Free James From ESRI

For those who can’t make it to the Manifold US Conference in Salisbury, there’s another opportunity to see Manifold in action at Las Vegas, details via Dimitri on Georeference:

For everyone who cannot resist visiting Las Vegas at every opportunity, I just wanted to note that there will be at least three Manifold sessions at the Nevada GIS Society annual conference, which runs from May 19 through 21 at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

On May 20th there will be three sessions of special interest to Manifold users. Just after lunch, representatives of the city of Fernley will be talking about emergency response using GIS, specifically how they used Manifold to great advantage during the recent floods. In the morning of the 20th I’ll be giving an introductory talk on Manifold, providing an overview for folks not yet familiar with Manifold. In the afternoon of the 20th I’ll be giving a talk on supercomputer performance in GIS, an overview of parallelization from clusters to multiple processors to massively parallel stream processing architectures like CUDA.

My inept method of finding you all the latest news on Manifold - Google search - brought up an interesting Sponsored Link: Manifold Too Limiting?, which takes you to the ThinkGeo website that pitches its Map Suite software as an alternative to Manifold. This is the first occasion I have seen a competitor using the better than Manifold pitch in their promotion. I have no knowledge of Map Suite, I’d welcome any comments from users, but when other GIS companies use Manifold as a comparative to their own software I see that as a good thing for Manifold.

Continue reading ‘An Alternative to Manifold?’

I have been tipped off regarding a press release due to be announced later today, my source wishes to remain anonymous, but suffice to say he/she is high up in the Autodesk HQ Housekeeping hierarchy.

Autodesk proudly announces the release of AutoCAD 2009 AutoGIS Max, a new desktop GIS which is built on the stable AutoCAD 2009 platform. AutoCAD 2009 AutoGIS Max incorporates all the features of AutoCAD Land Desktop Companion Enabled Civil Map 3D, but with a shorter name. Not only will users have access to the previous features of AutoCAD Land Desktop Companion Enabled Civil Map 3D we can announce that AutoCAD 2009 AutoGIS Max has the brand new feature ‘Service Multiple User Request Feature System’ The truly unique SMURFS feature will allow us to communicate directly with our subscribers to give us feedback on what GIS features should have been be incorporated into our desktop GIS, which we will implement over the next decade, possibly. Autodesk has incorporated a large blue SMURFS icon to allow easy access for our GIS power users.

AutoCAD 2009 AutoGIS Max will also have a built in add-on AutoCAD 2009 AutoGIS Enabled MapGuide Extreme Web 2.0 - a fully fledged map service over the internets. Based on MapGuide, which was developed with the help of the open source community - a big thanks to the open source community for the many hours you worked for free, we really appreciate your efforts. AutoCAD 2009 AutoGIS Enabled MapGuide Extreme Web 2.0 will allow seamless viewing of AutoCAD 2009 AutoGIS Max drawing files over the World Wide Web 2.0.

The future of interactive desktop web mapping is here - come join us.

www.autodesk.com/AutoCAD 2009 AutoGIS Max

Via Selectrob on Georeference:

There will be a Manifold Workshop this year at the CalGIS conference in Modesto, California. Modesto is just 90 minutes from Yosemite…

The session is aimed at new users so if you are reading this please pass the information on to those who are about to discover a more efficient, reliable, stable, advanced … tool. Attendees must register at http://www.calgis.org/Preconference.htm

The workshop will be held on April 22nd and the conference proceedings begin on the 23rd.

Whilst looking for GIS books I discovered Geospatial Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide to Principles, Techniques and Software Tools, you can read a sample here. The title says it all really, but what is most interesting is the inclusion of Manifold and other GIS programs alongside ArcGIS. Nice to see a GIS book that is aware that there are alternatives to ESRI products.

I think I may pick up a copy of this book, not just for its inclusion of Manifold, but I might learn one or two things also!

Update: You can read the whole text here.

Here’s some other bloggers I’ve noticed recently commentating on using Manifold:

Geoff’s Comparative GIS Weblog - Geoff has added video demos, with his commentary, on his experiences using Manifold, he covers importing SHP, pie charts and web queries. Edit (3) not available now.

Po Ve Sham - Muki Hakla’s personal blog has also been posting about Manifold over the last few months.

Edit: I forgot about this one too: Spatially and Technically Inclined - a nice breakdown of first impressions of Manifold from a GIS user.

Edit (2): Just noticed that a well known poster on CartoTalk, Hans Van Der Maarel has started up his own GIS and Mapping blog, Hans comes across as an intelligent guy with a lot of experience creating maps, he uses FME, Global Mapper and Manifold and doesn’t drink too much Koolaid when commentating on various software.

Conference details have been announced see below. Looks like this will be a must attend conference for current and potential Manifold users. I’m looking forward to meeting fellow users and putting faces to some of the more well known users and Manifold staff.

I’ve still got to convince my paymasters to subsidize part or all of the expenses, but I’ll be there regardless.

Salisbury University
2008 Manifold GIS US User Conference: mapping the future of Manifold GIS

May 29, 30
153 Henson Science Hall
Salisbury University
Salisbury, MD 21801

Description: The 2008 Manifold GIS US User Conference, held at Salisbury University, is an opportunity to connect with other Manifold GIS users, and also work together as a community to better understand the future direction of Manifold GIS, and advocate for upcoming features in the software. This year’s conference will consist of presentations on the innovative “technological edges” being explored by Manifold users, an extended technology briefing by Manifold GIS, and break-out group sessions to discuss user community wish-list items that are presented to the Manifold staff for feedback. Please note, all users must sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in order to participate in the sessions.

Tentative Agenda:

Thursday - exploring the technology boundaries

This session consists of technology briefings on numerous benchmark tests conducted over the last year, and will introduce participants to user experiences in parallel processing, spatial database integration, and integrating Manifold GIS within a tight-coupled model.

8:30 - 9:00 Registration and sign in

9:00 - 9:30 Introductions of participants

9:30 - 10:00 From gaming to GIS: results of benchmark tests for nVidia parallel processing in Manifold GIS. Benjamin Sigrist, Salisbury University

10:00 - 10:45 Integrating Manifold GIS with Enterprise-class spatial databases: experiences with Oracle, SQLServer, and PostGIS. Kevin Ross, Brett Morgan, Adam Ruff, and James Mooney, Salisbury University.

10:45 - 11:15 Coffee break

11:15 - 11:45 Spatially enabling hydraulic models to measure the performance of underground infrastructure after earthquakes: integrating Manifold GIS and EPANET. Arthur J. Lembo, Jr., Salisbury University

11:45 - 12:00 Wrap up and look ahead

12:00 - 1:15 Lunch (Commons)

1:15 - 2:00 Internet Map Server development, Dave Brubacher, Geomatica

2:00 - 2:30 TBD

2:30- 4:00 Manifold: a look ahead. Dimitri Rotow, Manifold Systems.

4:00 - 4:30 Questions and answers

4:30 - 5:00 Assignment of work group teams and homework assignments.

5:30 Dinner

Friday - mapping out the future

9:00 - 9:30 Review of Thursday presentations

9:30 - 12:00 Work group sessions

12:00 - 1:15 Lunch

1:15 - 2:00 Presentation of workgroup summaries

2:00 - 3:00 Manifold feedback

3:00 - 3:15 Break

3:15 - 4:30 Panel discussion and Q&A. Making it work: successful strategies for using Manifold in your organization.

4:30 - 5:00 wrap up

Information on registration, lodging, and other aspects of the conference will be posted shortly.

Full details can be found here.

I’ve been a bit shy posting here recently, mainly due to a mountaineous pile of work, that at present shows no sign of abating.

My company’s mainly an AutoCAD shop and I’ve been using/testing AutoDesk’s various incarnations of AutoCAD 2008 (Civil 3D, Land Desktop Companion, Map and Raster Design) a fair bit. I can say I haven’t experienced so many Fatal Errors with a version of AutoCAD before, it seems mainly susceptible to drawings with images added as backgrounds, although I’m also experiencing regular crashes when printing to a network printer.

One feature I have been impressed with is Map’s ability to link to external GIS data using Feature Data Object (FDO), which AutoCAD released to the open source community back in 2005 along with MapGuide. As a test I linked a SHP file containing point objects and successfull applied thematic formatting to set the point’s colour based on attributes in a data column. I also added labels for the points description field and could format them to have a halo outline, which I’ve never seen in AutoCAD before. I achieved all this using the FDO interface, which was easy to figure out without trawling through the Help files.

I will really have to push into using DBMS to storing geometry to enable me to access the data from Manifold, AutoCAD Map, ArcGIS (if possible?) or any software that I choose. I can forsee the ability of doing all the GIS heavy lifting in Manifold pushing the results out to a DBMS and linking via FDO the geometry for my projects that need to be based in AutoCAD.

I’m a bit late posting about the Western US User Conference, which is underway right now, but I’ll leave it to James as he has been doing a good job of letting the masses know about it.

I didn’t try and get down for the conference as I’m going to be attending The East Coast Manifold User Group Meeting, which will be held on May 29,30 at Salisbury University in Salisbury Maryland. There’s also a Canadian user conference, hosted by the Grand River Conservation Authority being organized in the warmer months, which I’ll also be attending.

I’ll post more details about the upcoming conferences when more details are available.

I’ve been working with ArcMap ArcView 9.2 for the best part of the week, mainly because I’ve taken over a project already started in ArcGIS. I’m absolutely astounded at the poor performance of the display engine - panning and zooming around a plan is slow as treacle and plotting or exporting to PDF is painful, I’m writing this now whilst waiting for the export to PDF to finish.

I’ll be the first to admit it may be my methodology at fault and there must be ways to optimize performance. I think it’s mainly due to a linked AutoCAD DWG which is a fairly large 18MB file for contours. I’ll have to try and convert the contours to SHP and see if that helps.

I’d have seriously considered porting the whole project over to Manifold, but a whole bunch of data labels were added previously as graphic elements: if you’re asking why? - that’s a very good question.