ESRI ArcGIS Explorer Website Up

Link - ArcGIS Explorer - thanks to all who sent this in

Well here we have a nice close look at ArcGIS Explorer including this screen shot of the interface.

Aeae.jpg

It has a very nice Windows XP look to it vs the non standard look of ArcGIS (yea i said it) and Google Earth. The screen shot is somewhat disappointing as it doesn’t show up satellite imagery but take a look at the table of contents” on the left hand side and tell me you aren’t really interested in more information.

Update - as I sent this out, Darren Cope linked to the same page also. He’s put some of his own spin on the ArcGIS Explorer story and why he thinks it might have a chance at being quite successful.

October 29, 2005 arcgis explorer esri Thoughts






Google Maps + ArcSDE + ArcIMS + ArcWeb =

Link - Google Maps + ESRIs ArcWeb Services

  • Users can geocode by city (Lawrence), address (1930 Constant Avenue, Lawrence), zipcode (66047), or the intersection of streets (9th & Iowa, Lawrence). We are using the Public Services category of ESRIs ArcWeb Services.
  • The black and white imagery is coming from ESRIs ArcSDE through ArcIMS. We are using the ArcIMS cache on demand system that I mentioned here. The reason for this is the lack of quality imagery data that Google provides for most of Kansas.
  • The Map client is the Google Maps ajax client.
  • The Road data is from Google Maps (Teleatlas).

Quite a novel way to get around limitations of all the products. You’d think with so many sources and different servers this would be slow, but it looks quite snappy and is a big improvement over the standard Google Maps version. Great job guys!

October 28, 2005 arcims arcsde arcweb esri google maps Thoughts






David Maguire on ArcGIS Explorer

Link - ArcGIS Explorer - geographic exploration system

With ArcGIS Explorer you can fuse data from multiple servers (OGC WMS, ArcGIS Server, and ArcIMS) and overlay local vector and raster data sets. The task-based interface allows fast visualization of massive 2D and 3D server-resident global terrain, raster and vector databases. The user interface exposes additional tasks for navigation, routing, geocoding/reverse geocoding.

David lets us know a little more about ArcGIS Explorer including that the beta will be out in a couple weeks. The biggest question I have so far is what ArcWeb services will be free? There is so much available for cost, but the free Public ArcWeb services choices are small. I can only hope that they will have good imagery by default, but at least support for most GIS server applications should allows others to fill the gap. I guess we’ll also see one of Sean Gillies’ favorite Web 1.0 applications integrated into ArcGIS Explorer, The Geography Network. Are there any plans to improve that service? What printing options do users have? Can we here more about the personalization and customization of ArcGIS Explorer (and I assume ArcGlobe server on the back-end)? What are the basic system requirements for ArcGIS Explorer (Google Earth runs wonderfully on my laptop, but ArcGlobe is a dog)? Does ESRI plan to have a community developed around ArcGIS Explorer (a huge issue as GE has a wonderful community and the current forums at ESRI are difficult to use)?

I’d love to see some screen shots or a video though of ArcGIS Explorer in action.

October 28, 2005 arcgis explorer esri Thoughts






2006 Esri Developer Summit Announced

Link - 2006 ESRI Developer Summit

Join us for the first ESRI Developer Summit held on March 17 - 18, 2006 at the Palm Springs Convention Center in Palm Springs, California is a two day event for GIS, Mapping, and Spatial Developers.

Event features include

  • Keynote presentations on developer opportunities in GIS
  • In-depth technical presentations by ESRI staff
  • Community Center
  • Tech Talks
  • Birds-of-a-Feather Forums

Thanks to Art, Rob and Brian for getting this going. I’ll be there.

Devsummitlogo06devsummitlogo06.jpg

October 28, 2005 dev summit esri Thoughts






Tracking Tropical Storm Beta

Tropical Storm BETA Public Advisory

Another week and another storm in the Caribbean is going to cause havoc for residents. These storms with Greek names are just freaky, though I can assume if you are hit by one its name isn’t very important considering more pressing needs such as food, water, shelter. Anyway, you can track the storm using either ESRIs storm tracker application or the Hurricane Tracker.

Ts betats_beta.png

October 27, 2005 esri hurricane Thoughts






Planet Geospatial Update

I’ve added many more feeds into Planet Geospatial tonight for a total of over 60 blogs. You’ll see some old posts at the top of the page for a couple hours. It seems that some blogs feeds (in this case Atom feeds as usual) have bogus dates in them. The Python script I’m running detects this and assigns the current time to them. This should go away after more blog posts happen over the next couple hours.

Remember you can subscribe to any of the blogs by clicking on the RSS feed link on the right of Planet Geospatial or you can subscribe to the Planet Geospatial feed which includes all of them.

October 27, 2005 planet geospatial Thoughts