Category: Thoughts

I just spent the last hour trying to help someone over instant messenger perform some GIS analysis using ArcView. Lets just say the hoops you have to jump through to get ArcView to accomplish tasks that are actually simple in ArcInfo is aggravating. I know many people have ArcView and try and use some 3rd party tools to do but lets get this out on the table; ArcView is a viewer, ArcEditor is for editing Geodatabases and ArcInfo is for GIS analysis. I don’t think ESRI has been as vocal enough with their users, telling them not to use ArcView as an analysis tool, as they should be. As the new Geoprocessing tools take off in 9.2, you are really shortchanging yourself by not upgrading to ArcInfo if at all possible. Actually lets be honest here, with the new Cartography tools at 9.2 you’ll want to have an ArcEditor license anyway to create these new cartographic features, otherwise you are just going to be on the outside looking in.

At a minimum any serious GIS Analyst using ESRI software needs a copy of ArcEditor to do their job. Yes you can hack your way though a job just using an ArcView, but if you work in an ESRI shop and stuck on ArcView, I’d be spending this summer working on figuring out how to upgrade my copy of ArcView to at least ArcEditor to be ready for when ArcGIS 9.2 arrives.

It has been a crazy week so far and I apologize for the lack of posts. I hope to be back on track tomorrow.

We are working on a regional master plan and I had to create a map using some GIS data that was given to us by various governmental agencies. In the pile of shapefiles was a dataset showing future transportation corridors, simple enough to add to a map or so I thought. I couldn’t get the map to look anything like that was on the website where we got the dataset from. After spinning my wheels for a little bit, I went ahead and called the organization to find out how to use this simple dataset. Most of the fields were blank so I couldn’t figure out how to query the dataset to get it to appear correctly. After talking with the GIS manager he remembered that particular layer and told me to calculate the field named “YES” = ‘no’.

Of course on closer look, you’ll notice that YES can also equal ‘ ‘ or ‘ye’ (the text field is only 2 characters so YES will never equal ‘yes’). I need to reach for some aspirin right. 😀

I was fooling around with the feedparser and I seem to have added the img tag as acceptable by mistake. I’ve fixed that and next time PlanetGS builds, there will be no more images to clutter up the aggregator.

I’ve been having tons of trouble with Blogger feeds and I was tweaking the python script in hopes of improving the non-standard atom feed that it uses. Doesn’t seem like I solved anything so I’ll put the old feedparser back in.

Looks like ESRI has totally revamped their beta website to make it more like a community and with forums that are much easier to navigate and search. If you haven’t logged into the beta site, you should probably do so and check it out. Heck they even have blogs on there and you can even subscribe to the forums via RSS so you won’t miss anything. Pretty slick.

Hmm, yea I used Geographic Exploration System again in one of my posts. Once you start using the term you can’t stop (kinda like “consume web services”).

Well beyond all that I saw that Arizona State University has a Java program called JMARS (Java Mission-planning and Analysis for Remote Sensing) which “provides easy access to many different Mars data sets, including MOC, MOLA and THEMIS, and allows the user to combine these into a single image”. JMARS supports Java Web Start so you can launch right from your web browser. In typical Java frustration though it requires J2SE 1.4.2 and of course I had 1.5.x only. Once you get that figured out is a really impressive way to view raster information from Mars.

One really interesting feature is that new datasets are constantly being added to JMARS because the Mars Odyssey spacecraft is still taking THEMIS pictures of the surface. You can also load shapefiles, GML or even ASCII (assuming you have such files for Mars).

I know everyone can’t bear to read another Yahoo!/Google Local/Live Local/Ask.com/Mapquest review but here is one.

Brian Flood says a trial version of Arc2Earth is available for those who want to test it out. Now you have no excuse not to try out the most impressive ArcGIS to KML “converter” out there.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t even taken a quick look at this shapefile to KML converter Shape2Earth by Tim Beermann, but some might want to check it out. Unlike many of the GIS to KML products I’m familiar with, this one doesn’t seem to need ArcGIS to get its data into Google Earth making it a pretty good choice for those not running ESRI’s ArcGIS. One good new feature in this beta I can see is that Shape2Earth will project on the fly so you don’t need to worry about making sure all your data is in WGS84.

I’ve been playing around with the NASA World Wind shapefile “import” tool and its not exactly as easy to use as I would have hoped. I can’t see how in its current form that my clients would be able to use it, but hopefully as the project continues the tool will become more robust and easier to use.

I noticed in my aggregator this morning there was a post about Mapdex and how it has done a wonderful job of indexing web map servers on O’Reilly Radar. Jeremy has noted similar problems with the web map servers on his blog before.

Of course the O’Reilly self promotion is really in full force getting ready for Where 2.0.

…it’s good to see the geospatial industry taking its first steps towards Where 2.0, with the Internet connecting everything.

Apparently us professional GIS types are just beginning to understand how the Internet connects everything and we can thank the good folks at O’Reilly for showing us how to do it. PLEASE!

In contrast to my post yesterday about the ArcGIS Explorer public beta (this snapshot release is a closed beta), a new “snapshot 1” beta is available for download from the ESRI beta site to those in the 9.2 beta program. I don’t see any release notes, but it appears to be similar to the version demoed at the Developer Summit last month. I guess keep an eye out on the ESRI beta forums for what is new and what to test as this is a closed beta so you can’t get any info from this blog.

Update – Actually the “What’s New” has been posted to the ESRI beta forums in the ArcGIS Explorer section. Take a look.