This past week I attended the official launch of the African Soils Information Service (AfSIS). The workshop was well attended by about fifty attendees from various organizations throughout North America, Europe and of course Africa. The program is developing spatial data and using mapping technology as a key component for its work and because of this there are obvious overlaps with both AGCommons and HarvestChoice.

We have officially launched the AgCommons at www.agcommons.com. This is an exciting new program led by the CGIAR in partnership with CH2M HILL and ITC to discover how geospatial technology can improve farmer productivity and market access in sub-Saharan Africa. Follow twitter updates at twitter/agcommons and visit the web site for more information about the program.

I was in Cape Town for the annual FOSS4G meeting at the end of September. There we're some interesting groups in attendance including Google, ESRI, the OGC and members from UNGIWG. During the opening session Ed Parsons of Google faced some difficult questions related to Map Maker. Map Maker allows anyone to edit and create map features wiki style but has a very restrictive license:

We recently completed a project that involved using the new ArcGIS Server 9.3 REST API for Google Maps. The application itself turned out great but also led us down a new path. We wanted to see if we could get the application to perform some of the calls without the user interaction through the interface.

We've been experimenting with integrated SMS/GPS for a while now. The team was able to leverage a new service called DotGo to integrate our very own short message service with a .net application that performs a spatial query and returns the results as text. We're building a small J2ME interface for the blackberry that encodes field values into single character 'commands' with an appended location off the GPS chip. Once we tie the two together we'll have a way to collect location information and forms data from any Java enabled device over SMS.

I've been a huge fan of FME for many years and have been a beta user of FME Server for over a year. Most of the projects I'm currently involved with include some RSS, KML, or GeoRSS output for spatial data, there always seems to be a desire to spatial information across platforms. For aggregating feeds, things like Mapufacture are awesome. However if I want to control the aggregated feeds and combine them in new ways or create new file types FME Server is the way to go.

The rarely used and often misunderstood CAD client finally made it onto the ESRI deprecation list. The CAD client allowed a way for AutoCAD users to connect directly to ArcSDE and both view and edit CAD data could be loaded directly into ArcSDE as a layer using the command line loader. Several years ago I loaded an entire cities worth of utility data into SDE. I could use an ArcIMS ArcMap Image Service to create a simple web site. What was so great about the solution is that the surveyors could edit their SDE data from AutoCAD and those changes we're reflected in the ArcIMS site.

I've been working with the ArcGIS Server Release Candidate 9.3 REST interface - pretty slick, I must admit!
However, the documentation is pretty thin as of now.

So, for those of you out there wanting to specify a date or date range in the WHERE CLAUSE of an ArcGIS Server REST Request, here's the skinny:

//Javascript - assumes you've got a Javascript Reference pointing to the ESRI Google Maps Javascript Extension

var _query = new esri.arcgis.gmaps.Query();
_query.where = "MyDateColumn >= date ’01-01-2007’";

Civil Infrastructure has been implemented since the beginning of humans civilizations. Spatial data collection, its integration and management also has a long history.

There has been alot of talk about the announcement by Google and ESRI at the Where 2.0 conference. The opening up of the Geo Search API by Google is definitely a step forward. ArcServer has had the ability to create generic KML documents from existing services for a while so making the service indexable and findable is a nice incremental step.