As many of you know, the annual Intergraph user’s conference is happening this week. Although I’m not there, Joe Francica from Directions Magazine is covering the conference via Twitter – #Intergraph09. Not sure how much he’ll be posting, but did want to pass out the link. I do find it interesting that Joe’s the only person thus far covering the Intergraph 2009 conference on Twitter. I recently attended the Where 2.0 conference and at the conference Twitter – #Where20 was used dramatically.

Read an interesting article on GISCafe discussing Intergraph’s new product named “GeoMedia SDI Pro”. If you have a few minutes, it’s worth the read.

A little more than a year ago, I did a project for a left leaning political organization that had an interest in developing an automated means to create (and recreate) a national layer of election precincts to support activities like political canvasing.  Click here for a more complete case study on my company’s website.

One of the basic challenges in this project was to find an efficient way to split hundreds of thousands of polygons (census blocks) using a separate, and rather large layer of line geometry – in this case, statewide commercial street data.  Although I had the option to do this work with custom code in Oracle Spatial, I wanted to use Geomedia in order to avoid the Oracle customization time sink.  How to do it in Geomedia?  The solution is easy, but not at all obvious (at least to me).  Here is the recipe I came up with:

1. Load the feature class that you want to split (in my case, census blocks), and the features that you want to split by (in my case, streets). Also, and this is important, make sure that the “Display Properties Dialog for New Features” button is unpressed.

2. Select the census blocks and initiate the split tool in Geomedia.  Notice that a new toolbar appears with four buttons on it… split by point, split by line, split by polygon, and split by selected features.  Click on “split by selected features”.

3. Turn OFF locatability on the census blocks layer (the layer to be split).  Be sure to do this without unselecting those features.

4. Turn on locatability for the streets layer, and select the features that you want to use as a basis for splitting census blocks.

5. Double-click somewhere – anywhere – on the map window and let Geomedia do its thing.  Depending on the complexity of the features that it is analyzing and the sheer number of records, it may take a little time to complete.  If you didnt take my advice from step one and ignored the “Display Properties Dialog for New Features” button, then it might force you to click OK for every newly split feature.

The result in my case is census blocks seemlessly split based on a seperate layer of line work.  Perfect geometry, perfect topology between features, with no slivers or gaps… a thing of beauty.

Thanks to Jeff for letting me participate in the Geomedia community in this way.  I asked Jeff if I can do this for the simple reason that I feel pretty strongly that Geomedia technology is really the best desktop GIS currently on the market.  Geomedia’s primary drawback, however,  is that it is undersupported in my corner of the world (The San Francisco Bay Area), and it is therefore hard to justify as a viable solution for organizations that require rock-solid support.  My participation here is my attempt to be a part of the solution to this travesty.

In case you are interested, here are a few highlights on my career:
-graduated from Humboldt State University in Geography, 1997
-spent a few years attempting rockstardom as a bass player in various touring bands
-finally decided to get a real job at San Mateo County in late 2000, helping to implement their Enterprise GIS (remember that term?)
-held increasingly responsible positions there until late 2006 when I moved to Farallon Geographics (a geospatial consulting firm in San Francisco)
-My current official title is “Geospatial Systems Analyst”, but basically I do projects to help clients of all sorts (but mostly local government) solve business problems using spatial data and related software tools.  I’m a problem solver.

As far as GIS technology goes, Geomedia is my first love. Unlike most GIS Geeks, I learned with it, and feel most comfortable and at home when developing workflows with it rather than the “other” guys.  It was my knowledge of Geomedia that got me a gig with San Mateo County back in the day.  Becuase of the County’s commitment to Geomedia, I have inevitably been exposed to various offshoots such as Grid, Transportation Manager, the Geomedia-Hansen Interface, and AFM.  From a technical perspective, what makes Geomedia exceptional are twofold:  1. The concept of pipe technology – dynamic queries upon queries, and 2. functional attributes.   In my opinion, no other GIS software has anything that touches it.

Partly as a result of the Geomedia approach to GIS, I have also become very fluent in relational database, and spatial sql language.  I have tons of experience with Oracle Spatial and Postgis, and I am now ramping up my fluency with the new Sql Server geometric (and geographic) data type.  Other interests are FME, open source GIS, particularly geoserver, qgis, udig.  Lastly, I have been forced to ramp up in ESRI technologies (mostly desktop and the former SDE stuff) to keep myself employable, so I am able to talk that talk as well.  Hopefully, I am a well-rounded GIS practicioner.

Bottom line is that I am here to help, both in terms of providing answers and in facilitating conversation among the Geomedia community.  Please dont be shy about contacting me through this forum.

Cheers,
Adam

I’m pleased to announce that Adam Lodge of Farallon Geographics has asked to be an author on the blog. Needless to say, I accepted his offer!

I first met Adam when he was with San Mateo County, CA and I was working with the City of San Jose. While I was with Intergraph, Adam served as the president of the Northern California Intergraph Geospatial User’s Community. Adam has been working with GeoMedia for many years (maybe even longer than me) and has a ton of knowledge about both Intergraph products like GeoMedia, GeoMedia Parcel Manager, GeoMedia Grid, and GeoMedia/Hansen interface. Additionally, he has a lot of experience with open source products like Geoserver, OpenLayers, and PostGIS. Finally, he’s been working with Oracle Locator/Spatial for a number of years.

I’ll let Adam tell you more in his own words. But needless to say, I’m very happy to have someone else post on the blog. If anybody else is interested in contributing to the blog, please email me and we’ll add you as well!

If you want to make enemies, try to change something

-Woodrow Wilson

In the way old news section of the blog, it was brought to my attention a while ago that you can now download the GeoMedia Viewer from the Intergraph web site. For a long time, you had to make a request from product support and then Intergraph would send you a CD with GeoMedia Viewer on it. As of late last year or early this year that changed. You can now download it from Intergraph Support site. https://support.intergraph.com/Product/GeoMediaViewer.asp Please note, although it’s on the Intergraph’s support site, I do NOT believe you need to login to download. So, if you’re looking for a tool that will do any of the following:

• Read a GeoMedia/GM Pro workspace
• Connect to Oracle Spatial and SQL Server
• Have the same look and feel as GeoMedia and GeoMedia Pro
• Free

You’re definitely in luck. I’d encourage you to download it and give it a try. Please note that if you’re going to install GeoMedia Viewer on a machine already running GeoMedia and/or GeoMedia Pro, I believe Intergraph recommends you install the least functional piece of software first. In other words, if you’re going to run (not sure why you would want to) GeoMedia, GeoMedia Viewer, and GeoMedia Pro all on the same machine, you’d want to first install GeoMedia Viewer, then install GeoMedia Std, and finally install GeoMedia Pro. If you don’t follow this pattern, you might find that some of your functionality is lost.

From the GeoMedia Viewer site:

GeoMedia Viewer is an easy to use, FREE GIS software application for desktop viewing and distribution of geospatial data. It allows an organization to maximize the value of its geospatial data by extending availability to novice users who wouldn’t otherwise have access because of the barriers of purchasing and learning how to use a full GIS software application.

Sorry about the long time between posts. I’m not giving up on blogging, but, believe it or not, it does take a lot of time….

Anyhow, I’ve been playing a little with the Analysis > Analyze Geometry command. I can’t say I use it all the time, so I’m not sure when this changed. It may have been a long time ago. I’ve always found it hard to get lat/long coordinates from my state plane coordinates. Yes, I can do this one off by just clicking on the map and getting a coordinate readout from the “Precision Coordinates” dialog, but what if I wanted to have lat/long for 10,000 points. That was much harder.

You can do this with functional attributes. In fact, I posted an article on www.geomediawiki.org on how to do it. It was actually copied for the most part out of the GeoMedia online help. However you can also do this with the Analyze Geometry command.

1. Launch the command (Analysis > Analyze Geometry)
2. Choose a point feature class. If you have lines or polygons, use the CENTERPOINT functional attribute to create points from the line/area geometry.
3. When you select the point feature class, you will see the “Analysis Options” dialog populate. In the dialog you will see “Geographic Coordinate” and “Projection Coordinate”
   
4. If you check “Geographic” you will get lat/long. If you check “Projection” you’ll typically get easting/northing. NOTE: you can set the output coordinate format in the “Units and Formats…” dialog in the same Analyze Geometry dialog.
5. For points you have options for Azimuth, Bearing, Geographic Coordinates, Projection Coordinates, and Height. Height assumes you have the Z elevation populated in your geometry
6. If you work with lines, you’ll have options for Length, Azimuth, and Bearing
7. If you work with areas, you’ll have options for Area, Perimeter, and Area/Perimeter ^2

All in all, this is much easier than having to write a functional attribute.

All – Sorry about the long time between posts. Hope to start posting again soon. Anyhow, did want to mention the upcoming Northern California Intergraph Geospatial User’s Community (NCIGUC) meeting. It will be on October 22 from 10:00 – 3:00 at the City of Livermore, CA City Council Chambers. You can find out all the information by going to the NCIGUC web site.

Hope to see you all there!

With the last blog post on Safe Software’s FME suite, I would be remiss to not discuss Intergraph’s own Schema Remodeler utility. The Schema Remodeler utility comes as part of GeoMedia Fusion.

[RANT]On a complete side note…IF Intergraph would NOT hide their marketing information behind a login and password, then I’d have links to the products. The last I heard, David Holmes had said that he hoped to have at least the splash pages out from login/password shortly after the end of the conference. We’re going on almost a month now…anytime soon would certainly be nice. Actually, I found what I think is a hidden link to a bit of literature on the software.[/RANT]

Anyhow, GeoMedia Fusion is a great tool for doing data cleanup, attribute validation,  and conflation. The schema remodeler utility comes with GeoMedia Fusion and is a stand alone utility that provides you with the ability to migrate data from one source to another and to bulk export from the GeoMedia environment. For those that have heard of Intergraph’s Data Warehousing Tools, the schema remodeler utility is the re-branded (and enhanced) Data Warehousing Tools. Schema Remodeler is one of my favorite Intergraph tools and I almost always use it at least once a week.. As of late I’ve set it up to take my Trimble GPS text files and load them into my Oracle Locator database. In the schema remodeler utility, you can do a number of things including re-mapping and reordering columns from one source to another (think migrating a database from Access to Oracle or SQL Server); exporting a seamless Access feature class into a gridded Bentley Microstation V7 environment; and updating columns using functional attributes, creating a subset of the the data using temporal and attribute queries, and modifying the source geometry using an analytical merge so you can export the Oracle data to create a shapefile (all in one transaction).

When you look at the functionality of Schema Remodeler, it’s really pretty amazing at how much you can do with the utility. Now, how do I compare it to FME? It’s hard to say as I’ve used Schema Remodeler off and on for the last five years and I’ve only use FME a handful of times. In my eyes, they both attempt to do similar things. The biggest difference in my eyes has to do with the number of file formats supported (Schema Remodeler only supports the standard GM data server while FME supports at least 150 different GIS data types) and how detailed you need to get. Schema Remodeler is great for many things, however it’s only a utility. FME on the other hand is a complete software solution. Its so goal is “spatial ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load”. It should also be mentioned that since you can’t buy Schema Remodeler by itself (it only comes with GeoMedia Fusion), FME is actually quite a bit cheaper than Schema Remodeler. So, if you’re looking exclusively for “spatial ETL” functionality, I personally would go with FME. However if you need to do some pretty advanced conflation, a lot of automated data cleanup, and attribute validation, you really should be looking at GeoMedia Fusion. If you do that, it’s really nice to know that Schema Remodeler comes as part of Fusion and may answer many of your ETL needs.