RE: CAP Visualization (was RE: CAP Developers' Forum...)

["Kon Wilms" <kon.wilms@ndsamericas.com>]

> The idea of visualizing aggregate CAP traffic is an interesting one.
> The <references> and <incidents> fields provide a mechanism for
> associating multiple messages in a graph... provided that the
> originator provides them, or that some reliable mechanism can be
> devised for inferring such relationships after the fact.  As is so
> often the case, the holdup appears to be at the input.

What I've done for now (as a test scenario) is to take the NWS emwin
data and visualize it by breaking it into entities based on state,
county, and some other drilldowns. I have a basic 3d hyperbolic view
that can be manipulated by the user, and new entities can be added and
visually flagged as they arrive dynamically. It's a good alternative to
flagging counties on a map for each weather event (even though we're
doing that too..) and cuts down on drilldown time for a user. Anyway
that's just my 2c.
 
> (Of course, relationships could be built on the basis of sender,
> event category or whatever, but it seems like in most cases the
> result would be a simple set that might not be very interesting
> visually, except perhaps when displayed geographically.)

With the sheer glut of data possible, it makes good sense to give the
user vis options. Unfortunately I have found that some vis approaches
have been patented.
 
> As for mapping, I've done a couple of demos plotting CAP location
> data over a map... I used an open-source platform called OpenMap that
> reads various formats including ESRI shape files, but a commercial
> GIS would work as well if not better.  The ComCARE team (in
> particular, a company called GeoDecisions out of Pennsylvania) has
> also done CAP plots in a web mapping service.

Our initial client version used a faked webservice hack to get a
standard version of MapPoint to act as a webservice but we've opted for
native code in the application -- which also cuts down on bloat
(MapPoint has a tendency to grow to your max ram size with each
successive query and only then throttle itself). Anyway the client
application has recently been moved to a native vector/raster plotter
with support for MIF and SHP files, so that is good to hear.

> The CAP <polygon> tag, in particular, is derived from GML, so
> GML-aware platforms should be able to use it pretty directly...
> although extracting the points and constructing a new shape is pretty
> easy.  <geocode> values require the use of polygon lookup tables...
> easy in the case of well-known areas like ZIP codes or county (FIPS)
> boundaries... less so in the case of system-specific zones that may
> not be familiar to all recipients.

Thanks I will keep that in mind.

Cheers
Kon


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