Using ArcWeb Explorer

March 23rd, 2006 · 6 Comments · ArcWeb, ESRI, GIS

A friend of mine has been in Spain, checking out all the sites. Well when I heard there was a Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, I had to learn more. Well Google did get me to their website, but that didn’t help me at all because I had no idea where Bilbao was. My first thought was to put the address in Google Maps, but I got a weird “Sorry we don’t have maps at this zoom level” for Spain (I guess they don’t have as good world coverage as I thought). Anyway, the same problem occurred with Live Local (aka Virtual Earth). I didn’t have Google Earth on this computer so I was getting really frustrated. Then I though, what about ArcWeb Explorer? I took the address, loaded it into an Excel file and then uploaded that into ArcWeb Explorer. Bingo!

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in ArcWeb Explorer

How cool will this be when the JavaScript API is out or the SVG viewer? I’m lucky that I live in a USA centric world so I usually never see how hard it is to use some of these mapping services. Glad to see at least one has great data for the rest of the world.

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6 responses so far ↓

1 Christian // Mar 24, 2006 at 3:08 am

Sure, ArcWeb is great but there are a few more mapping services apart from ESRI who provide gread data for europe: ask.com, map24, mapquest, multimap. Google only provides detailed data for UK and for some italian regions (Olympics), in Yahoo! a world outside the US doesn’t exist…
2 Jeffrey Johnson // Mar 24, 2006 at 9:17 am

Google Maps with the same coords. I believe that is the Guggenheim right in the center of the frame.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=43.2677580539507+-2.93006294472162&ll=43.26873,-2.934422&spn=0.005922,0.014849&t=h
3 James Fee // Mar 24, 2006 at 9:37 am

Yea, I know the images work which is very cool, but you can’t get even a hybrid look to it. I’m not saying Google Maps isn’t powerful, I’m just surprised they don’t have routing or vector roads available.
4 TomServo // Mar 24, 2006 at 9:38 am

Wow, I was looking at that ArcWeb Explorer tool and it has impressive coverage all over the world. I’m not sure though if it will be able to surpass Google Maps in popularity.
5 James Fee // Mar 24, 2006 at 9:43 am

Tom,

ArcWeb isn’t a Google Maps compeditor so I don’t think the goal is for it to be used by everyone instead of Yahoo! Maps or Google Maps. Nothing will probably ever surpass Google Maps for mashing up simple data. ArcWeb though shines on its content beyond just vector maps and imagery.
6 marc // Mar 25, 2006 at 5:30 am

You could have used http://www.geoames.org to find bilbao on a map

Here the result for bilbao, click on the name to see it on googlemaps :

http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=bilbao

Or here the result for ‘museum, bilbao’ , click on the coordinates to see in on googlemaps:

http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=museum+bilbao