Roger Tomlinson’s Book, Thinking About GIS, Details GIS Planning for Managers
The revised and updated second edition of this book, which provides planning wisdom for implementing a GIS, is now available from ESRI Press.
If you haven’t read this book and work in the GIS industry, you should go ahead and buy it now. Heck, now it is in paperback making it an even better deal.
I’ve got one heck of a month planned. I start by visiting a client that I haven’t seen in some time to try and help them get a handle on their GIS. They have been so busy during the past year that they have not had much change to make sure their GIS is as compliant as it needs to be. We’ll spend this week trying to prioritize what datasets they need either cleaned up or created and then go from there. I’ll be home a week, but then I travel to a new client to see what we can do to help them with their web based GIS. The implementation needs to be ESRI based, but we might still get to do some interesting things on the backend with Oracle Spatial. After that, I’m home for a week and then it is off to the ESRI User Conference in San Diego. I’m glad I have those weeks in between to clean up loose ends in the office and check on the progress of existing projects.
The title graphic on the top of this blog was found online at the USGS.
Historical Photos of Geographers at Work
The photo dates from circa 1925. I’m going to change the graphic monthly to a different interesting image that somehow relates to GIS, mapping or programming.
I’ve moved from Blogger to TypePad to get better control over the site. You’ll also notice that the web address is now http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com rather than the more complex old address. Make sure you are using the following RSS feed rather than any old ones to make sure you area always up to date.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpatiallyAdjusted
My first vacation in over two years (pretty sad when I have to count the 2003 ESRI User Conference weekend as a vacation) is about to happen. Building a GIS practice from scratch is a lot of work, but I’m glad I had an opportunity to do it, again.
Anyway I’m going to a place that has no phone lines so I won’t be able to check my email at all, what a concept! No GIS for 5 whole days.
OK, maybe not. I’ll have my new bluetooth GPS with my Dell Axim v50. I’m a geographer, what can I say?
Rob Elkins asked me in my previous post about EDN for any suggestion I might have.
EDN is still early in its life and I’m sure ESRI has thought long and hard about most of my suggestions before I even knew about EDN. Personally I love it so far as we have finally gotten into ArcGIS Engine development and we’ve only had it for a little over a week.
One of more intriguing reasons to use UMN MapServer is Ka Map. I’m quite impressed with how it is able to pan and zoom without having to load the whole page. We’ve tried to do as much as we can on the client side of ArcIMS and with Ka Map we can continue that trend.
Since ESRI released ArcIMS 3 a couple years ago, there haven’t been any big changes to the default templates. I’d love to see ESRI offer some new ones on their site for those who can’t hire someone to customize ArcIMS for them or have the to do it themselves. Maybe with the advent of ESRI Developer Network and the Code Exchange we’ll see some more, but I doubt it.
I posted a blog entry moving to a .NET development environment last month and questioned what the possible licensing issues were with ArcGIS Engine. I had searched ESRI’s site to see if there was a definitive answer, but couldn’t really find much. Lucky for me ESRI Product Manager Rob Elkins saw what I wrote and offered to answer my questions. I’ve taken him up on it and he cleared up every question I had, thanks Rob!
Weblogs are great tools for everyone. We can talk about issues that concern us in an open forum and get reaction from other bloggers and just people in general. I decided to start blogging about GIS again because our company was moving our GIS work in two new directions, from COM to .NET and into open source server side GIS. In a closed development environment I wouldn’t have had the great suggestions people have given me about connection to PostGIS and I sure wouldn’t have learned as much as I have about ArcGIS Engine.
ESRI has a couple of bloggers that are in my blogroll, but I sure wish there were more. I’d love to see every ESRI Product Manager have a weblog to interact with users. Forums are nice, but I don’t think you get the kind of feedback that weblogs can give you. Microsoft has jumped on the weblog bandwagon and I think this gives employees better feedback than they would get with surveys such as the annual ESRI User Conference questionnaire.
How cool is this? Oracle has released tools for Visual Studio .NET 2003 to provide integrated support for creating .NET applications that access Oracle databases. Rather than use the weird, non-standard Oracle Java based tools or command line, you can now use the Oracle explorer to browse and alster the schema right from inside Visual Studio. We use Oracle for most of our database applications and better .NET IDE integration was always on our wish list.
I’m quite impressed with ESRI and their EDN. For a first time effort, they really did a great job. I haven’t seen any pictures of what it looks like so I thought I’d upload a couple of our copy. I apologize for the quality of the pictures as the only camera we had left in the office today was quite old.
The front cover of the EDN
Getting started with EDN
The GIS Servers section
Information about GIS Servers
A close look at some of the tabs of the EDN