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Open Standard - OpenGIS.org (Open Geospatial Consortium - OGC) (will redirect to the PDF version of the Web Feature Service (WFS) specification for GeoSpatial services).

Customer desires open standard compliant projects where economically feasible.

Customer desires Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) products with minimal integration code.

Customer uses ESRI's ArcGIS product as the predominant geospatial application. (NOTE: ESRI is essentially the Microsoft of the Geographic Information System market.)

ESRI does not "fully" support OGC. Their data/service formats are pretty much the industry standard but are not totally "open".

Complying with the WFS standard through a COTS product adds a minimum cost of $50,000 USD to the project.

Free or Open Source alternatives were not mature enough to consider
While generally I agree that open standard is the right way to go, one must consider all factors.

FYI - My employer is a business partner to ESRI and we frequently request that they impliment their software to support the OGC standards from both a server and a client side (they currently impliment most of the client side but very little on the server side).

At least one part of this encoding method - converting floating-point to non-negative integers - looks like prior art.
For instance, ESRI does this for their spatial database (SDE):
URL is here.

And most likely it was known even before...

Why is this map any more controversial than any other network map?

I'm sure this isn't the only Geospatial vendor but ESRI pretty much makes their software, technical support and data free to agencies supporting disasters. For the Indian Ocean disaster, check out this link.

I'm sure this isn't the only Geospatial vendor but ESRI pretty much makes their software, technical support and data free to agencies supporting disasters. For the Indian Ocean disaster, check out this link.

of downstate Illinois is actually Red. Cook county from which "Hot" Rod Blago is a Democratic Machine product, does not represent in any meaningful way, the rest of the state. Yes, there are some isolated "Blue" areas around the University towns and the St. Louis Metro East, but look at the map below. See this article in the Chicago Sun Times. See also the 3-D map.

Blagojevich's main interest here appears be to position himself for national office. He ran on a platform of "It won't be business as usual." He was right. It's worse! Downstate state workers are being laid off while others are being hired in Chicago. Family and friends make up a large proportion of the higher paying jobs and appointments being handed out. It's a blatant power grab by the "Chicago Democratic Machine". The mayor's office in the capital, Springfield, was won by a Democrat with a large war chest provided by Chicago interests. And so it goes.

"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

Perhaps if they were using the New York City Base Map (see this for an overview or this site for a commercial product) then what they were doing would seem a bit more believable.

Perhaps the exit polling sucked balls? Perhaps the numbers they were showing were not correct and they updated them with the correct data? Perhaps the early voters were Democrats and the later voters were Republican.

Well, from the 3d election results:

http://www.esri.com/industries/elections/graphics/ results2004_lg.jpg

It looks like most of the areas who voted for Kerry were in urban areas. Now, if the exit polls were conducted in mostly urban areas you can see how the results would be biased in favor of Kerry.

Just so you know, slashcode puts that space in there for long entries - any (long) url will get one.

It's not your fault, in other words (but it would have been nice if you'd just included a link).

Also, check out a population weighted map, as opposed to just land area. Land area doesn't vote, people do.

It is stated on the ESRI GIS for Elections website:
ArcGIS desktop was used to display up-to-the-minute results while ArcGIS Engine supported the generation of hundreds of maps each hour on election night.

That first link also has a view map animation link that shows a bunch of the other maps created and used during the TV coverage.

It is stated on the ESRI GIS for Elections website:
ArcGIS desktop was used to display up-to-the-minute results while ArcGIS Engine supported the generation of hundreds of maps each hour on election night.

That first link also has a view map animation link that shows a bunch of the other maps created and used during the TV coverage.

It is stated on the ESRI GIS for Elections website:
ArcGIS desktop was used to display up-to-the-minute results while ArcGIS Engine supported the generation of hundreds of maps each hour on election night.

That first link also has a view map animation link that shows a bunch of the other maps created and used during the TV coverage.

How to understand the presidential election results.

If you haven't read any books about U.S. politics, then you probably don't know much about the activities of the U.S. government.

You cannot rely for information on TV or newspapers, or any advertising-supported media. Advertising-supported media exists to make money, not to inform. Advertisers are understandably careful not to alienate anyone. It is not possible to develop an accurate opinion of government activities only by listening to the carefully crafted phrases from media employees who would lose their jobs if they seemed to indicate a preference for one candidate over another.

It's a fact that Bush supporters often have a poor understanding of his actions rather than what he wants people to believe. One example of support for this is the following article: Bush Supporters Misread Many of His Foreign Policy Positions.

The U.S. government is corrupted by extreme conflict of interest. Please don't moderate this down just because you disagree. I can support my position with links to 3 movies and 35 books: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

For a quicker overview, see this article: 100 Facts and 1 Opinion -- The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration.

The county-by-county results showing not only who won, but the number, are extremely interesting. So is the USA Today result map. They show what might be expected. Those who live in rural counties vote for Bush. In the past century, the more intelligent, educated, and ambitious people have migrated away from the farms to places with more opportunities. The less educated have stayed behind. Those who live in rural counties are less likely to read, and therefore are not well-informed.

Those who don't read are fooled by Karl Rove's lies. Here are books about Karl Rove's methods:

Boy Genius: Karl Rove, The brains behind the remarkable political triumph of George W. Bush by Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, and Carl M. Cannon, 2003, PublicAffairs. Reviews: Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon

Part of the secret of Karl Rove's success is that U.S. voters don't want to believe there is widespread corruption in their government. Lies that are extreme and unrelenting enough are accepted.

President George W. Bush has a habit of giving disrespectful nicknames to those with whom he works. "Boy Genius" is one of Mr. Bush's nicknames for Karl Rove. Mr. Bush also calls Karl Rove, "Turd Blossom". The term refers to a flower that grows in the feces of a cow.

Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove made George W. Bush presidential by James Moore and Wayne Slater, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, New York, New York, USA. Reviews: Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon

One of the Amazon reviews quotes the book: "Karl Rove matters to all Americans, many who have never even heard his name. While the president chafes at the description of Rove as 'Bush's Brain,' he can hardly deny that every policy

Even on the site that the image is linked from, it doesn't say what the heights represent.

I saw another poster suggest population, but that doesn't make sense because so much is flat.

I submit that it is based upon the sway of the vote. The higher the plateau, the farther away from 50% split the vote was, and the color indicates the higher sway of votes. It also explains the higher blue plateaus in the coastal/liberal areas.

FWIW, I don't appear on that map; I voted for Badnarik

From an urban-planning geek's perspective, it's one of the coolest local sites I know of. But serving 300,000 a month with what I assume to be an intensive GIS application can't be cheap.

UMN Mapserver
+ GRASS GIS
+ FreeGIS tools

The equivalent ArcWeb system ain't cheap. Like several county employees' salaries uncheap.

I tried to look at their GIS site to see what they were using, and got this error:
(Firefox on Debian/G/Linux)

http://www.maricopa.gov/Assessor/Error.aspx?type =b rowser
"This site is best viewed when using Internet Explorer.
Your using: Netscape5"
[not proceeding]

.. I'm guessing they are not using Free software.

Bonus chuckle [non-county residents only]:
Spot the apostrophe disaster in the error message.

ArcGIS is written in C++. ArcGIS Engine and Server will run on various flavors of Unix/Linux. See here.

ArcGIS runs in windows, linux, AIX, HP-UX and solaris. There's some functionality difference in ArcView once you enter the *nix/UNIX world, but it does exist.

check it out

It seems they might have changed things in version 9, but i'm not totally sure. Either way, i don't like the product.

Here are the two places where I get all my map data:

Bureau of transportation statistics. Detailed data, but only down to the highway/interstate level, no residential roads.(Shapefile format)
Tiger/Line data converted into shapefiles for easy use. Down to the residential street level, very detailed!

good source of information, but doesn't come with maps.

Best place i have found maps is:

1) Tiger data (If you read the infosets long enough you can begin to undersdtand them)

2) Shapefiles from ESRI(These shapefiles were generated from Tiger data)

The software i prefer to use is Tiger Map Server The author of this software has also figured out a way to convert tiger data into his own shapefiles due to ESRI's license.

Best of luck!

Sorry for preaching about GIS. My main argument is that if you want to get your data to the masses, you publish it in a format that the masses can read. GIS data isn't generally the type of data that most people would be interested and the software development reflects that by being a higher cost. GIS software, namely the main stream market leaders, is quite expensive due to the fact that development cost is spread over a smaller number of sales.

ESRI certainly has it's foot in the door of most agencies that are interested in producing geographic datasets, but they aren't the only ones. Intergraph, another major GIS vendor (I forget which position they are in for sales/installations), competes hard with ESRI to sell their software and also practices the same strategies of encouraging their format. Intergraphs GeoMedia software (maybe it was a different name before) started out on their own proprietery hardware called Clipper workstations which NIMA (NGA now) was locked into at one point. The parts all came from Intergraph and they controlled the pricing and had all sorts of political push from the representatives in Alabama .

Until recently (say the last 5 years or so), the computing power to work with these national datasets was limited to a small community of agencies/companies. Consider the data format that an agency chooses to be akin to distributing a document as either MS Word format or Adobe PDF. If an agency provides the data, it has to be in some format and they typically choose one that reaches the broadest audience. That being said, there are organizations like Open GIS Consortium that are working to create open standards so that the smaller GIS vendors and the not so traditional GIS vendors can have access to data once reserved for the more powerful systems. A company called Ionic produces an application called Red Spider (NOTE: This software is very very expensive. We evaluated it and found while it impliments most Open GIS Consortium "OGC" specifications, we could never pass the cost on to our customers.) that allows for "Web Feature Service" or "WFS". An open source project that is attempting to impliment these specifications, and certainly not the only one, is GeoTools, but they are slow in development and not mature enough at this point for commercial deployments. WFS allows applications to request geographic data similar to other web service applications. Part of the problem with these open standards though is getting people to buy into them. Obviously vendors like ESRI, Intergraph, Microstation, etc... have lesser interest in promoting the open standards over their own product standards, but they are starting to do it.

As far as restrictions on the datasets, I'm not entirely sure I follow you on that. The datasets are generally available for free (sometimes export controlled, but still free) and free viewers do exist. Granted that the free viewers are not always the best product for "high end" analysis, but they do at minimum allow for data viewing. One such tool from ESRI is called ArcExplorer (This link provides the location to download the viewer and an Interoperatability Extension) that is available for various platforms (MS Win32, Linux, UNIX, Mac) as it's Java based.

I know there are other open source GIS analysis applications, but I haven't used them as my employers have had the ability to purchase the high end commercial software. If I recall correctly, a copy of the ArcView software was less than $1000 a couple years ago and the software was available on UNIX (Sun, SGI, and a few others) and MS Win32 systems (sorry, no Linux version that I'm aware of).

I think I jumped around a bit on my above ramble so please forgive. I am coding/compiling and writing in between things. I guess I'm not sure if your disappointed a

"Because geoprocessing often involves processing many datasets or datasets with many records, geoprocessing tasks typically are repetitive and good candidates for automation. Any scripting language with a COM interpreter, such as Python, JScript, or VBScript, can be used to write scripts that execute ArcGIS Desktop 9 geoprocessing tools and automate tasks. Because these scripting languages are not proprietary, many resources for learning them are available." Source
__________________
working & blogging from nigeria

I'm developing a large ArcObjects-based extension to ArcGIS -- version 9. We're using C#, which, though it ain't python, isn't a bad language either.

Trust me on this: No language will make ArcGIS fun, or even marginally handy. That application is the worlds' largest heap of disgusting bloat, and it is buggier than hell. Have a look at the object diagrams (warning: 10Mb PDF, not that I feel any guilt about slashdotting ESRI) and see for yourself...

Avenue was a joy by comparison, although it was extremely limited. Probably _because_ it was extremely limited; it was also extremely clean.

Bottom line: if you use ArcGIS, expect to go spend 50% of your development time cursing ESRI and smashing your forehead on your keyboard: adjust your schedule accordingly.

What is the purpose of creating 3d terrain maps? What type of textures or data do you want to overlay? Is there any economic value to your project? Do you want to be able to do a virtual walkthrough, or just generate static images?

If you are trying to program a flight simulator, your needs are totally different than if you were trying to do mapping or GIS analysis. Also, you could just be trying to make a pretty picture.

Pretty picture:
Use terragen (as mentioned by previous poster)

Mapping/GIS analysis of geospatial data:
ArcView (not cheap)

Architectural rendering:
Lightwave (not cheap) or RapidSite 3d (not sure if they are still making this one)

Goofing around with flight sim:
some game engine

You might want to take a look at this site:
Vterrain is a pretty cool place to get started. The community is pretty helpful - some French dude who programs flight sims gave me some pointers in developing a commercial 3d mapping application.

Finally, if you need a source for terrain maps, check out the USGS's National Elevation Dataset (NED). This is the best thing since sliced bread in the GIS community.

Good luck...

First off, I don't want to see the data pulled/restricted.

The issue isn't necesarily just the geolocation of specific buildings. Consider features that may not be visible above ground and features that represent a generalization (i.e. population densities/make-up, religious data (might be interesting to locate islamic dense areas), etc...). Part of the problem with the availability of data is that it allows analysis to be done remotely. Picture a workstation with a GIS application (see ESRI's website for applications and various GIS papers), public datasets, and a determined analyst. The analyst can provide "ideal" targets based on various criteria.

My problem with limiting the data is that once it was available, you really can't pull it as people can find it cached off somewhere. Even though it may make getting the data easier for terrorist, it wouldn't make it impossible. All removing would do is make the general population have to work harder to find the data too.

Looks like there are not many GIS geeks in the /. Overlaying a GPS tracking on a map is routine work for many applications look this links, ESRI
ERDAS

I'm runnning dual xeon (2.66) on XP to do some pretty serious image processing stuff, and the performance is pretty good. All my bottlenecks are a result of crappy GIS software.

I'd love to work with others on this. I have tons of ideas relating to it.

-cp-

Phase II requires more precise location information be provided to the PSAP. Phase II requires the wireless service provider to provide the call back telephone number of the 9-1-1 caller, cell tower location, cell sector (antenna orientation) information, plus longitude and latitude (X, Y) information. Phase II E9-1-1 services exist today in a handful of locations, by a few wireless service providers, but these numbers will grow.

It is more significant to know the image resolution than the file size. This is represented by the number of ground units a single pixel takes up. 5 meter resolution refers to each pixel being 5 square meters (obviously). For mapping grade imagery, you want at least 5 meters. The standard is moving much closer to 1 meter as companies like Space Imaging start to dominate the market.

The performance is TERRIBLE on single large images, if you plan to use it at multiple zoom scales. It is much more efficient to have a spatially indexed series of seamless smaller images. This index, known as an image catalog in the GIS world, is basically a database with image coordinates and file names. When you zoom in to a given area on the map, the geographic coordinates are used to determine which images to display.

It is possible to compress the file size using such means as jpeg, but this is not thought of very highly in the mapping world. The ideal is to have a georeferenced (has a *.tfw header file that contains the coordinates for one of the image corners) tiff file, and to add compression using a package like MrSID. People who use air photos frequently will have two datasets: a compressed one and a standard tiff. It is much easier to change a map projection on an uncompressed image.

If you have some $, there is a software package called SDE that enables high performance raster display for mapping purposes. It works really well, but you are getting locked into a highly proprietary and expensive format.

It is more significant to know the image resolution than the file size. This is represented by the number of ground units a single pixel takes up. 5 meter resolution refers to each pixel being 5 square meters (obviously). For mapping grade imagery, you want at least 5 meters. The standard is moving much closer to 1 meter as companies like Space Imaging start to dominate the market.

The performance is TERRIBLE on single large images, if you plan to use it at multiple zoom scales. It is much more efficient to have a spatially indexed series of seamless smaller images. This index, known as an image catalog in the GIS world, is basically a database with image coordinates and file names. When you zoom in to a given area on the map, the geographic coordinates are used to determine which images to display.

It is possible to compress the file size using such means as jpeg, but this is not thought of very highly in the mapping world. The ideal is to have a georeferenced (has a *.tfw header file that contains the coordinates for one of the image corners) tiff file, and to add compression using a package like MrSID. People who use air photos frequently will have two datasets: a compressed one and a standard tiff. It is much easier to change a map projection on an uncompressed image.

If you have some $, there is a software package called SDE that enables high performance raster display for mapping purposes. It works really well, but you are getting locked into a highly proprietary and expensive format.

There is a payoff between very fast maps (usually based on static pre-generated images) and dynamic maps (content coming from a spatially aware database). The static map route usually leads to reduced feature set, including but not limited to the ability to only view things at "canned" levels. Dynamic map content served up by technologies such as ESRI</shamless plug> allows you to zoom to any level / extent you want.

So what are they going to do now, make GIS illegal, what I'm I suposed to do for a job? I'm sure they've gone light on the details but I could make a "super-map" similar to this one in my spare time at work. Any kind of infrastucture information needed for this is readily availible from MapInfo & ESRI.

Jaysyn

For the right price, you can just buy the data from Platts - power line rights of ways, water pipes, etc. Once you have the data, you can throw it into any GIS software (purchased for the right price). Example: you need to get the natural gas pipline information to the road repair crews, so when they dig they're sure they won't hit anything... all this data used to be open, because noone thought you could do anything with it.

So what if I know where the local 500KV transformer yard is located over the 3rd hill on the left, who in their right mind would want to damage it? Then we realized how many people in the world really aren't in their right minds... I'm not complaining that this data should be bottled up again; what was really lacking was the chain of custody of who accessed the data, and for what purpose.

I agree totally. I work for a local government entity, and we recieve lots of grant money from the state to manage various web projects (basically we just host the servers, etc). The problem is that in every case where we are not given a choice about what software to use, the software works exclusively with IE. This is quite frustrating, considering that I manage our Windows network from my RH 7.3 machine. It's actually at the point where I have to keep a Windows computer in my office solely for those times that I need to do something with one of these projects.

It's getting better, though. We recently received a grant to do a map server project, but were given control of the software that we use. We originally planned on using ESRI's ArcIMS, priced at about $12,000 at the time. We even went to the training and started looking at hardware. Then I found out about the MapServer project. Mapserver is an open source internet map server, with all of the usual features: it's free, it's more secure, it's faster, it's more stable, etc, etc, etc. So rather than buying a Win2K server (that's the only thing ArcIMS will run on) and ArcIMS we bought a Redhat server and installed Mapserver. Saved my company about $17K, and our mapserver is faster than any ArcIMS-based server I've looked at.

The best news, though, is that this has brought about a significant change in thinking in my company. Before, our Controller thought Linux was a "toy". She used to say, "If it's free it can't be any good." All the usual stuff you expect. Now, we have one Linux server, a Linux firewall, two Linux desktops, and plans to add two more Linux servers in the next 6 months. They also sent me to take my RHCE about a week ago, but I bombed the Installation section. I'm going back May 19.

What half of that has to do with Mozilla I'm not sure. Just thought you guys might like to hear a nice story on Monday morning.

I agree totally. I work for a local government entity, and we recieve lots of grant money from the state to manage various web projects (basically we just host the servers, etc). The problem is that in every case where we are not given a choice about what software to use, the software works exclusively with IE. This is quite frustrating, considering that I manage our Windows network from my RH 7.3 machine. It's actually at the point where I have to keep a Windows computer in my office solely for those times that I need to do something with one of these projects.

It's getting better, though. We recently received a grant to do a map server project, but were given control of the software that we use. We originally planned on using ESRI's ArcIMS, priced at about $12,000 at the time. We even went to the training and started looking at hardware. Then I found out about the MapServer project. Mapserver is an open source internet map server, with all of the usual features: it's free, it's more secure, it's faster, it's more stable, etc, etc, etc. So rather than buying a Win2K server (that's the only thing ArcIMS will run on) and ArcIMS we bought a Redhat server and installed Mapserver. Saved my company about $17K, and our mapserver is faster than any ArcIMS-based server I've looked at.

The best news, though, is that this has brought about a significant change in thinking in my company. Before, our Controller thought Linux was a "toy". She used to say, "If it's free it can't be any good." All the usual stuff you expect. Now, we have one Linux server, a Linux firewall, two Linux desktops, and plans to add two more Linux servers in the next 6 months. They also sent me to take my RHCE about a week ago, but I bombed the Installation section. I'm going back May 19.

What half of that has to do with Mozilla I'm not sure. Just thought you guys might like to hear a nice story on Monday morning.

Microsoft set fall 2001 as a deadline for customers to sign up. Those who did would pay $239 to $380 per copy for Office XP, the latest version.

Those who passed would pay $479 a copy when they did upgrade.

At that rate, and with a promised audit carred out, just about anything looks good. They also realized that the machines they had would not run the new bloated M$ junk. Oh yeah, that and M$'s pathetic 11th hour attempts to avoid being dropped must have left a bad taste too. Anonymous accusations of IP theft are very damaging and M$ should get spanked hard if it turns out they did that. Also, I can only hope that M$ has not been dumb enough to use these dupes to get that embezelment charge against Piper.

This is a half measure. It's nice they found a local, but I wish they had discovered someone that would fix them up with free software. Until people do that, there will always be someone who can pull the rope.

For those in Geographic and Spatial Analysis fields, Arc/INFO, produced by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) is *the* industry standard software package. Although ESRI claims that its software will always be supportive of UNIX and will always be an open package, the reality is that the majority of their development efforts are going into software for Windows platforms. My fiancé has a MAC with OS X, and I would happily make all my machines LINUX boxes, but the fact is that as long as ESRI develops for Microsoft, my biggest, shiniest machine will be running Win2k or its most recent flavor.

If you are doing geographical stuff, maybe ArcIMS (GIS software in Java),
ArcPad (for handheld PC) and all that is related to GI Networks would save you a LOT of work ...

Esri new product line is very young (ArcGIS 8.0, ArcIMS 4.0, etc.), has still many bugs and sometimes, the object model make you hit your head on the wall, but despite all this, I think it is the best and most complete GIS software suite available right now).

ESRI
ArcGIS
ArcPad
ArcIMS
ArcObjects online

If you are doing geographical stuff, maybe ArcIMS (GIS software in Java),
ArcPad (for handheld PC) and all that is related to GI Networks would save you a LOT of work ...

Esri new product line is very young (ArcGIS 8.0, ArcIMS 4.0, etc.), has still many bugs and sometimes, the object model make you hit your head on the wall, but despite all this, I think it is the best and most complete GIS software suite available right now).

ESRI
ArcGIS
ArcPad
ArcIMS
ArcObjects online

If you are doing geographical stuff, maybe ArcIMS (GIS software in Java),
ArcPad (for handheld PC) and all that is related to GI Networks would save you a LOT of work ...

Esri new product line is very young (ArcGIS 8.0, ArcIMS 4.0, etc.), has still many bugs and sometimes, the object model make you hit your head on the wall, but despite all this, I think it is the best and most complete GIS software suite available right now).

ESRI
ArcGIS
ArcPad
ArcIMS
ArcObjects online

If you are doing geographical stuff, maybe ArcIMS (GIS software in Java),
ArcPad (for handheld PC) and all that is related to GI Networks would save you a LOT of work ...

Esri new product line is very young (ArcGIS 8.0, ArcIMS 4.0, etc.), has still many bugs and sometimes, the object model make you hit your head on the wall, but despite all this, I think it is the best and most complete GIS software suite available right now).

ESRI
ArcGIS
ArcPad
ArcIMS
ArcObjects online

If you are doing geographical stuff, maybe ArcIMS (GIS software in Java),
ArcPad (for handheld PC) and all that is related to GI Networks would save you a LOT of work ...

Esri new product line is very young (ArcGIS 8.0, ArcIMS 4.0, etc.), has still many bugs and sometimes, the object model make you hit your head on the wall, but despite all this, I think it is the best and most complete GIS software suite available right now).

ESRI
ArcGIS
ArcPad
ArcIMS
ArcObjects online

Since the story on ESRI was rejected, I am asking all Linux scientists who use GIS systems to follow this link to take a survey in support of Linux development.

Since the story on ESRI was rejected, I am asking all Linux scientists who use GIS systems to follow this link to take a survey in support of Linux development.

Since the story on ESRI was rejected, I am asking all Linux scientists who use GIS systems to follow this link to take a survey in support of Linux development.

Regarding software:
Communication with a GPS via NMEA sentences is relatively simple. NMEA is a standard text format that most (all?) GPSs are able to use. I have written several simple objects that parse NMEA into usable information and I'm sure there is lots of existing code available to do just this if you dig.

GIS was originally a UNIX market and some vendors (ESRI atleast) still sell GIS software for these platforms. The problem is, GIS has been traditionally expensive and tools like ArcInfo are way beyond your needs. I have yet to find a simple GIS with routing for Xwindows.

There is a small company in Poland called TatukGIS that sells an excellent GIS toolkit called the TatukGIS Developer Kernel. It includes a very capable GIS viewer object and a GPS object for NMEA. These tools are written with and originally designed for Borland Delphi although they now make an ActiveX version available. Last year they made a release that was compatible with one of the earlier versions of Kylix. I'm not sure if the current version is still focused on cross-platform compatibility, but this would be an excellent tool to use and would do the job with no problems.

I have both Kylix and the DK here as well as plenty of data and have worked with the DK quite a bit on the Windows platform. I'll have to see if I can get a little tool built on one of the XWindows machines. From previous posts it seems that there may be an interest if such a tool were created.

I have stumbled into the GIS area. I had background in analysis, reporting and knew a reasonable amount about property (I now know more)

You having some JAVA experience, have a look at ESRI's offerings that have JAVA components.

This area is starting to develop. Where I am they are using ESRI products to develop an intranet GIS system that will also display associated data from whatever datasource they want (Sybase, Informix, etc). Currently in beta, they have developed to display data from two seperate SYBASE databases all using JAVA. Awesome potential.

An interesting site is CAGIS

There's currently a discussion on this very topic on MacSlash, but a few /. people may be interested in some Apple ramblings too:

Strategy: Buy Low, Sell High.
How low can the stock values of companies go? Since last fall, many in the tech sector have certainly been trying to find out. This is a great time to buy companies or technologies and lately Apple has been wisely acting when opportunities arise. Even if Emagic GmbH, Spruce Technologies, Nothing Real, and Zayante in the last year had all been privately held, they would have still been sold at a favourable price compared to buying them before the .bomb bubble burst.

Strategy: Niche Market Growth.
It's clear that Apple wants to defend the Macintosh strength as a music & audio creation tool in the long term. Since pro audio software has been lagging on the march to MacOS X, Apple is at least applying heat to developers if not exactly lighting a fire under them. Logic and associated software & hardware on the Mac will mean that Digidesign, Twelve Tone Systems(Cakewalk), MOTU and Steinberg will have to take the market segment more seriously (although MOTU & Digidesign have historically been great friends of the Mac already). The way it's looking is that a larger majority of pro audio will be done on the Mac. Can Steinberg, Twelve Tone et al. risk being caught with their pants around their ankles if this happens?

Strategy: Technology Cross-Pollination.
Now that Apple has a substantial video-production, streaming, compression, audio & other technologies, they may consider adding many good features from one to another and developing truly feature-rich packages. It dosen't take a dreamer to see the possibilities, from unheard-of professional solutions to trickle-down pro capabilities in new iSoftware (eg. look how technologies purchased from Marcromedia were crafted into Final Cut Pro & iMovie). This is one area that users, down the road, can really cash out with if Apple encourages the flow of technologies between it's new divisions.

Strategy: Sorry, Mac-Only.
One thing that is a bit sad about this, ironically enough, is the immediate cancellation of the Windows versions of some software (notably Shake & Logic) with this strategy. While perhaps more upfront than an MS-style purchase and feature-deprivation in non-Windows versions, Apple still isn't making any friends (and perhaps losing potentially loyal customers & money) by doing this. Still, one cannot say that it's not what happened to Mac users through the late 1990s (even now - look at Bungie) but it would be better karma to be more merciful once the shoe is on the other foot. Apple would be smart to mitigate the anger of Windows users by offering discounts on upgrades to the next Mac version.

Next Strategy: More Vertical Markets.
The Macintosh still has a real chance at gaining significant market share if it can be a strong alternative in enough vertical market segments. Apple is rightly building on it's strenghts, but should diversify enough so that the Macintosh is not pegged as only good for those niches (remember what happened to the Amiga? Games machine!)

A Holy Grail almost as worthy as dominating the business market for Apple is the scientific & engineering markets, often with high software margins all around. A purchase or substantial investment in Autodesk à la the MS $150M in Apple would make Apple a huge player in the professional engineering, architecture, and manufacturing industries overnight. Considering Autodesk is not the most expensive stock right now, with a market cap of approximately USD$1.4B, Apple could conceivably purchase the entire operations in cash and still have about $2B in the bank. Autodesk's Design Segment develops AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, Mechanical Desktop, Autodesk Architectural Desktop, Architectural Studio, Autodesk Map, Lightscape, and Autodesk Land Desktop, to name a few (most industry-standard in their fields) and the Discreet Segment develops 3D Studio MAX, Animator Studio, flame, inferno, smoke, combustion, cinestream, plasma, cleaner, MPEG supercharger, Topper, and many others.

With a stable of industry-dominating software products as great as this, such a purchase (or even investment ensuring MacOS X compatibility) would send massive shockwaves across the engineering & architectural markets, and ripples in the scientific & pro graphics markets who are by now used to this. No immediate cancellation of the Windows version would be posible here, rather a years-long strategy to ensure first Mac versions and then Mac feature-parity. A purchase like this too rich for Apple's blood? Try something smaller like privatley-held ESRI (makers of ArcINFO, ArcView, ArcGIS & associated imaging systems), or continue to add strength in the crucial areas of coming scientific importance such as biotech and bioinformatics, in which Macs already have a growing following as you can see.

Note that the above are for the older, 3.x version of ArcView. Information on the newer ArcView 8 can be found in book and online course formats.

I hope that helps some. What I would ask in return is that when your company gets going with GIS you help promote the use of GIS in Schools (book) by helping any local schools that are interested in getting started with this. School/Business partnerships benefit everybody, especially when it provides the schools with alternatives and additions to the standard Microsoft/Intel curriculum.