Spatially Adjusted

Category: Thoughts

  • City of Portland integrates Google Maps into their Property Search

    Link – Portland Maps Advanced Search

    I’ve given Google Maps mashups a hard time because I don’t see too much value in many of them. I don’t need a mashup showing me where all the Starbucks are located since they are on every corner. But, some people are really started to figure out how to use Google Maps and create mashups that really add value to their websites. Take the City of Portland’s Advanced Property Search tool, it is much like any search you’d see from a large city, but it now gives you a map view showing where your search results are from. Simplicity is what works and this really is integrated well. If you need more detailed results, you can still drill down into their detailed ArcGIS server maps. The search tool also allows you to save your results into Excel ( including centroid coordinates
    in lat/long!) and Philip Holmstrand let me know they plan to offer Google Earth KML links soon.

    The team over at PortlandMaps should be congratulated for really pushing the envelope on their web based mapping. They’ve been able to utilize ArcGIS Server, Google Maps and Google Earths to try and get their GIS out to as many people as possible. Search is something that is always really hard to get right (I know, I’ve struggled with coding them for years), but Portland Maps gets it right.

    Portland maps search

  • Better Than Buying an Ad

    I’ve been critical of companies uploading commercial products into ArcScripts, but now they are uploading the same file more than once. Sure they use the excuse of German vs. English to give them reason to upload the file twice, but we all know they shouldn’t be doing it anyway and it says that you can’t upload demo software to the site so I can only conclude they did this for commercial reasons. I mean, why pay for an ad on a website or GIS magazine when you can put it right on ESRI’s site. And a trip to their website, you quickly see that their site runs so slow. Moving the downloads to ESRI’s servers should help with the speed. Why pay for your own bandwidth when ESRI can host the file for you?

    More commercial software

    The first screen when you upload your file you see the following.

    Upload script

    Even if you are color blind, I assume these companies can read. The only conclusion is they are marketing their products using a service from ESRI, that has a goal of allowing GIS professionals to freely share programs and scripts they have created so that others can benefit. No wonder most of us don’t like using it anymore.

  • Putting ArcIMS Services into Google Maps

    Link – ArcIMS to Google Maps…

    have debated with myself and others about if and how we should publish our large raster datasets within the Google Maps framework. State and local governments have large amounts of high quality aerial photography, often much better than what Google Maps provides. But how do small government agencies deal with the massive computing infrastructure of Google? One of the reasons people like Google Maps is that it is a fast, seamless repository of imagery (high quality in some areas, very low in others). The speed for Google Maps lies in the tiling scheme. Unfortunately the Google Map API does not allow (currently) a way to overlay an image that spans multiple tiles, if it is an image then it must conform to the tiling system. Google Earth is much different. I and others have shown how relatively easy it is to pass a network link containing ground overlays that span large areas on top of Google Earth’s base data. This is not the case for Google Maps (at least not that I have been able to see).

    Jeremy has a great example of taking data you are serving out of ArcIMS and putting into a Google Maps page. There are many parts of the country that don’t have good satellite coverage in Google Maps so taking some DOQQs and serving them up can help with any Google Maps mashups you are working on. Jeremy also went into some of the details on how this works so click through to find out more.

  • Multi-Dimensional Imagery from NOAA is back up

    Link – Multi-Dimensional Imagery from NOAA

    The site is back up and running so if you want to check out the latest multi-dimensional imagery, now is the time.

    Hurricane Rita Satellite NOAA

  • Jeff Thurston tries to figure out web mapping API details

    Jeff Thurston looked closely at the Google Maps API terms and didn’t like what he saw. I’d guess most people haven’t thought too much about what it means to use Google Maps for their products, mostly because you still charge users for anything you create with it. Hopefully Jeff hasn’t scratched a hole in his head yet thinking about the implications of “free” services from a publicly traded company.

  • Controlling ArcWeb Visible Layers in PHP

    Link – ArcWeb and PHP – Controlling visible layers

    Walt Eis has posted a simple method to control what layers display on your ArcWeb Public Services. Walt has really taken off on ArcWeb over the past few weeks, with many great examples on how to use PHP and ArcWeb together.

  • Canada to Abandon Topo Maps?

    Link – Canadian Government Abandoning Paper Topo Maps?

    The Canadian government wants to get out of the business of producing paper topographical maps, according to an e-mail from World of Maps president Brad Green. As of January 2007, when the lease on the Canada Map Office’s warehouse expires, the CMO will be closed down; instead, the Centre for Topographical Information will make the vector data available to third parties to print their own maps.

    Yikes! I can’t tell you how valuable topo/quad maps are to me as a GIS professional to check accuracy of many vector and raster datasets I get. While the information on the maps can be decades out of date, the general topology and hydrography of the maps usually is not. I know every time I grad a quad map, I can pretty much get any lat/long coordinates of almost any feature anywhere in the country. The problem with letting 3rd parties create these maps is that every topo/quad map looks exactly the same, they all have the same symbols and they every map of the same area will be exactly alike. Everyone (not just those in Canada) should keep an eye on The Map Room as Jonathan Crowe plans to research more into this situation. Hopefully this won’t come to fruition. I’ve got quite the collection of paper and DRG quad maps for most of where I’ve worked over the years and now I’ll begin to protect them more as I don’t doubt that the USGS could follow such a path especially if the White House continues to cut their budgets. I view paper topo/quad map production as the responsibility of the government, not the private sector.

  • The Latest View of Rita

    I’ve got family in the Austin area so I’m very happy to see that the hurricane will be well to the east of them, but it looks like Houston will be getting more than before. The ESRI Hurricane Disaster Viewer is a great tool to keep up to date on the path. The live web services that ESRI is using is wonderful, I can’t imagine how all this will be when ArcExplorer is out and ESRI starts leveraging all this data inside ArcWeb.

    Rita path

  • Jeff Archer – ArcGIS Server Product Manger

    In case you don’t already subscribe to his RSS feed, Jeff Archer posted a small bio about himself and how he ended up as the Product Manager for ArcGIS Server. I’ve never met Jeff as unfortunately our workload hasn’t included much ArcGIS server beyond a few projects, but if you do use Server you should definitely bookmark his blog as I’m sure he’d be a great resource to any ArcGIS questions or any wish list items you’d have.

    I have one big wish Jeff, combine ArcGIS Server and ArcIMS into one product. Two server solutions just confuses the marketplace. Much like ArcView became the “low end” of ArcGIS Desktop, ArcIMS would be the entry to ArcGIS Server. It seems silly to at least me as a developer to keep them split anymore.

  • Multi-Dimensional Imagery of Hurricane Rita

    Link – Multi-Dimensional Imagery from NOAA

    Multi-Dimensional Imagery from polar orbiting and geostationary satellites at NOAA really gives you a sense of depth in these hurricanes. I wonder if this time next year if we’ll see 3D live models of hurricanes in Google Earth and ArcExplorer. Until then, bookmark this site for incredible pictures (high res photos available after the jump).

    Rita