It was just a few weeks ago that I was wondering out loud why more organizations weren't leveraging Virtual Earth in city planning applications. VE is a great web based visualization platform for GIS data. Actually, in that post I half answer my own question pointing out that the vast majority of this data is in Esri shape files and ArcSDE. Making this process easier is definitely an area the VE team needs to improve, but in the meanwhile tools like Arc2Earth, MapCruncher and MapDotNet Server ** are making great progress for us.

So it was timely to see this post from Chris Pendleton roll through my news reader this afternoon highlighting the recently completed web GIS redevelopment project for Boston by San Francisco based Farallon Geographics. Totally sick looking application that I'd like to try out, but will have to be content with this nice set of screengrabs for now. Definitely check it out- very impressive looking application leveraging Birds Eye imagery, 3d navigation, vector drawing, and raster overlays. Farallon's system interfaces with Arc GIS server and ArcSDE allowing the project data entered by staff to be instantly available to all city employees. It isn't clear if they leveraged one of the tools mentioned above or built from the ground up, but I hope to learn more about this application in the coming days.  

** James Fee installed the latest version of MapDotNet Server and is trialing it. See his first impression here.