Posted by jeffhobbs on March 26, 2008
Had a very interesting question today on the Directions Magazine GeoMedia list.
Hi fellow ‘GeoMediars‘.
One of my colleagues has asked me about the possibility of doing proportional circles maps in GeoMedia.
Since I don’t know if/how it’s possible, I come once more seeking your help, asking if anyone has ever done this kind of maps?
Best regards
Jorge
There were a few replies. However I did want to highlight one from Phil Hardy as I thought his attached diagrams were very good. He did make sure to let me know that he didn’t create the images himself…so he can’t take all the credit 
1) OK, by Proportional Circle map I assume you mean something like this.
2) First, use Functional Attributes to create centerpoints.
3) Then use the legend to change the style of the centerpoints. In this case I assigned size based on the Population attribute.
4) And the end result:
Simple, but I thought very well diagrammed. It should also be noted that a nice example of this can be seen on the USSample.gws that comes with every version of GeoMedia and GeoMedia Professional in the GeoWorkspaces folder.
Posted in Functional Attributes, GeoMedia, Intergraph | 4 Comments »
Posted by jeffhobbs on March 25, 2008
Got back from today’s Northern California Intergraph Geospatial User’s Community (NCIGUC) meeting. We had Vince Smith, the product manager for GeoMedia Desktop solutions out to do an “unofficial” GeoMedia 6.1 product launch. I’m hopefully going to be obtaining the slides and .avis from Vince in the next couple of days. I’ll post the slides on the http://www.nciguc.org web site and will post the .avis on everyone’s favorite http://www.youtube.com.
Vince really went over a lot of stuff and asked for a lot of feedback from the users. He took a lot of time to discuss Intergraph’s plans with the consolidation of the Intergraph GeoMedia, G/Tech, and CAD (computer aided dispatch) lines of products. I’ll get into much more detail over the days to come. However I can really say that Intergraph’s plans sound very interesting and very promising…if things go as planned.
Finally, I really want to commend Vince personally for coming out to the user’s group meeting. The NCIGUC was formed in September, 2001. However this is the first time we’ve actually had someone from Huntsville actually fly out and present. It really showed a dedication to the Bay Area users. Furthermore, Vince did his best to answer all questions (and there were plenty), take plenty of notes, and interact with the users. He wasn’t at all defensive and took feedback from the users. All in all, I really think it was a strong event.
BTW – congratulations to Leena Gautam for winning the free version of GeoMedia 6.1. The software is in the mail
Posted in GeoMedia 6.1, Intergraph, NCIGUC, User Groups | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jeffhobbs on March 20, 2008
As many of you are aware, SVG (scalable vector graphics) is currently Intergraph’s preferred way to render vector graphics in a GeoMedia WebMap (GWM) site. There has been a lot of discussion as of late in the comments section reference this post as an example discussing what Intergraph will do now that Adobe (the largest maker of a SVG plug-in) has announced that they will no longer support the SVG Viewer plug-in as of January 1, 2009. Additionally, as far as I know, Adobe is no longer developing the plug-in. I believe this decision was made soon after Adobe completed their purchase of Macromedia and Macromedia’s web technologies (namely Flash, Dreamweaver, and ColdFusion). Well, with Adobe’s decision left Intergraph in a bit of a bind…what to do now that the SVG Viewer has been discontinued??
After talking with a few folks at the GITA booth, I can say that Intergraph looks very close to adopting Microsoft Silverlight as their next vector engine. With the pending release of Silverlight 2.0, Microsoft has come a long way in expanding the flexibility and functionality of Silverlight. In fact, version 1 was very much designed for delivering movies over the web (think Youtube’s use of Flash to serve all of the movies on www.youtube.com). Version 2 is being designed with the idea of building rich internet applications using XAML, .NET, and other technologies. You can take a look at roadmap I found on Silverlight 2.0 here if your curious to see just what Microsoft is planning for this eventual “Flash killer”.
So…what does this means for GMWM users? Well…initially (hopefully before January 1, 2009) it means that we should see Silverlight as a replacement (or addition) to the choices we have for rendering the actual map object window. This probably won’t be a giant enhancement by itself EXCEPT for the cross-browser (think Firefox and Safari) and cross platform support (think Mac and Linux). However down the road, I’m hoping we’ll begin to see a much better overall user experience. This will include more intuitive tools, better user feedback, and an overall much better “web 2.0″ interface. With time, we might even have the flexibility to more easily develop those “web 2.0″ dashboards (the Oakland Explorer demo is very cool) that more and more of us our seeing at conferences and other demonstrations.
Personally, I was hoping Intergraph would adopt Adobe’s Flex technology. In large part because it’s a much more mature technology. Not to mention Flash is really at this point almost ubiquitous with any modern computer and browser. But, Silverlight does look very promising and Microsoft is really coming on strong. In other words…life could be much worse.
Posted in GeoMedia, Intergraph | 26 Comments »
Posted by jeffhobbs on March 20, 2008
Last week I attended GITA’s 2008 Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference in Seattle, WA. As a whole, I was really happy with the event. I attended a couple of pre-conference knowledge immersion seminars – one titled “Strategies for Enterprisewide Web Services” and one titled “Mobile Technology for the Enterprise”. I then attended the entire conference followed by the Oracle Spatial User Conference the day after the conference. I’m not going to go into great detail about the conference as I’m sure you can find a lot online that’s been covered by other users.
I must say that Oracle has done some impressive things with Oracle 11g and their support for LiDAR data, TIN exports, and overall 3D data storage. Additionally Safe Software has done some really cool things embracing Oracle 11g. At the Oracle Spatial User Conference, Safe demonstrated extracting 3D data from 11g, and transforming the data into a 3D PDF. Once in the PDF environment, you could pan, tilt, zoom, and fly around. It was really cool to be able to do a virtual flyover both around and into a building. You can see the demo on the Safe web site. Just look for the .wmv titled “FME and Oracle Spatial”.
Anyhow…I did have some time to sit down at the Intergraph booth and talk to a few people. I’ll cover some of the things I discussed in upcoming posts.
And finally, on a complete side note. I was really surprised at the size of the booth at the GITA conference. It was really great to see such a large presence at a conference. I’m used to seeing the one small table in the corner. Not this time…. Very cool.
Posted in GITA, Oracle Database, User Groups | Leave a Comment »
