The IDV Solutions public SpatialWiki beta, blogged about by myself and IDV UX Lead John Nelson, is a community experiment around easily creating geographic content that can be refined by the community at large. It is the culmination of our R&D efforts around building a map viewer from the ground up completely in Silverlight. Virtual Earth serves as the base map for SpatialWiki, drawings are stored in Microsoft’s cloud-based storage area SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), and the drawings can be exported as KML or SQL Server 2008 scripts.
SpatialWiki is also available as a product within the Visual Fusion Suite that empowers an organization to quickly and easily create, update, and leverage spatial drawings and content. In this version the drawings can be saved in SharePoint as part of the larger Visual Fusion composite application platform. John and I recently sat down to brainstorm important use cases for the SpatialWiki inside an organization and I think it’s valuable to enumerate a few of those in today’s Spotlight Blog.
1. Crisis Management
When a crisis event occurs, it is usually centralized in a specific location and responding to a crisis almost always involves coordinating location-based efforts. The SpatialWiki is a great tool for quickly and easily defining boundaries, routes, check points, impacted areas, areas of interest, precise locations for people or equipment, etc. Within minutes users can create the relevant spatial content necessary for a complete Common Operation Picture (COP). Further, because of the wiki nature of the tool, that content can be in a constant update mode with changes immediately reflected back to the COP. Combining this evolving geographic content with other enterprise and cloud-based data in the COP gives all responders, from command-and-control down to the feet-on-the-street, the context and insight they need to make the critical assessments and decisions that are central to effective crisis management. Pairing the SpatialWiki’s strengths with the COP creation strengths of Visual Fusion Server and Visual Fusion Experience offers unprecedented speed and flexibility in building and maintaining a highly visual composite application to address a specific crisis.
As an example, responders to a hostage/bomb threat at the Millennium Dome in London could use SpatialWiki to quickly define land and water blockade locations (red lines below), a command and control area (yellow polygon), an equipment staging area (green polygon), a press area (aqua polygon), a blockade checkpoint (blue pushpin), etc.
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It takes just a few minutes to create this in SpatialWiki and it can be updated continuously as the event unfolds. SpatialWiki can be set up to save back to a SharePoint Library, and then this SharePoint Library content can be combined with other enterprise and cloud-based data in a composite application with Visual Fusion. As the SharePoint Library updates, the view in the composite application automatically updates. This seamless integration between the SpatialWiki’s collaborative content creation with the resultant COP view is extremely powerful in the hands of crisis responders.
2. Playback of Event Details
One cool outgrowth of the content versioning inherent in the SpatialWiki is that the situational view can be replayed after the fact to get a sense of how things evolved over time. Diligently adding metadata to the spatial features and using pushpins generally to add comments to the map as events unfold can all be reviewed later as part of a lessons learned or examination of “what decisions were made when based on what information”. Beginning with the initial SpatialWiki entry in the history and stepping through each subsequent update will tell a compelling story of what the responders knew and when they knew it.
3. Event Management
Similar to crisis management, an organization can do planning for a known event in the future. Defining areas, locations, and routes in a way that the broader organization can access them and easily update them when necessary is extremely valuable.
4. General Security
Facilities and other physical assets within an organization can all benefit from having security related content mapped and stored in an easily accessible repository. Video camera locations, guard posts, nearby police stations, nearby hospitals, planned evacuation routes, staging areas for people and equipment, etc. can all bring value when visualized as part of an overall security planning effort.
5. General Spatial Content Creation & Warehousing
SpatialWiki is the easiest tool on the market to create and maintain spatial data. An average person within the organization can immediately begin using the tool to create and update spatial content that is relevant and meaningful as a standalone map overlay or as part of a larger Visual Fusion composite application. No special training is necessary and no complicated interface is in the way to trip up the non-geospatial-specialist.
6. Content Creation for SQL Server 2008
A very specific use case for SpatialWiki is the painless creation of content for use with the spatial capabilities of SQL Server 2008. Right now DBA’s searching for ways to leverage these capabilities are at a loss to quickly and easily populate the database with useable spatial content. Whether it’s finding utilities to translate proprietary formats into WKB or trying to figure out what WGS 84 is and why it’s relevant, there have been many hurdles to getting spatial data into SQL Server 2008. With SpatialWiki this is no longer an issue. Users can easily export drawings as SQL Server 2008 scripts that can be uploaded into the database as spatial content.
7. Defining Areas Rather than Points
Often times the location-based assets of an organization are better defined as areas on the map as opposed to points on the map. Drawing out shipping yards, or plant grounds, or even sales territories are all obviously better defined as areas rather than points. SpatialWiki makes the creation and editing of these areas a trivial task.
8. Thematic Shading of Persistent Regions
One fun and informative thing to do with the SpatialWiki is to branch a drawing of persistent regions and then edit the color shading of those regions based on a variable. For instance, taking a drawing of the United States with each State represented as an individual polygon, I can quickly go through and shade the States based on the 2004 presidential election results, and then modify a new branch to show the 2000 election results, etc.
[click on the image to enlarge]
Similarly, I could quickly shade branched versions of my organization’s sales regions based on quarterly revenue or any other metric. This is very viable for a quick view of a limited set of data, but a longer term approach would involve porting the area geometry from the States or sales regions into SQL Server (along with the relevant data to shade the geometries), and then using Visual Fusion to display the shaded area geometries based on the underlying values inside a slick user interface. This would empower a more automated process than the manual process that is viable in SpatialWiki. Either way, the end result is quick, meaningful communication to an intended audience.
These are just a few use cases John and I came up with off the tops of our heads, and I’m sure the Visual Fusion user community will come up with many, many more as they incorporate SpatialWiki into their Visual Fusion workflows.
