Category: Thoughts

My Wonderful World Blog has a pretty nice entry on the GIS portion of Geography Awareness Week. Not much going on at the GIS Day webpage today but Geography Matters has a detailed post.

I should have gotten a GIS Day cake, but maybe next year.

ArcGIS Explorer Overview

ESRI released a podcast with Bernie Szukalski going over the details of ArcGIS Explorer and plans for the next year. For some reason ESRI doesn’t allow you to permalink to the podcast so when you get to the page pick “Interviews with ESRI Staff and Business Partners” and then you’ll see the podcast or just click on the link below. I’m going to listen to it on the commute home tonight so I’m not really sure what Bernie is going to talk about but I’m sure it will be a good overview of how ArcGIS Explorer will work and maybe where you can download it.

Direct Link to Podcast

Are you still confused about the whole ArcGIS Server Basic/Standard/Advanced mess? Well reader caseahr posted a link to a PDF on ESRI’s website detailing the levels and what functionality you get with them.

OK you guys can stop emailing me. I have no idea where ArcGIS Explorer is. Yes it makes sense that they would release it today, but I haven’t heard anything beyond the “will be available with the rest of ArcGIS 9.2 as the product begins shipping”. Believe me when I say I’ll not know before anyone else.

Comparison of GIS software

A reader who probably enjoys my bashing of Wikipedia sent me an interesting take on the GIS software packages. I’m guessing the person who created the table didn’t have much time to research the system requirements of all the different GIS software packages. Mapserver does run on Windows (I wouldn’t say it “runs” on the web, but then again I’m an ESRI apologist I guess) and “ESRI” does run on GNU/Linux (sorta as I believe only RHEL is supported) and one could say that ArcWeb runs on “the Web”. Don’t get me wrong, the task is very hard, but if you don’t know then don’t put “no” down. Someone care to bail this page out for the sake of GIS Day? Maybe Wikipedia User:Redlands can correct “ESRI”.

Not sure if Hallmark has released any cards for the occasion, but this is Geography Awareness Week. I’ve seen in some of the blogs that Google has a great Geography Awareness Week page with some great sources to people to use. Google even has a nice KMZ that enables you to find Geography Awareness events in your area (is it just me or does that placemark look a little like the OSGeo logo?).

ESRI has their GIS Day page, but it seems to be stuck back in the 1990’s with not much spatial content out on the front page. I’m beginning to wonder if this is more of a marketing gimmick than an actual grassroots educational event; NO references to Google Maps, Google Earth or Virtual Earth 3D on that page. They’d rather you use ESRI branded products which I guess proves my point that this is all about marketing ESRI GIS, rather than GIS as a whole. shrug

That said, there are going to be tons of GIS Day “celebrations” (use Google News to find newspaper articles announcing events in your area as the GIS Day website doesn’t have a good events search page, more of that Web 1.0 stuff) around the world and I’m sure Google Earth will be front and center.

Google’s entry into the Geospatial arena is refreshing.

I got an email from Jeff Harrison, one of the co-founders of the The Carbon Project, letting me know that the powerful Gaia 3 viewer source code will now be part of the new CarbonTools PRO toolkit. For those who haven’t seen Gaia 3, it is a GIS visualization tool that allows you to integrate geospatial data from many, many data sources (Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps, KML/KMZ, GML, WMS, WFS and WCS, Shapefile, Autodesk, Mapinfo and others) and view them on your desktop. The application is pretty incredible on its own, but now anyone can utilize this application because** CarbonTools PRO toolkit includes the Gaia source code**!

As a .NET shop, I’m excited, but it is the end of the year so there isn’t any money left in my development budget, but you can be damn sure I’ll be getting some room in next years budget for CarbonTools PRO toolkit, if just to get a look at that Gaia source code.

ArcGIS 9.2 is showing up to positive reviews. UPS still hasn’t shown up with my copy yet, though it could be due to my high customer number.

**Update – **BAH! More reports of ArcGIS 9.2 and not even in the USA! What is the point of living in America (aka USA) if you can’t get things first?

Looks like at least the ArcGIS Explorer 9.2 beta build I’m running is dead and you can’t download the version anymore from the beta site. I’m guessing that the release is upon us. Who wants to go to http://resources.esri.com/arcgisexplorer/ and start hitting F5?

Frank points out that the Rumsey Historical Maps are available now as new feature content in Google Earth.

ArcGIS Explorer has had this layer “coming soon” for quite some time (though it was active at the 2006 User Conference).

Shame the development of ArcGIS 9.2 has taken so long as this layer seems to have given Jonathan Crowe an early Christmas present. The uniqueness of ArcGIS Explorer seems to get smaller and smaller every passing week.