Spatially Adjusted

Category: Thoughts

  • About Google Maps hackers just don’t get it – “It’s all moot”

    From the comments about Google Maps Hackers:

    It’s all moot. Hardly anyone, including the GIS professionals, attaches metadata anyways. Even when you do, nobody else knows what do with it.

    Actually ESRI does include metadata with their ArcWeb Services datasets. Take a look at the U.S Street Map Service metadata page. This information is available for every ArcMap service. But it isn’t just ESRI. Geodata.gov has extensive metadata as well as other providers of data (when you get satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe, they give it to you).

    Before the API was released, it really wasn’t a big deal to know how up to date the information is on these web mapping services, but now that they have opened up the API, publishers need to know how relevant the information is before investing time in Google Maps. Do the hackers care? Maybe not, but if they expect professionals to ever develop using the Google Maps API, this will have to change. ESRI’s ArcWeb does offer this and I suspect when AWS 2005 is released will reap the benefits of having their metadata available for every data layer they offer.

  • Google Maps hackers just don’t get it

    [on my high horse]
    I wrote up a long rant about how ignorant these Google Maps hackers were to think that one should obfuscate history on old imagery, but I decided to delete that post because I don’t think they can handle it. [/on my high horse]

    Look, stick to making great hacks and leave the back end GIS source to professionals. There isn’t anything wrong with the images that MSN Virtual Earth uses. Sure they are old, but a great GIS database includes time and historic aerial/satellite imagery is wonderful to see changes in places. If there isn’t a better reason to keep investing in GIS professionals that post on Google Maps Mania, I can’t think of one.

    Rather than tune out Jack Dangermond at Where 2.0, you guys need to listen to what he is saying about this stuff because you might learn a thing or two about GIS. The power of products such as Google Maps is in more than just an easy to use API. It’s the data behind the server and without GIS professionals, you’ll end up with what happened at MSN Virtual Earth on launch (no metadata available to tell users the data was old) and Google Maps hackers (wanting to reduce the accuracy of datasets).

    Update – Let me just add that Google Maps doesn’t have metadata attached to their imagery either. The copyright says 2005, but that doesn’t mean that the images date from 2005. At least were I live they date from about late 2002/early 2003. Google too should let users know how old the imagery is.

  • David Maguire Announces ArcPad 7 Beta

    Link – ArcPad 7 Beta

    David lets us know that ArcPad 7 beta is out and he’s got some details on his blog. Honestly I don’t really see the point of ArcPad anymore, this kind of stuff should be done on the server, rather than on PDA’s (and this is from someone that used to be an admin on a very large PDA site). I’m sure there is still demand from existing customers, but PDA’s are such a small market and their growth has slowed to the point that I don’t see anyone wanting to get into the marketplace. Smartphones are the future and the better choice for ESRI would be to migrate ArcPad support into ArcGIS Engine so anyone can develop applications for both PDA’s and Smartphones. ArcPad is on an island by itself and I don’t see ArcPad 7 changing that.

    update – fixed a sentence to make more sense

  • Creating your first ArcWeb mashup

    Link – Making an ArcWeb Mashup

    Andrea’s been really busy over the past few days posting tons of code on how to use ArcWeb Services with Perl, PHP and now he’s posted some code on how to create a simple ArcWeb mashup. He used Perl as most hosting companies support it by default, and you can check out the result here. Don’t forget the online help for ArcWeb is available so you can learn more about what data sources you can use with Public ArcWeb Services.

  • Using ArcWeb Services with Perl and Python

    Yesterday we saw Andrea post about using ArcWeb Services with PHP and now today we have two great posts about using ArcWeb with Perl and Python. First Andrea Rosso again has a great article with code on using Perl to fetch ArcWeb images. I’ve never really worked with Perl other than messing around with Movable Type (the CMS that I use with this blog), but the code is pretty strait forward and my hosting company already has the Perl SOAP modules installed. Andrea was nice enough to post the whole code so make sure you take a look at the bottom of his post.

    If that wasn’t exciting enough, Sean Gillies posted today about using Python with ArcWeb. Seans example also includes the code so you can start playing around with Python and ArcWeb. Sean ran into a little trouble getting his Public ArcWeb Services activated, but in the end he was able to work it out and returned an image.

    Sure, these great code examples won’t make you forget that one has to use SOAP, but at least you can get better acquainted with how the requests work so when REST arrives with AWS 2005 you’ll be ready to go.

  • ArcMap 9.2 and GeoChat

    Link – GeoChat (Integration of GIS and IM)

    What is a GeoChat Layer?
    A geochat layer can be created by any ArcMap user. The layer creator can add one or more MSN contacts to the layer. When the layer creator sends a text/geometry/imagery message to the layer all recipients (that are running ArcMap + geochat) will be “pushed” the layer and the associated message. All contacts are then free to send messages. Note that all geochat communication is peer to peer (P2P). One nice feature of geochat layers is that they can be used in the geoprocessing environment!

    GoeChat was mentioned a little bit at the ESRI User Conference, but unfortunately I was never really able to find anything more in detail. Well Richie has a great post about how the product works as well as some nice screen shots of it in action.

  • Via Virtual Earth adds Test Methods Page

    Link – VE MapControl Test

    Via Virtual Earth has added a test page that shows methods on the MapControl and how to use them. I like the concept of this page and how easy it is to visualize how you want your code to work.

    map_methods.jpg

  • Using ArcWeb Services with PHP

    Link – Using ArcWeb with PHP

    Andrea Rosso has posted a quickstart guide to using ArcWeb Services with PHP. He goes into great detail about how to accomplish this so if you have been in interested in getting started with Public ArcWeb Services, but aren’t a Java, JSP or .NET fan, now you’ve go no excuse. Of course as with everything PHP it isn’t quite as easy as it sounds, but anyone with intermediate knowledge of web servers and programming should be able to follow the instructions.

  • RSS Feeds Changed

    I’m not sure what was happening, but my .htaccess file was all screwed up and some feeds were not updating. I’m sorry for the confusion, but it looks like an update I applied to Movable Type was causing the problems. For most people this isn’t an issue as the vast majority have already been using correct feed, but check your RSS URLs anyway.

    For now I’ve removed all of them except for the following which everyone should use from now on.

    http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/rss

  • Keeping up to date with ArcWeb Services

    There has been a couple times where I’ve wondered what has been added to ArcWeb Services and/or what changes have been made. Well inside the online help is a “What’s new page” with all that information. It hasn’t been updated since May, but maybe that is because the focus right now is upon AWS 2005.