year! I called it Fun with Hyperlinked Data. I did go a little overboard with the Lightbox2 javascript but it does a great job in helping to tell the story! In a Map Book series, there is also the ability to search for features stored in an external database and create custom functionality through GeoJavascript.

Map2PDF for Raster: I have seen 6 gigabytes of raster data compressed down to a 400 megabyte GeoPDF. Wow! That is an impressive compression ratio! I mentioned earlier that we can create layered PDFs which means that with our raster data, we can see a base layer as an RGB image but then we can add additional bands to be turned on and off as needed. For Landsat ETM+ data we can create a base map with bands 1, 2 and 3 then add additional bands and assign a particular color to each one. Because they are treated as seperate layers, you have the ability to turn them on and off dynamically. Imagine what you can do with low-resolution multispectral data like AVHRR? MODIS/ASTER? Click here to download some example data.

Things to look forward to: Mobile apps, Enhanced GeoJavascript, Advanced GPS Track Manager, leveraging Acrobat 9.0 functionality like Adobe AIR and much more...

Geocode with Flash

2008-06-12T08:21:00.005-04:00

A good mapping application was sent to me this morning and I had to post it! Click here to read the full article entitled "Learn how to geocode with Papervision3D and Adobe Flash". This is a really good and apparently easy way to create a quick and useable mashup that can be deployed on any platform. I look forward to seeing many more quick mapping solutions like this one!

Like Finding Nemo? Check out the Papervision3D website to see what they have done with their ocean scene...VERY cool! Could we view VRML in this environment?

AIR (Adobe Integration Runtime)

2008-06-11T08:47:00.006-04:00

What exactly is AIR?

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, Ajax, Flash, and Flex to deploy RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) to the desktop. AIR applications are available virtually anywhere at any time, providing convenient desktop capabilities and working with local or server data. They are developed using modern, efficient programming methods.

Adobe AIR allows developers to use familiar tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver, Flex Builder, Flash CS3 Professional, and even Notepad to build their applications. Applications built for AIR are deployed with a single application installer that works across multiple operating systems. These applications work with Adobe's servers and services to deliver rich experiences on the desktop. Click on the icon below to install AIR.

There are SDK's available too!

Flex SDK~
AIR SDK~

What does this mean to GeoSpatial Developers? It means that we take our GeoPDF's and create dynamic mapping applications that everyone can access and use. Adobe has also started allowing folks to store their data at Acrobat.com which is REALLY cool!!! 5 gigs of free storage space for starters! Click here to see a previous post that highlights this functionality.

Integration through GeoJavascript

2008-06-10T09:23:00.006-04:00

There is a little known piece of technology that TerraGo created a few years ago called GeoJavascript. This javascript API extends the functionality of Adobe's client-side scripting API to work with the GeoPDF. There are several methods that are currently supported which will allow the end user to get coordinate information, zoom to a specific location, draw routes, connect to a database through ODBC, etc...I will include the full list at the end of this post.

I took the opportunity to post an example GeoPDF with GeoJavascript to my account at acrobat.com. This has proven to be an excellent way to disseminate this map of the Atlanta area. Please download the map from this Flash plug-in and open the bookmark section to gain access to all the pre-defined functionality.

Select the "Menu" option in at the top of the embedded viewer and download the full GeoPDF. The full user guide for GeoJavascript can be found by clicking here!