James Fee GIS Blog

We’ve just rolled out the latest update to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) Repopulation Google Maps application.  Thanks to Matt Priour figuring out how to add the Street View imagery to our New Orleans Repopulation Map, you can now not only see where people are coming back to The Crescent City, but [...]

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Paul Bissett has some great news on Safe Software entering a partnership with WeoGeo.  This is great for users who have looked at the superb FME Server and wondered how the heck could they actually use it.  WeoGeo gets that into the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and users benefit by being able to [...]

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libLAS has moved forward and has been released as 1.0.0b1 in the hopes of attracting more testers. For those who haven’t been following, “libLAS is a BSD library for reading and writing ASPRS LAS version 1.0 and 1.1 data. LAS-formatted data is heavily used in LiDAR processing operations, and the LAS format is a [...]

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The Friday before a holiday weekend is always nice. Traffic is light as folks cheat on leaving early for vacation, the office is excited about heading to the mountains for camping/boating/fishing and knowing you have an extra day for the weekend to get things done (or just sit in front of the TV) and [...]

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Dave Bouwman has some thoughts on using PostgreSQL as a RDBMS for ArcSDE (or ArcGIS Server Enterprise as we should be calling it).
Thus far I’ve simply come to realize that I have a lot to learn. I need to grok a lot more about Postgresql and PostGIS to start, and then add ArcSDE into the [...]

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I don’t like the term “ESRI Shop”. Both open source developers and ESRI developers use it as an excuse one way or another. Just because you are running ArcMap or ArcGIS Server, doesn’t mean that you can’t explore open source GIS software and in fact you might be surprised how it makes your [...]

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On Friday the Google Summer of Code Blog posted very interesting news about touchEarth created by Pawel Solyga.
touchEarth, an application he developed that allows you to control Google Earth using two finger gestures on multi-touch table. touchEarth uses the Google Earth COM API to control some of Google Earth’s features, while all the multi-touch [...]

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Gizmodo and Engadget both have articles on this LCD touch screen and both show a picture of Google Earth being demonstrated.

If you look past the cute girl, you can see Google Earth
52-inch Multi-touch Screen - World’s Largest Multi-touch Display
LG.Philips LCD’s 52-inch multi-touch panel for public and interactive displays is not only the world’s largest, it [...]

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There has been some discussion on my blog about the ArcGIS Online Data Appliance. Most ESRI users already know what is on the thing because they have had access to the ArcGIS Online Beta.
The ArcGIS Appliance provides terabytes of pre-rendered U.S. nationwide and worldwide data that you can host on your own secure server. [...]

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The Free Geography Tools blog has been posting about saving out Google Earth imagery and georectifying them in your GIS applications. When pressed on the post by a couple users and bloggers (here, here), he’s posted up a clarification of “Fair Use”.
I still don’t believe one can use Google Earth imagery the way he [...]

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Great news yesterday out of the GIS in the Rockies Conference. I was planning on going to the conference this year, but just got so busy I could tear myself away from work. Remember what Jack says about being successful at GIS:
“Now is the time to be the last one out of the [...]

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The news broke this week that Google has updated the Google Earth EULA to allow “internal use” for commercial users. Now what does this mean? I’m thinking that you can now use Google Earth at work for for personal and work related use as long as you aren’t reselling that work. For [...]

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I’ve been lucky enough to see some of the new features that Brian has been working on for Arc2Earth. The KML region stuff is simply amazing (check out some of the demos on his blog).
It’s best you go over to his blog and check out all the great information he’s posted on [...]

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I’m not going to FOSS4G 2007 (nor any other conference this summer), but I’m keeping my eye out for interesting talks. This one by Brian Timoney looks like it will be a presentation not to miss.
Adding Analytic Muscle to Spinning Globes: Bulking Up Google Earth and Virtual Earth With PostGIS

Brian Timoney, The Timoney Group

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Fantom Planet reports that Google Earth is like a country upon itself:
Michael Jones, the CTO of Google, noted that GE’s user base is approximately the tenth most populated country coming in with 200,000,000 users in the world in his keynote
Well my 2,094 RSS readers make me the 230th largest country in the world. Norfolk [...]

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I figured I’d try Chad’s Mogadishu Refugee Migration KML in ArcGIS Explorer and see how it looks.

Click for larger view
While it appears that KML rendering has improved, its still not able to handle transparency. Take a look at the same KML in Google Earth.

Click for larger view
KML support in AGX still has quite a [...]

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This has been a pet peeve of mine and its not just a problem with ESRI ArcGIS Explorer. Google has the search figured out just about perfectly. Give the user one text box to enter in their search query and return results. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has not gotten this right yet.

I don’t [...]

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Interesting*

Use Google Earth Pro - A software solution for viewing GIS data
Hmm, for about half the cost of Google Earth Pro, you could have Manifold…

* Fortunately searching for Goo doesn’t not result in Google trying to pimp their Goo….

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Ed, congratulations on the new job.
Private sector clients of ours can’t or won’t use Google Earth as a client to our products until the EULA is fixed, can you address this? If Google Earth is to be more than a tool to locate flying airplanes in satellite imagery, we’ll need to see [...]

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I’ve not really written anything up on Google’s KML Search because it really is irrelevant to me. One still can’t install Google Earth in corporate settings without paying for pro so why would I bother since none of my clients can install it (can you imagine if Adobe had such a restriction on Acrobat [...]

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