Category: Thoughts

OK, well I have heard of it. Still I’ve never run across it in my professional experience. Guess that makes me less than serious about GIS. shrug

Actually I have one more confession to make. I’ve never used it or installed it in my life.

Steve Citron-Pousty wonders if there are too many barriers to using open source GIS for the average user, especially those already knee deep in the ESRI suite. Steve’s got some good points that I’ve heard from some of our clients when we’ve proposed open source solutions (well some, I’ve gotten a couple hooked on FWTools).

I’ll play devils advocate here and say that if someone really wanted to go open source, they could just take their ESRI maintenance costs and apply that to a consultant who could help them deploy open source correctly. Technically that is the same as paying ESRI for maintenance/support. Rather than calling up Redlands, you’d just call up Canada.

**Update – **Steve wrote up a response to some of the discussion

We had a little rain last night so I figured I’d spend my morning looking for ways to bring Doppler radar imagery into ArcMap. There are of course a ton of ways (and at 9.2 you’ll have even more), but one simple ArcScript caught my eye. NOAA/NWS WEATHER FOR ArcGIS 9.X gives ArcMap users access some some nice NOAA/NWS radar imagery. Simplicity I think is what caught my eye (Of course I’d rather just add a WMS service, but that will have to wait) and sometimes that is the best way to be productive.

click for larger view

Zooomr has a nice geotagging feature, but Flickr alas doesn’t (at least an official one, yet). But that hasn’t stopped people from geotagging their Flickr photos. On the heals of his Localize Bookmark for Flickr, Aemkei has released loc.alize.us using the Google Map and Flickr APIs. If you use his Localize Bookmark tool, your photos will appear almost instantly in the viewer. I think this is the best geotag browser so far.

Both Adena and Jason hit the big points about this bundle release, but I thought I’d chime in. From the press release:

“Incorporating Google Earth Pro into our Autodesk Government Geospatial Solution creates a complete workflow for government agencies,” said Dave Rhodes, vice president of Autodesk Government. “The powerful combination enables professional GIS staff to more easily share complex, precision data with a wide audience of non-technical colleagues and partners that need to leverage that data in a variety of geospatially-enabled business projects.”

Kinda sounds like Autodesk is answering ArcGIS 9.2 (specifically ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Explorer) and at a cheaper price. I wonder how long until this bundle is available for non-governmental organizations.

Oh and check out that press release, Autodesk has been working on the Web 2.0 lingo.

Chad Zimmerman has posted some wonderful screenshots of NASA World Wind 1.4. Go over to Chad’s blog and take a look.

The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator is not a bad idea for those who want to talk like they understand Web 2.0. I’m glad to see that the words “consume” and “rich client” are not on the generator. Guys at ESRI can still use them with impunity!

I just noticed that ESRI now has a REST API Lab over at the ArcWeb Services webpage. New features include turning vector layers on and off and the ability to request raster tile maps. Most people are probably better suited to use the ArcWeb Explorer JavaScript API over this, but those who want to interact with AWS directly might want to take a look. The previous web REST documentation was lacking so this is very welcomed.

I guess I freaked out a couple ArcIMS folks with some of my posts this week. Don’t worry, ArcIMS is not going anywhere and will still be an integral part of the ESRI Server product family. 9.2 could be the last big release for ArcIMS, but I don’t think that is a bad thing. Remember, you no longer need to use those wacky Java admin tools, its all web based now and looks great. There are also improvements to ArcMap Server that will fix some weird bugs. Plus you get access to the new web ADF for .NET and Java so you can ditch the old HTML viewer. Actually if you do like the old HTML viewer, there have been improvements to that so you can continue to use that also. And one big change is something one of my clients will be very happy about:

Take advantage of improved security for served vector data. Image and ArcMap Image Services will not include geometry by default in the response to GET_FEATURES requests if the output mode is binary. With this change, ArcMap cannot be used to download vector data served in ArcIMS without the knowledge of the service provider.

Some seemed to have been taken back by the ArcInfo 7 reference Jack made toward ArcIMS. That isn’t a bad thing as Workstation is still going strong at 9.2 and I’d suspect ArcIMS will be going strong for years to come.

OK so how does all this now ESRI server stuff fit into the big picture? Well lets take Declan Butler’s wonderful avian flu outbreak informationn map. Declan used ArcGIS to create his map and then Arc2Earth to export that map to KML. This works great when for Declan because he’s just using this as an example/demo, but if you really want to share up to the minute information with digital earth clients, this model breaks down because it only gets updated when Declan manually uses Arc2Earth. Now lets say Declan had a nice big server running ArcGIS Server, he could serve this data up in a couple ways.

First off he could use the new cartographic tools in 9.2 to make a very visually pleasing map and serve up the the ArcGIS Server service for ArcGIS (ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Explorer, Web ADF) clients (both desktop and web) to consume (because if anyone has ever seen an ArcGIS Server demo, “rich clients” consume). Anyway that covers your ESRI users, but what about the rest of the world? Well you can offer up a KML network link that Google Earth users (World Wind and others too) can connect to. This KML won’t be as visually pleasing or as full featured as the AGS service, but it will be usable by many more people. In addition to the normal AGS service and the KML service, you can also offer up a WMS service for other users who would like the WMS option. So from one server product, you can cover almost all the spectrum (except for those people who want WFS, you can talk to Jeremy). And because it is “live”, you don’t need to worry about exporting it out every time there is a change.

OK so that picture is a little idyllic. I have no idea how much hardware would be needed to accomplish such a task and of course Declan on his own could never afford the hardware/software requirements for such an endeavor. Still if you think about how many organizations will now have access to ArcGIS Server because of the changes to the licensing, you can only hope that users of this new technology will want to share their data via KML, WMS or AGS for the community to integrate into their digital earth clients.

The days of using the standard ArcIMS HTML client are over and I think even to just assume the community at large will be happy with the new web ADF on its own is shortsighted. Giving people a choice of how to consume your services is the best way to ensure people actually use them.