Tag Archive for 'ArcGIS'

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Publishing strategies for 2006?

Published on February 14, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

A few days ago I discussed with a colleague ways to publish maps, analysis results or to provide analysis tasks within an organisation. We were talking about a quite common corporate geomarketing challenge (I suppose, since we’re no geomarketing experts): a specialised department analyses spatially distributed marketing data and provides other departments with their results. Whereas the presentation of results should be somewhere in between PowerPoint slides and a full functional desktop GIS client. Honestly it was quite hard to seperate various publishing options, identify the optimal tasks and features and combine them to the best individual publishing solution. Along with recent developments on server-side GIS software, powerful new generation geo viewers like the popular Google Earth or the upcoming ArcGIS Explorer offer content providers quite an alternative to well-established map publishing solutions like mapservers do for instance.

So today I tried to sum up a few map publishing solutions I know and figure out their pros and cons, their qualities. Just to clarify: this list is not exhaustive. It’s an overview and the result of a short brainstorming to have a note for further discussions on that topic in my pocket. Comments or suggestions will be highly appreciated!

ArcGIS Publisher & ArcReader

Pros:

  • Out of the box viewer
  • Local map viewer
  • Optional 3D (ArcGlobe)
  • “Familiar” GIS application interface
  • Advanced map layouts
  • Data encryption
  • Viewer customisation

Cons:

  • Viewer installation
  • Local map file
  • Limited base maps (e.g. provided by geography network)
  • Extension for map authoring needed
  • Limited viewer functionality

Google Earth, ArcGIS Explorer (upcoming)

Pros:

  • Out of the box viewer
  • 3D
  • already integrated access to base maps
  • OGC Webservice support (upcoming in GE?)
  • Local data support (KML, Shp, PGDB)
  • Customised tasks (AGX)
  • User acceptance (GE)

Cons:

  • Viewer installation
  • 3D only
  • Mainly data viewer
  • Limited map layout authoring
  • Internet/Intranet access required or recommended
  • Ads (upcoming in GE)

Webmapserver e.g. Mapserver, ArcIMS, deegree,…

Pros:

  • Out of the box browser interface
  • Platform independent
  • Customisable user interface and functionality
  • OGC Webservice support (embed or provide)
  • Access to base maps by third party API (Google local, ArcWeb, Yahoo!, etc.)

Cons:

  • Browser interface
  • Last & performance
  • Development effort

ArcGIS Server, GRASS, GDAL, etc.

Pros:

  • Browser interface
  • Platform independent
  • Customisable user interface and functionality
  • Customised advanced tasks

Cons:

  • Browser interface
  • Last & performance
  • Development effort

ArcGIS 9.2 includes GML and KML support

Published on January 21, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

James Fee reports that ArcGIS 9.2 ArcView will support OGC GML Simple Features and KML by default. This means an important step for interoperability!

Best ArcGIS add-on 2006 nominee

Published on January 14, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Looking at those screenshots I suppose Arc2Earth is going to be my favorite piece of software in the year 2006.

Happy new year!

Published on January 1, 2006 in Other. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

Since I quit smoking last year there are no personal resolutions left for 2006. I’ll give them another try in 2007, earliest, quitting smoking usually gives you bonus resolutions for at least 5 years. But I do have some wishes I would like to see come true in 2006. So listen up politicians and product managers, here we go:

  • World peace
  • Fair policies and fair distribution of goods for developing countries
  • Ongoing implementation of the Kyoto Protocol
  • ArcGIS 9.2 with built-in PostGIS/PostgreSQL and GML support: small businesses like us badly need a cost-efficient Spatial-DBMS solution!
  • GPS enabled iPod nano: this gadget has perfect (not to say divine) dimensions and now I would like to see an arrow on its display which routes me to an address out of my address book, further I would appreciate the possibility to save my current location and load it later into tools like Google Earth or automatically add the positions to my photos in iPhoto (there is already an EXIF placeholder for coordinates in the image property window!) by syncing time stamps of photos and gps tracks for instance
  • a working INSPIRE service: EEA’s data service and UNEP’s Geo Data Portal are working very well but I would like to see a service similar to Mapdex for EU-specific datasets and some more webservices up and running.
  • to be completed…

Annoying ArcGIS bug

Published on December 26, 2005 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , .

ArcGIS 9.1 Service Pack 1 was released last week. A day before Christmas holidays I had the chance to install it and run a quick test. A PDF-export made some problems that day, minor problems: certain lines remained for some unknown reasons grey while they should have been white, people kept asking if we could color the line white, somebody had to explain why the line is grey and not white, followed by another attempt to export the PDF. So in the end this “minor problem” cost a lot of time and money. Once I had Service Pack 1 installed this behaviour was gone and the line was exported white as it should – sort of early Christmas present.

Especially the various adressed export-to-vector-graphics-issues called my attention. As far as I can remember Illustrator export for instance was more reliable before 9.1. Regularly we encountered problems with CMYK colors and the listed font-size-issue. I still have to check if all those problems are gone with Service Pack 1 and ArcGIS now proper exports to Illustrator.

However, in my quick test I focused on one bug. Besides reproducible bugs that cause full system crashes is this the most annoying one I’ve ever seen since I use computers:
I’m or better I was using the non-US regional setting for numbers on my system. Outside US we tend to use a “.” as thousend delimiter and “,” as comma. For some reason ArcGIS is the only application on my machine which doesn’t want to take this system wide setting over. It ignores them and only accepts US settings (“.” as comma and “,” as thousand delimiter). Still more confusing is that it only happens on my machine! The other ArcGIS installations work fine with non-US settings. The problem is that every time I want to edit a number in ArcGIS it gets confused about thousand delimiter and comma. For instance a stroke width of 1,00 points which is reasonable for non-US-settings (meaning 1.00 points) is considered by ArcGIS as 1,000 points as it would be entered in an US-system because it takes “,” as a thousand delimiter and not as comma.

ArcMap ErrorSo it gives me two of this popups, every time on every single input box on every opened window. I don’t know how much time I already spent on clicking those popups away until I changed my regional settings to US standards (as the only one in my company). So far I didn’t run into problems with other applications or data exchange with some colleagues. On certain formats we have to mind that we’re using different comma-settings.

Funny thing is that our local ESRI support first denied the problem, after I insisted that I’m not blind and if he wanna come over to see it our local ESRI support admitted that he believes he can remind that he has seen this behavior one time before. Finally he told me that they already knew the problem, that it apparently depends on certain hardware combinations and that ESRI developers know it for about 2 years. Due to the fact that they can’t reproduce that behavior it has not been fixed yet.

Styling KML to GML

Published on December 11, 2005 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

The proposed use of Google Earth to mark some places and produce simple datasets emerged as big success and was widely adopted by some of my colleagues. Actually one of them is using Google Earth pretty intensive.

So I extended my begun KML to CSV XSL stylesheet to take over Google Earth KMLs in a more convenient way. With the help of this XSL stylesheet you can transform a KML to a GML file. As input examples I took the three listings at Keyholes KML-tutorial. They cover three geometry types, so the developed XSL stylesheet should support:

  • Placemarks
  • Paths
  • Polygons.

With the help of Marc Liyanages TestXSLT I was able to test my XSL stylesheet against Sablotron, Gnome Libxslt, Saxon and Xalan-J. You’ll need one of those (or any other) XSLT processor to transform your KML to GML.

For processing XSLT on Mac OS X you can just use Marcs application, it’s easy to use and extremely helpful for developing and testing XSLT.
An online implementation of Gnome libxslt you can find here. Just copy & paste my XSL stylesheet and your KML into the corresponding fields and hit process. Copy the result in any text editor and save it as GML. E voilà!
How to transform XML with a simple java application is described in that tutorial and based on .NET here.

As in the former KML to CSV transformation you first have to delete the KML namespace declaration before processing your KML, otherwise it won’t work:

xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0"

If you want to get some ESRI shapefiles out of your GML you can further use ogr2ogr for instance:

ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" myfile.shp myfile.gml

I only did some very basic testing with Quantum GIS (which opens GML directly) and ArcGIS (via ogr2ogr). Possibly it won’t work with every KML.
Suggestions will be appreciated!


A little KML to CSV converter

Published on November 25, 2005 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Today I had to take over some places a collegue marked in Google Earth. Maybe I was too blind or actually too stupid but I was not able find a simple tool for converting KML to an ArcGIS-compatible format. Except FME of course, but that would be the overkill for my purposes. So I wrote a quick and dirty XSLT-hack to convert a KML-file to a very basic CSV-structure, which I could later import as X/Y coordinates to ArcGIS.

I had following structure in Google Earth:

My Places
__Folder
____Placemark 1
____Placemark 2

Saving the folder as kml brought me this file (GE_original.kml).

For some reasons (I’m no XSLT expert) I had to delete the KML namespace declaration and of course add the XSL-stylesheet information. See the modified KML file here (GE_modified.kml).

The XSL-file I wrote you can find here (kml2csv.xsl).

Put your modfied KML file in the same folder as kml2csv.xsl and open it in a XSLT compatible Browser. You should see now coordinates and placemark names in a CSV structure instead of a KML-XML-tree:

Name,X,Y,Z
Placemark 1,13.08349600542125,47.79234503541417,0
Placemark 2,13.27061184961974,47.68484958984244,0

Save it as text file, open it in ArcGIS (or in your prefered GIS client, spatially enabled DBMS, spreadsheet app or wherever you want) and add the X/Y coordinates to your layer. For now the XSLT is limited to placemarks and it only works if your placemarks are contained by exactly one folder – as I said, a quick and dirty hack.

Further improvements to come (as soon as I have some time left):

  • the conversion of KML to GML would be a more elegant way
  • support of lines and polygons

Google Earth is a nifty tool to create some spatial notes and simple geographic objects. It’s easy to use, offers access to basic geodata but it’s definitely not a tool to produce large and complex geodatasets.


ArcGIS SVG export

Published on March 31, 2005 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , .

Because I was not entirely satisfied with the built-in SVG export option of ArcMap I wrote this short macro to do it my own way. The essential feature, compared to ArcMap’s built-in SVG export, is that I can define an (known) ID for every SVG element out of the attribute table. Thus I’m able to access my SVG elements later via JavaScript.

What the macro does:
- Exports all layers and features of your map document (mxd) to SVG
- Every layer will be preserved as SVG group
- Adds the values of the field “SVG_ID” of your attribute table to every SVG element as ID
- Units and extent are taken from the layer properties of ArcMap
- Produces clean SVG 1.1 code

What the macro does not:
- no formating – no colours, stroke-widths, etc. – everything will be visible as black in black (I just needed a clean SVG skeleton, graphic attributes I add later via interactivity)
- no HTML embedding, you get just the SVG code

If you think this can be useful for your purpose, just copy & paste the code of the text file into the Visual Basic Editor of ArcMap (Project/ArcMap Objects/ThisDocument) and hit run.

SVG-Export

PostGIS & ArcGIS

Published on February 13, 2005 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , .

Another interesting message about using PostGIS as backend to commercial GIS-clients like ESRIs ArcGIS has been submitted to the PostGIS-mailing list:

“The PostgreSQL OLEDB Provider does not support rowsets, which ArcGIS and other commercial software look for in a data source. That’s why you can establish a connection, but it will always look empty to ArcGIS, regardless of whether you’re trying to load spatial or non-spatial data.
I am just about to finish an extension to ArcMap that loads spatial and non-spatial data from PostGIS and PostgreSQL (as well as other databases) into ArcMap. It does not use a live OLEDB connection, but caches data in local scratch workspaces (personal geodatabase, i.e., Microsoft Jet format).”

[postgis-users] RE: ole db, arccatalog and arcmap

Interessantes rund um Webmapping und GIS

Published on March 1, 2004 in Geotech. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Mein im September angetretener Job beansprucht zwar einerseits viel Zeit, die ich eher für die Fertigstellung der Diplomarbeit gebrauchen könnte, andereseits eröffnet er mir auch Zugang zu sehr interessanten Themenbereichen die hoffentlich auch in der Diplomarbeit berücksichtigt werden können.

PostGIS in Verbindung mit ESRI ArcGIS

IMSEMU: Ein (Perl) Layer der auf dem Mapserver (künftig auch auf PostGIS) einen ArcIMS Map Server simuliert und somit von ArcGIS-Clients genutzt werden kann.
PgArc: Extension für ArcGIS die es ermöglicht PostGIS als Geodatenserver zu nutzen.
OGC Interoperability Add-On: Extension für ArcGIS 8.3 um auf OpenGIS Web Map Services (WMS) und Web Feature Services (WFS) zugreifen zu können. Auch wird mit dieser Extension GML (Geography Markup Language) als Exportformat für Geodaten angeboten.
Der nächste Release von ArcGIS (Version 9) unterstützt u.a. die Open Source Programmiersprache Python und läßt daher auf weitere interessanten Entwicklungen v.a. in der Open Source Welt hoffen.

Webmapping

Mapbender: Auf der CORP 2004 hatte ich die Möglichkeit eine Präsentation der Firma CCGIS zu sehen, die die Open Source Software Mapbender entwickelte. Mapbender ist ein Web basiertes, mit PHP umgesetztes GIS Front End zur Bedienung von OGC-konformen WMS (Web Map Service). Mapbender (u.a. in Verbindung mit PostGIS) bestach auch bei verteilter Datenhaltung durch sehr hohe Performance.
deegree: Mit maßgeblicher Unterstützung der Firma lat/lon entwickelte Open Source Web (Map) Services Suite.