Government Technology - December 2007 - (Page 30)

20 YEARS IN REVIEW ‘THE BIG VISION WAS TO BRING GIS TO THE MASSES’ Selected quotes from Google Earth’s Chikai Ohazama and Virtual Earth’s John Curlander. Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth may arguably be the next step in the evolution of GIS. These two applications humanize GIS and present geographic information in a more accessible format. Chikai Ohazama and John Curlander are central figures in this new era of GIS. We spoke with both of them in 2007. Ohazama on bringing GIS tools to the public using Google Earth: “The big vision was to bring GIS to the masses, bring GIS technology to the everyday person. Today I get so many people telling me their 6- or 7-year-old kid used Google Earth to play with it. And they’re learning how to use it themselves. We’re taking technology that was very inaccessible, required a lot of training, you had to know the software, and taking that and bringing it to the everyday person so they can do the same thing very easily through a nice interface that is very engaging.” Curlander on how government can leverage Virtual Earth: “What we’re planning to do is process the data as a service and make the finished product available to the government. We’re trying to free the government from having this big infrastructure that’s required for geospatial data. The data quality is high enough that it meets a large percentage of the applications that an urban planner or any city user would need. They won’t need to have custom flights done to collect their data. They won’t need to have custom processing done to create their products. They can simply access the Virtual Earth databases through our viewer and get most of what they need from that, if not all. Potentially it’s a huge savings for cities to be able to access these kinds of databases and not have to commission them themselves. I see a transition to using this data pretty easily just for the budget reasons if nothing else.” CHAD VANDER VEEN, TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS EDITOR DEC_07 the economic impact of both the dot-com collapse and 9/11 was beginning to wane. Things were looking up. New gadgets were fueling the consumer electronics industry and causing headaches for hoary organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. The digital music and video revolution was well under way, and peer-to-peer networks again moved issues like security, privacy — even network neutrality — to the forefront. No device made a bigger impact than the MP3 player, the iPod in particular. MP3 players — and the BY 2003, video-enabled players that would soon follow — coupled with new cell phones that began incorporating digital music and video, represented an astonishing advance in technological capability. Only a few years prior, it would have been almost unimaginable to carry around a credit card-sized hard drive, let alone one with multiple gigabytes of storage capability. Today, of course, we enjoy MP3 players, compact flash, memory sticks, and secure disks that offer enormous storage capacity in housings sometimes no larger than a Cheez-It. IN 2004, the Mozilla Foundation released its open source, cross-platform browser Firefox. Created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, Firefox was the first browser in years to give Microsoft’s Internet Explorer serious competition. The open source architecture of Firefox was a sensation with the geek set. Its user-friendly interface and customizability soon made it a hit in layperson circles as well. Firefox has since made significant inroads in the browser wars, now commanding some 15 percent of the market. Another benefit of Firefox is that it finally forced Microsoft to upgrade the perpetually vulnerable Internet Explorer 6. In 2006, Microsoft released IE 7, which incorporated some of the features, like tabbed browsing, that had won Firefox so many new fans. IE 7 also boasted much-improved security, and many analysts now compare it favorably to Firefox. 2005 Three Texas cities — Arlington, Grand Prairie and Carrollton — launch joint ERP project Many claim the Real ID Act, signed into law in 2005, is little more than a de facto national ID card. Others decry the legislation as the worst kind of unfunded federal mandate. Already, some states have sworn to reject the Real ID Act, passing laws of their own requiring non participation. Supporters say the law will provide Americans with better security and also help curb illegal immigration. 2006 Google buys YouTube Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn releases a policy to phase out Microsoft and other providers in favor of document formats based on open standards Peter Quinn resigns Problems with emergency responders’ ability to communicate hamper efforts during Hurricane Katrina. It’s hard to believe YouTube has been with us less than three years. Created in 2005, the site became a phenomenon whose popularity led Google to purchase it for $1.65 billion, despite concerns about how to make it generate revenue. Perhaps more important to Google is the fact YouTube is ground zero for Web media, which by almost all accounts will soon dominate traditional media like TV and film. 30 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - December 2007

Government Technology - December 2007 Contents Point of View Big Picture Profile The Last Mile GT Spectrum Well...How Did We Get Here? Dark Spaces A Paler Shade of Green? Decertification Dilemma Game On Two Cents Products Signal:Noise

Government Technology - December 2007

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