rajsingh.org blog

KML now an OGC Open Standard

After a little less than a year of great work by the KML SWG, we have a standard! The OGC press release gives some facts and a link to the OGC KML 2.2 Standard, and John Timmer at ars technica has a nice piece on the significance of this step. His article won’t offer anything new for geo industry veterans, but it’s great to see the mainstream IT media “get it” when it comes to our technologies and markets.

This is hopefully a big win for individuals who contribute data to one site, and would like to use it in many others — not to mention the companies whose business model revolves around these altruistic, bottom-up data providers. One small step for OGC, and one big step towards breaking down data silos!

Roll Your Own KML App

This morning at the OGC Technical Committee meeting, the Google Earth & Maps team announced an alpha of libkml, an open source (BSD) library for reading/parsing/writing KML 2.2. It’s a C++ library, but includes SWIG bindings for Java, Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP. The hope is that this piece of code will help developers build comprehensive, robust KML support into their applications. But note, this is NOT a mini-Google Earth. You just get KML support – there’s no way to get that streaming earth imagery goodness that you see in GE, although I suppose you can combine this with a map access API (from Google, Virtual Earth, Yahoo!, etc.) to get nice base maps in your app. Enjoy!

Are Pigs Flying? Microsoft’s Big Interoperability News

Needless to say, I was shocked and amazed when I saw this statement on Microsoft’s new Interoperability Principles this weekend. To summarize, they are committing to make open and public the protocols and APIs for their major products, including Vista, Exchange, SQL Server, and Office. And, wait for this, access to those documents will be free. Is your mind blown yet? How about reading on and seeing that they plan to embrace non-Microsoft standards, and “increase interoperability with open source solutions”? I’m going to take all this at face value and say, “Bravo Microsoft!” I hope it all plays out according to this plan. The IT world will be a much better place if it does.

Mapping is the new spreadsheet

I was over at Harvard yesterday talking to people from the GSD, the Herbarium, the Library, the new Center for Geographic Analysis, and MassGIS. It was great to see some old friends and make some new ones. One topic that came up was why you don’t see OGC standards in widespread usage. I argued that the geospatial Web is where the regular Web was in 1996, when the tech industry thought that HTML was so easy and powerful that everyone would build their own Web sites – not by writing HTML but by using tools like Dreamweaver. As it turns out, that was still way too high a barrier to entry. People didn’t want the hassle of designing a site from scratch. They wanted to post a blog entry or a MySpace page. That’s when the Web saw a real quantum leap in content.

So in my mind, there’s a continuum of tech diffusion, where the first stage is raw HTML/XML/KML/URL coding by alpha techies. The second stage is using software tools that automate that raw coding. And the real diffusion comes when companies offer tools that automate 90% of the content creation busywork, and let users compete that last 10% that is unique to their interests. OGC is just moving into the second stage, and we don’t even know what that last stage will look like.

The discussion reminded some of us of an idea we had late in the 1990s that mapping should be as commonplace as spreadsheets. We were wondering whether that type of revolutionary leap could come from the GIS industry or would come from mainstream Web hackers. So it was very timely to wake up today and see this Wired article today about using Google Spreadsheets to create KML. Is this the way most geographic content creation will happen in the future?

Always use the en-dash

I think my college newspaper experience has made me a little obsessive about writing – style, format, and clarity. My job requires reading a ton of writing done by programmers, and this group, to put it gently, is the writing equivalent of a bull in a china shop. So I post this in hopes that I can fix at least one technical writing problem with this simple rule. Always use the en-dash.
One issue I’ve been obsessing about lately is the use of dashes. Specifically, when to just hit the ‘-’ key, or (on Mac) hold down option as well to get an ‘en-dash’, or do the option-shift-dash dance to get the ‘em-dash’ (by the way I have no idea how these work on the PC, but I remember something about F-keys, aagh!). I finally decided to research the issue, and found out it’s actually very simple. At least according to Wikipedia.

The em dash, or m dash, m-rule, etc., (—), indicates a parenthetical thought—like this one—or some similar interpolation. Its name derives from its defined width of one em (originally the width of the letter m), which is the length, expressed in points, by which font sizes are typically specified.

Traditionally an em dash—like so—or a spaced em dash — like so — has been used for a dash in running text. The Elements of Typographic Style recommends the more concise spaced en dash – like so – and argues that the length and visual magnitude of an em dash “belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography”. The spaced en dash is also the house style for certain major publishers (Penguin, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge among them).

The en dash (always with spaces, in running text) and the spaced em dash both have a certain technical advantage over the unspaced em dash. In most typesetting and most word processing, the spacing between words is expected to be variable, so there can be full justification. Alone among punctuation that marks pauses or logical relations in text, the unspaced em dash disables this for the words between which it falls. The effect can be uneven spacing in the text.

So programmers, the dash is for hyphenation or a minus sign. Only use it as such. For a parenthetical thought, use the en-dash – option-dash on the Mac. See how nice that en-dash is?