Author: James

I had quite a bit of business realated matters to get to today so I didn’t get much time to go to any sessions or walk the floor. I hope to get back on track tomorrow. Still Planet Geospatial has done a kick-ass job of keeping me up to date even though I’m standing right here.

I did learn a couple things about ArcGIS Server. First if you want to do geoprocessing, you’ll need at least an ArcGIS Server Standard license. This gives you all the GP functionality of ArcView. If you need more, then you’ll need to go to AGS Advanced. Basic has no GP at all. The licensing is a little confusing for some still, but there is a good slide going around explaining it all. I’ll see if I can track that down and post on it this week. Even though they are combining ArcGIS Server/ArcIMS/ArcSDE, you’ll still get individual disks for all and licenses for all so you can still install them in different locations.

As for PostgreSQL support for SDE, lets just say they are still quite a ways away and even then I’m pretty sure there will be no PostGIS involved.

I’m heading out to the Open Source GIS San Diego Gathering tonight so I hope to see some of you there.

The default web mapping client looks great (AJAX, caching). You can work with multiple services at once. WMS, ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server can all be integrated (projection the fly and transparency) as well as ArcWeb Services. Publishing maps with ArcGIS Server is really easy to do. From inside ArcCatalog all you have to do is right click and select publish. Then you can open them up in ArcGIS Explorer. So if you’ve invested all that time creating your ArcMap documents, you can easily share them with users around the world with ArcGIS Explorer (well and ArcGIS Server).

(side note, someone should sell this service for users who don’t have access to an ArcGIS Server)

Of course you can still create custom applications with ArcGIS Server (and you no longer need ArcCatalog to administer AGS). The ArcGIS Server Manager looks so much more polished than what I’ve seen before (I guess we are getting close to the final release). The real power of AGS is the cartographic capabilities. The maps that get generated are just visually impressive. The online editing tools great. Using AJAX you can digitize right on the web client and they get added to your Geodatabase. (you can even snap to existing data layers). Oh and all this can be done with zero programming on the server side.

Replicating SDE between two different locations is really easy (Think Oracle and SQL Express). This can even be done over web services and ArcGIS Server. As easy as clicking on a Synchronize button, you then send the data back and forth. Our company has tons of small offices and sharing SDE Geodatabases has been quite a bit of work for us, now it is very easy.

Just as easy as ArcMap documents, you can publish models to the Internet right out of ArcCatalog. So from inside ArcGIS Explorer you can connect to these model services and use them. So agencies can share these models and allow others to use them (they didn’t mention but I assume you can use these in ArcMap/ArcCatalog also). Sharing models has never really taken off so maybe this will be the kick that gets it started.

Well I’m sitting at the plenary ready to hear what Jack has to say. The setup seems the same as last year, widescreens everywhere.

Directions and information are available at the link below. Even if you aren’t using much open source, meetups like this can be very valuable in your professional growth. Even if you don’t or can’t use open source GIS, you’ll probably have to learn how to share data with it. I’ll be there as I still have much growth needed in open source GIS. Remember it is a very simple trip on the Trolley from downtown San Diego.

Open Source GIS San Diego Gathering (OSG-SD) – Tuesday, August 8th, 6:30pm

It is somewhat hard to blog about Jack’s talks. I’ll just focus on some big points he made and leave some of the details for the rest of the week. First off Jack reiterated that 9.2 is the biggest release since 8.0 and apologized for problems with their software in the past. He then went directly into ArcGIS server and how it is changing how ESRI operates. While his did say that ArcIMS 9.2 was almost a total rewrite, he did compare it ArcInfo 7 being supported when ArcGIS 8 arrived. If you have ArcSDE maintenance, you’ll get a copy of ArcGIS Server Basic, if you have ArcIMS maintenance, you’ll get ArcGIS Server Standard and if you have an existing ArcGIS Server maintenance you’ll get ArcGIS Server Advanced.

It has been quite a few years since I was really amazed at seeing something demonstrated at the Plenary, but the new cartographic representation tools just blow me a way. Anyone who is using ArcGIS for cartography should be scanning the online training at ESRI for sessions because this is going to revolutionize how we make maps with ArcGIS. Bernie Szukalski demonstrated ArcGIS Explorer including some of the tools ESRI is going to provide to make publishing maps to ArcGIS Explorer very easy (and they will include some impressive maps online to get you started). Visually, the globe is looking more like NASA World Wind than Google Earth, very pretty (but of course it all depends on what you are serving up). Then Jim McKinney showed some of they ways to share ArcGIS data with other applications (GeoMedia, Google Earth) and how one can use SQL to update SDE layers from outside the ArcGIS suite. The KML network link right out of ArcGIS Server was particularly impressive.

Lastly Nick Frunzi showed the new ESRI customer portal. I was pretty harsh on the marketing team for not using ESRI technology, but the support team has really done a great job of giving customers access to their license information, shipping status, tech support calls and bug reports. I’m sure anyone who has tried to manage this stuff on their own will want to give Nick and everyone on the support team a huge hug.

We’ll be getting more into details later this morning so we’ll see more about the new 9.2 stuff an things that I’ve forgotten to mention.

• Keyboard shortcuts for tools (hit “z” for the zoom function)
• Better mouse roller wheel support
• Better context menus
• Customize Map Scale list (1” to 200’, etc)
• Limit Zoom to full extent (stops you from zooming out to the whole world rather than your focus area)
• Right click and identify any feature
• Sort the identify results (or hide fields you don’t want to see)
• Copy and paste right out of identify window
• Hide fields in tables very easily (just double click on them)
• Print attribute tables!
• Right click and calculate areas or length (no more vb code).
• Table navigation mimics Microsoft Excel (word wrapping also)
• Help now includes video tutorials
• Supports CAD documents symbology
• No longer need to set domains in geodatabases or grid size
• You can set by default “relative path” in your map documents rather than have to manually change it every time
• All ArcToolbox tools support batch operations (right click and hit batch)
• File Geodatabase improves performance over Personal Geodatabase (much, much faster)
• Flicker capability (rapidly turn layers on and off to toggle back and forth between datasets)
• Export to PDF now includes named layers (layers tab in Acrobat can now turn on and off the layers right inside the PDF)
• Native support of Excel (add Excel spreadsheets can be added right to the layers list of ArcMap)
• Support for archiving (see changes to geodatabase over time and even use the new animation tools and save movies out to show change over time)
• New graph support (Much easier to make “Excel Quality” graphs from inside ArcMap)
• OH I heard mention of using an Python script and R within your ArcGIS Model

I’ll be honest, I haven’t heard the kind of cheering and clapping that I’ve heard today in a very long time

Well we’ve all been able to geotag in Flickr, but according to this screenshot in the GeoTagging Flickr Pool, we’ll be able to do it natively. I don’t see it in my Flickr menu bar, do you? An astute poster points out a gap in the code that might indicate that they will be rolling it out very soon.

Update – Looks like TechCrunch has some analysis on the issue.

Update 2 – Geobloggers doesn’t help at all.

As the GeoRSS blog pointed out, ESRI is now supporting GeoRSS with the Javascript API. Andrea Rosso let me know that you don’t even need to go to that extent to load GeoRSS into ArcWeb Explorer. Just use the find widget and paste the GeoRSS url right into the search box.

ESRI is only supporting points right now and some GeoRSS feeds don’t work exactly right, but at least it is a start. If you want to use the Javascript API on your own use the location property of the AWLocation object that is passed to findLocation. I’ll post some code maybe later if I get a chance.

I haven’t been part of a presentation at ESRI since probably 1998 so I’m not really full of any hints. My suggestion to those who have asked is bring lots of donuts.

I guess though there are better resources than that, but I can’t think of anything better than donuts to go with my morning coffee.

Reader Erin sent me a link to a comment on a recent post over at AllPointBlog.com.

…give “ya” what- that spatiallink_org was up and running long before? Thanks, but we don’t seek your validation. I and our users have been reading our aggregations since 2004, just run a WHOIS.

And nothing is plain and simple about your subjective, need I add arrogant, claim. For our users, we are the hub and on and on…

Also, ours is a team effort- I don’t go around plastering the internet with an egomaniacal zeal, selfishly promoting myself or my chosen vendor and attempting to make pennies from ad clicks in the process.

The facts speak for themselves: spatiallink_org links professionals from 14 states and 8 countries, partners with not-for-profit agencies, etc. If you and those you know aren’t faintly aware of that, you are not “with it” and/or you don’t know enough people and/or you don’t appreciate the poly-centric nature of our vast professional world.

Yikes back to you!
Lorriana

Honestly this is the first time I’ve ever heard of spatiallink.org. I must not be “with it”, “know enough people” and “don’t appreciate the poly… yada yada yada”…. Talk about arrogant and condescending. I wasn’t subscribed before and I sure won’t now.

Oh and I had no idea that a WHOIS lookup could determine what people were doing in the past with their domain names.

I guess I just need to keep reaching for the stars…