PolyGeo

ArcGIS Explorer and Windows Vista SP2

2009-09-24T15:48:00.000-07:00

ArcGIS Explorer Build 900 seems to run well enough under Windows Vista SP2 so I was surprised today to have this otherwise very useful utility tell me that my new laptop Failed both Minimum and Recommended Requirements because of it.

The lack of certification for Vista SP2 is also indicated by its absence from the ArcGIS Explorer System Requirements.

I'm curious about whether there are any known issues with running AGX Build 900 on Vista SP2 as opposed to SP1.

Geodesic Buffers in ArcGIS Desktop 9.3

2009-09-17T21:35:00.000-07:00

Ever noticed that the results of an ArcGIS model that includes a Buffer tool can be different when run at 9.2 and 9.3/9.3.1?

It happened to me while providing ModelBuilder training yesterday which made me suspect that a change relating to projections may have been implemented between versions.

Sure enough!

An excellent explanation of the change in behaviour appears in ArcUser under the heading of Geodesic Buffers.

MapBuilder now retired?

2009-07-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

I was surprised this morning when I saw that there was a new release of MapBuilder (version 1.5) because I thought I read a while back that it had become a retired project. Looking back at the announcement which I was recalling, from Cameron Shorter, it looks like 1.5 represents the final release which was planned at that time. I wish the MapBuilder team well in their "retirement".

MapInfo Professional 10 Highlights

2009-05-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I attended my first ever MapInfo (now known as Pitney Bowes Business Insight, or PBBI) User Forum. It was a big turnout and I suspect one of the biggest events in Brisbane's GIS calendar for 2009. I was surprised by how many faces were unfamiliar to me and also by how many were very familiar.

Highlights of MapInfo Professional 10 for me were its slick new interface, particularly the rich functionality of its Layer control, and its support for direct editing of SQL Server Spatial and PostGIS data.

RabbitScan

2009-04-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

I was just watching an ABC Landline program about the 150th anniversary of rabbits being introduced (disastrously) to Australia while eating lunch, and spotted a fellow former postgrad and friend from the Zoology Department at the University of Adelaide (Greg Mutze) amongst those attending a filmed briefing. It got me interested, so I visited the RabbitScan website. It turns out to be a project that involves crowd sourcing of spatial information about the distribution of rabbits - with a view to reducing it. There's no web map to view the distribution that I could find, but I hope that will one day be there.

In the meantime I wish all involved with the project every success, and a Happy Easter!

Update: I just received an e-Newsletter from Spatial Vision and was pleased to see that they are providing web mapping to this project using Google Maps as the underlying technology.

REST "vs" SOAP

2009-04-10T04:20:00.000-07:00

I normally give developer topics a wide berth on this blog, but I got the tip from James Fee that the presentation by David Chappell at the recent ESRI Developer Summit was not to be missed.

For me this is by far the best distillation of the key differences (pros and cons) between SOAP and REST that I have come across. It not only acts as an excellent layman's guide to those two topics, but also describes, in an easy to follow way, how they relate to additional topics including: WS-*, WSDL, WCF, XML, HTTP, GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, JSON, SSL, ACID, JavaScript, Flex, Silverlight, Java Server Faces and ASP.NET.

It also introduced me to the term idempotent and I particularly liked his final conclusion: "The best decisions come from reason, not emotion"

GISP-AP came in today's mail

2009-04-09T02:51:00.000-07:00

I was very pleased today when I received notification of my GIS Professional - Asia Pacific (GISP-AP) Certification in the mail from the Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI).

If you are a GIS Professional working in Australia, the SSI is an organisation that I recommend and of which we are a Gold Partner - you can see the recently new NGIS logo on the SSI Specialist Certification page.

ENERGEX, Earth Hour and AFL

2009-03-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

After reading Geoff Zeiss' post about IESO in Ontario monitoring the drop in that city's demand for electricity during tonight's Earth Hour I wanted to check whether ENERGEX in Brisbane would be offering similar service.

I was very pleased to find that they are: http://www.energex.com.au/community/community_earth_hour.html

Unfortunately, while my house will be using no electricity during Earth Hour for the second year running, I will be watching the Brisbane Lions play the West Coast Eagles at the Gabba under blaring lights. I sincerely hope that the Australian Football League (AFL), Brisbane Lions, West Coast Eagles and the Gabba management all put Earth Hour into their calendar and not commit such a faux pas in 2010.

Note: I have since read that the AFL is offsetting during Earth Hour which partially redeems them in my eyes. However, I still think not scheduling a game under lights on the night of Earth Hour would be much more in the spirit of the event.

PostgreSQL, PostGIS and Windows Vista

2009-03-20T21:01:00.000-07:00

Today I installed PostgreSQL 8.3.7 with PostGIS 1.3.5 on my laptop with Windows Vista SP1. I thought I'd found a great place to start when Google turned up Getting Started With PostGIS: An almost Idiot's Guide. I think it assumes a little more PostgreSQL experience than I have so I ran out of time to accomplish anything momentous. With any luck by the next time I get to look at this there will be an updated, or new, tutorial that provides a few more details.

Now Twitter-ing Too

2009-03-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

I'm yet to be sold on the value of Twitter but a number of the larger GIS organisations have accounts that I've started to follow: ERDAS, ESRI, OSGeo ... to name a few. I've now opened an account and added Twitter Updates to this blog to make it easy for you (or they) to follow me :-)

Map Book options

2009-02-12T01:31:00.000-08:00

Today I am interested in the COTS or Open Source software options available for creating Map Books (or Map Series). So far my research has uncovered three options to use with ArcGIS Desktop:

and one to use with MapInfo Professional:

MapShop

I'm surprised there are so few, but this could be testimony to the ubiquitousness of online devices and web mapping nowadays. I'll be very interested to hear from anyone involved in making Map Books about their impressions of the software tool they are using for this purpose.

GeoServer Tutorials

2009-02-10T13:23:00.000-08:00

As a follow up to my posting about where to find tutorials related to Quantum GIS 1.0.0, I just came across the GeoServer Tutorials page. This would provide an excellent template for a Quantum GIS equivalent.

Using ArcGIS Server to Publish LYR files

2009-02-07T03:53:00.000-08:00

I was reading What's Coming in ArcGIS 9.3.1 just now and something that caught my attention was the heading "Better sharing of layers".

For a couple of years I've been thinking that it should one day be possible to author a LYR file in ArcMap, and then to publish it from ArcGIS Server, without having to add the Layer File to an MXD, before it can be published as that larger document. I'm very interested to see if this capability is to be included in 9.3.1, because I can immediately think of one of our key clients using several ESRI products in its GeoStack, who could benefit if this is the case.

I'm also interested to learn how "ArcGIS Online sharing supports ... Organization, community groups, and control access to layers". It seems like ArcGIS Online is heading in the direction of overlap with the Geography Network which is far greater than today.

Quantum GIS Tutorial Wanted

2009-02-07T02:12:00.000-08:00

Nowadays I look at lots of software (COTS and Open Source), from many different tiers of the GeoStack, that our clients and prospective clients are considering. When I'm looking at something new to me, I often look first for an introductory tutorial. I recently downloaded and installed Quantum GIS 1.0.0 onto my laptop running Windows Vista SP1 and was pleased to see that it "just worked". My quick impression was that it has an interface which is intuitive, and functionality which is comprehensive. However, it would be great if the home page for Quantum GIS had a link to an introductory tutorial, and data set, that I could use to guide my initial investigations further. For now, I think it looks worth taking a deeper look into at a later date. In the meantime, my suggestion to its team, who have done a great job getting it to where it is today, is that another worthwhile task for its documenters (which could be documented at http://www.qgis.org/documentation.html) would be to create or link to an introductory tutorial from its home page.

Note that I have seen a few references to Quantum GIS tutorials from workshops, and the like, using earlier (pre-1.0.0) releases, but am always happier to spend time running through a tutorial when it is endorsed to work with the latest version.

Google Earth consuming KML from ArcGIS Server

2009-01-12T02:06:00.000-08:00

Before including it as a technology recommendation within a spatial architecture, I ran a test of authoring a map from ArcGIS Desktop, serving it as KML via ArcGIS Server and consuming the KML service as a network link in Google Earth.

Other than an issue that arose when publishing the MXD on a shared drive, related to having used full (rather than relative) pathnames for data sources, the process ran very smoothly, and I commend ESRI on its KML support in ArcGIS Server document and the functionality it describes.

As for the issue mentioned above, that resulted in a somewhat cryptic "Unable to retrieve layers: Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error, I documented the solution in an ArcGIS Server Forum posting.

SIX Viewer has Best Available Image Layer

2008-11-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

A colleague pointed out to me that the Best Available Raster as a Web Service, that I was looking at options for a while ago, appeared to have been already implemented by the NSW Department of Lands in its Spatial Information eXchange (SIX) Viewer. At first I was unsure whether what was being displayed came from a pre-cooked image, or was being produced "on-the-fly", but during the week I sat with its developers at a conference dinner, and they assured me that the image was being produced on-the-fly from around 300 images using the Image Web Server from ERDAS under its hood. This was one of the three candidate technologies that I thought most likely to have the functionality that I was looking for earlier this year.

Can I Find My House?

2008-10-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

A posting from The Earth Is Square blog got me thinking about the availability and accuracy of Australian address locations.

Whenever I install a product, or start to use a web application, with capability to find addresses, one of the first things I do is to type in my own address. This starts my Out-Of-The-Box-Experience (OOTBE). The second is usually to inspect the quality of the imagery displayed and when it was captured.

Here I'll record whether or not I can find my house in Brisbane (Australia) using a number of alternatives. For my test I just type in my house number and street, my suburb, my state and my country.

The results are:

ArcGIS Explorer (Build 500): Find Address task has no option to set Country to be Australia
ERDAS TITAN 2009 Viewer 9.3.1: My house was not found
Google Earth 4.3.7284.3916 (beta): Found my house (imagery looks to be within last year or two)
Google Maps: Found my house (street view image from about 10 months ago)
Information Queensland: Found my house using the Property radio button (imagery not available when zoomed in)
Microsoft Virtual Earth: Found my house (or at least was within about 50 metres of it; imagery from more than two years ago)

At this stage I'll tend to use Google Maps when my requirement is simply to find and view an Australian address.

Write World File while in Layout View using Export Map

2008-10-09T04:27:00.000-07:00

This is a question that I posted to ESRI's "Ask A Cartographer" related to ArcGIS Desktop:

"The functionality to be able to check a box in the Export Map dialog and then Write World File for the chosen export format [in Data View] is great. However, I would like to be able to do the same from Layout View so that the map with marginalia (legend, overview map, north arrow, etc) can be used as a background image [in ArcPad]. Although the World File which would be created would only allow one Data Frame (the current one) to be correctly georeferenced this would meet my current requirement perfectly. I think this would be a useful enhancement to Export Map, but in the meantime does anyone perhaps have code which could use Write World File from Data View and take into account the position of the Data Frame within the current Layout to create a World File that could be applied to the map image created from Layout View?"

Ideally the output image would be in ECW format but I could live with JPEG 2000. ESRI's Cartographer(s) have noted my question so I am hopeful of a COTS solution sometime in the future.

In the meantime, can anyone suggest an existing solution to this requirement?

Ignite Spatial

2008-10-07T00:29:00.000-07:00

If you are in Sydney on the evening of Wednesday 12th of November and are keen to be pepped up on Spatial then an event I'd like to recommend is Ignite Spatial that Steve Lead has put together.

Where is Intergraph product information?

2008-09-17T00:41:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I was looking for product information about GeoMedia and gave up after a frustrating search of Intergraph's home page. Soon after I noticed that Jeff Hobbs and others had encountered the same issue. Today I was interested in finding out about Intelliwhere and was disappointed to find that Intergraph still seems not to have any product information available on its website. Fortunately, there are enough other commercial and open source GIS developers proudly displaying information about their products. This makes it very tempting for me to think "too hard" when considering whether to include an Intergraph product in a spatial architecture.

Best Available Raster as a Web Service

2008-08-28T04:34:00.000-07:00

This year I have come across a web service requirement for what can be referred to as "Best Available Raster". I'm not sure if that is a term used by anyone else, or whether anybody might be able to alert me to an alternative term that has been previously used for the same requirement. Other terms that I looked for it under were along the lines of "mixed resolution" and "composite raster".

The specific requirement is for more than one overlapping raster file, in mixed formats that include ECW, JPEG 2000, GeoTIFF and others, at more than one resolution, to be served out as a single Web Map Service (WMS) that uses the highest resolution available at whatever map extent is being requested by the client.

My feeling is that ESRI's ArcGIS Server Image extension, Safe Software's FME Server or one of the ERDAS image serving products ( Image Manager, Image Web Server and/or Image Integration Framework) are the candidates most likely to come close to meeting the requirement. I'll be surprised if no one has tried, so am keen to hear from anyone who has experiences and hopefully success to share, before I try to test.

As an alternative to the relatively expensive COTS GIS products mentioned above, my clients will be especially pleased if an Open Source Geospatial solution can be found with no (or minimal) development on top of what can be downloaded.

I've accomplished something superficially similar using ArcGIS Explorer to place a higher resolution JPEG 2000 image over a background globe service of lower resolution but the requirement I'm trying to meet is to have all rasters reside on the server and be provided unaltered as a single WMS. Ordering the highest resolution images to "be on top" can either be done manually or automatically but naturally the latter is more desirable.

ArcGIS Desktop and Oracle Spatial

2008-08-25T01:11:00.000-07:00

There are many spatially enabled organisations in Australia using the Oracle Spatial data format. A number of these use ArcGIS Desktop to author maps and edit spatial data. A question I have been asked is whether any Australian organisations are using ArcGIS Server's ArcSDE component to provide direct connections from ArcGIS Desktop to an Oracle Spatial database in a production environment? If there are any, either in Australia or elsewhere, I am keen to hear from or about them and their experiences.

If ArcGIS Server is not being commonly used for providing direct connections between ArcGIS Desktop and Oracle Spatial, then how are requirements for ArcGIS Desktop users to be able to author maps based on, and to update data stored in, Oracle Spatial generally being met?

There are at least two other ways of which I am aware:

1. Spatial ETL
By using FME Desktop some organisations make Oracle Spatial data available for their users to display/update on a shared drive by exporting to and importing from Shapefile, Personal Geodatabase or File Geodatabase formats.

2. OGC Web Services
Other organisations provide Oracle Spatial data as a Web Map Service (WMS) or Transactional Web Feature Service (WFS-T) so that ArcGIS Desktop and other desktop, web or mobile client applications can consume it. Out-of-the-box ArcGIS Desktop can consume WMS and, with the inclusion of CarbonArc PRO, it can also update features via WFS-T. Options for providing WMS from Oracle Spatial data include Oracle Application Server, MapServer, MapGuide Open Source and GeoServer. The last three are open source products, and of these, GeoServer appears to be the most popular in Australia because it provides a reliable and robust WFS-T.

Whether it be via ArcSDE, Spatial ETL or OGC Web Services, it is possible to include both Oracle Spatial and ArcGIS Desktop in a Spatial Architecture to take advantage of what each offers to the client and data tiers respectively.