James Fee GIS Blog

The ArcGIS Server RESTful API will come out at 9.3, but what about those who need it now? Well Dave Bouwman has blogged about its release. Because we all love demos, here is the link to the ArcGIS Server RESTful API.
http://65.101.234.201/rest/
Notice that it is running on OpenLayers. Think about what you are [...]

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A reader forwarded me this article from Federal Computer Week about the Navy looking at only accepting “systems based on open technologies and standards”.
Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communications, broke the news March 5 to a Navy IT Day audience in Vienna, Va., sponsored by AFCEA International. “The days [...]

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Looks like the OSGeo Jobs email list is needing some help.
As of today, still only one job is being offered — surely there are
more out there that people should be made aware of?!
I already posted about my thoughts on the email list so I won’t go over them again, but even I’m amazed [...]

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Blog reader Mike emailed this link to me and said that he thought it was well written. I agree, I think if you’ve been having difficulty understanding how map tiles work, this is a great primer to grasping the concepts. Map tiles are critical to getting performance on your web mapping applications and [...]

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Paolo Corti has written up his introduction to FeatureServer.
So I decided to spend a day for installing and testing [FeatureServer], without thinking of the lack of documentation (FeatureServer is still a young project, so no wonder here if the only way to get infos is digging in the source code and posting to the mailing [...]

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The Open Thread has pretty much fallen into a petty argument about if Google Maps is a “GIS” or not so lets break away from that and focus on the issue that seems to have come out of that discussion.
Dimitri hit on some of his feelings about open projects and the open source community here [...]

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I’ve been following the discussion on the OSGeo mailing list about setting up an “open source jobs list” and it looks like it is now live.
FOSS4G Related Jobs and Resumes
I’m not sure why they feel the need for such a list rather than work with existing job posting sites, but I guess this has to [...]

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I’m traveling this week to the hinterlands of Arizona for some marketing so posting will be very light, but Paul is filling in very nicely with some of the points that needed to be addressed from the discussion last week. He’s got a great point about skills already existing for using open source software:

PostGIS: [...]

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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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I’ve made my reservations to visit Denver, CO to Frugosapalooza 2008 on Tuesday February 19th at Forest Room 5. Should be great hooking up with everyone in Colorado I have yet to meet yet and see some of the interesting things folks are doing with Open Source. I know Sean will be there [...]

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So how the heck are you guys doing it? Google Maps and Virtual Earth have so much distortion up there (or down there as the case may be) that mapping is very difficult. Plus what happens when they navigate off the edge of the map? Anyway the closest thing I’ve found [...]

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Abe Gillespie has the great news on his blog, zigGIS 2.0 is officially announced.
Obtuse Software is proud to announce the upcoming release of zigGIS 2.0. For over two years zigGIS has enabled ArcView to view and analyze PostGIS layers. New to version 2.0 is the ability to edit PostGIS data as well as [...]

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The biggest excuse I hear time and time again for not using open source geospatial tools is that they are too confusing to use. Take GDAL/OGR for example, the webpage probably scares off most users because of the lack of examples of how to use both toolsets. But the tools themselves are so [...]

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TileCache 2.0 has been released with support for ArcIMS AXL requests. This should be of great interest to users of ArcIMS who want to create a tile cache. If you have a server that can run Python CGI and has write access to the hard drive and an ArcIMS Web Service, you can [...]

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PostgreSQL is about to get really integrated into ArcGIS workflows in 2008. First off we have ArcGIS Server Enterprise (ArcSDE) which will support PostgreSQL (ESRI and PostGIS data types) and now we have zigGIS 2.0 which will support PostGIS/PostgreSQL without the need for the traditional “ArcSDE” connection.
First and foremost, the zigGIS codebase will remain [...]

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I just got this tidbit of information from a friend who talked to Ed Katibah (lead Program Manager for SQL Spatial).
Spatial datatype, methods and indexes will be supported equally on all SQL Server editions (Express, Workgroup, Standard and Enterprise) at no extra charge. That means anyone who wants to use the SQL Server 2008 [...]

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This is clear to me:
FeatureServer + ArcSDE Data Store = Holy Grail
Being able to store data in ArcSDE, but still access it freely across any and all platforms. ArcGIS clients can hit ArcSDE and everyone else can enjoy data served by FeatureServer. But deep down this is even bigger than FeatureServer because really [...]

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Lets make this simple. If you have experience with:
Python
PostgreSQL
PostGIS
GDAL/OGR
OpenLayers
and at least some knowledge of:
GeoJSON
FeatureServer
GML
KML
dealing with the above on Windows (Linux may come down the line)
and live in either Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, or New Mexico; email me
james.fee at gmail.com
Position can be contract or full time work.

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I’ve been so busy working on a 3D modeling job for the Navy that I haven’t had a second to blog. I’m usually pretty good about posting fast (if you can’t figured out, I can type faster than I can think), but these last few weeks have been tough.
I’ve been thinking about how to [...]

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I get tons of emails from people asking where they can get free ArcView licenses for home use. People really want to work with GIS at home as well as at work which makes sense to me. I’ve always pointed folks to QGIS and other tools, but Matt Perry has a wonderful and [...]

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