Category: Thoughts

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.

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

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.

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.

I get this email from time to time from a blogger who’s says their feed isn’t being displayed correctly in Planet Geospatial. Before they even tell me the feed, I pretty much know what they are talking about:

Any time a blog that is running on Blogger posts an image, it gets screwed up by Planet Geospatial. My RSS parser cannot handle how the “non-standard” Blogger Atom feed displays images, so you end up with the picture above. There are two ways to fix this. First you can move off of blogger and on to a better blog platform (WordPress.com, Typepad, Vox) or provide a FeedBurner feed that fixes the problem. Glen moved his AnyGeo blog back to blogger but I didn’t really care even though the Opera blog platform had good RSS support because he offered a FeedBurner feed. You’ll see his posts from blogger render perfectly.

So if you are using Blogger, do yourself a favor and offer up a FeedBurner feed. Plus if you ever do move off of Blogger, no one will have to resubscribe to you feed because you can just update FeedBurner yourself.

I’d respond on AllpointsBlog.com, but Adena is still trying to figure out why I can’t post there. Guess I’m just a spammer Adena!

You have to leave it to James Fee AKA Lefty AKA Anonymous to divert traffic from this website and milk the conversation for more ad click pennies!

Honestly James, when you can claim and rightly so to a certain degree, that Archive.org archives snapshots of “what people were doing (with their websites) in the past” (your words), surely WHOIS can also help find that. Try this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whois). I am sorry to see that you have little idea of how websites are registered- maybe website hosting is not your thing. Anyways, there is little need to “take pride in the fact that a Google search for ‘adjusted’ results in my blog as the top result” (your words and your need for an ego massage!). Why? Because a more likely reason is the relative number of websites with ‘adjusted’ either in the name or title.

Given what you reveal about your old-school knowledge of the internet, try being “with it” (your words) and some “spatial readjustment” (my words).

But glad to see you finally agreeing with us and beginning to appreciate the poly-centric “yada yada” (your words): “…there are tons of people who have no clue who the heck I am or even that I have a blog. I might have lots of readers in our little circle, but in the grand scheme of GIS as a whole I’m not even a blip on the screen” (your words).

And to think of it, I didn’t even know your blog until last week.

So please get back to this website, away from your spin zone and the comforts of your coterie and please don’t hide behind a pseudo name to post your reply. Thanks James Fee AKA Lefty AKA Anonymous AKA
aggregating-since-whenever.

Lorrie

7 Lorriana on 2006-08-04 12:28 (Reply)

Actually I have no response, I just wanted to make sure the world got to see this unstable comment. As Steve would say, “Don’t feed the troll!” Maybe it is a good thing I can’t post on AllPointsBlog right now.

For those who haven’t seen, the QGIS team has a blog called QGIS Ramblings.

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…

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.

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.