thoughts on spatial tools and practices
Over on Google+ (and also on Twitter), Brian Flood announced the impending availability of Arc2Earth Sync Beta to existing Arc2Earth users. This has been brewing for for a while and Brian says it best:
“What makes Sync really cool is the live edit synchronization and the ability to publish online to different formats. It’s a great way to provide integration between ArcGIS desktops/online and the other Cloud database providers like Google.”
I blogged a while back on PgMap, a freeware ArcGIS extension for directly connecting to PostGIS. ST-Links, the makers of PgMap, sent out an e-mail this morning announcing that PgMap and QMap (the equivalent technology for interacting with SQL Server 2008 spatial data) have been combined into a single tool called SpatialKit. This move comes … Read more
I’m getting ready to head out to Denver for the 2011 installment of FOSS4G. It seems like my biggest problem will be figuring out how to clone myself in order to sit in every session. Open-source geospatial is such a vibrant and active area right now that there’s just so much to see and learn.
A couple of things of note (to me) before I head out the door:
Update: I pulled this link out of the comment thread below to emphasize it. It seems to answer this question for now: http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/35676-Edit-spatial-data-with-quot-ArcGIS-for-Desktop-10.1-quot-in-non-SDE-RDBMS-systems
Since my previous posts about PgMap and the shuttering of zigGIS, the nature of the planned support for connecting directly to spatial databases from ArcGIS 10.1 has gotten somewhat muddier.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU9lv_WqK6k]
One of the first indications of direct support was this statement from the ESRI UC Q&A.
When I blogged about the official end of zigGIS last week, I included a mention of PgMap, a free extension to ArcMap for direct read/edit of PostGIS data. Judging from outbound links, there seems to be a good bit of interest in it so I decided to take a look.
To recap, Abe decided to pull the plug on zigGIS due to the fact that ESRI will support direct read/edit of spatial databases (as simple features) in 10.1. In my opinion, this is a good development. With native support coming, there was no need to continue with zigGIS. That support, however, will only exist in ArcGIS 10.1. Users of older versions will need to find alternatives. Based on our experience with zigGIS (as well as download data I’ve seen for the WeoGeo toolbar), there are a lot of people (especially outside the US) still using ArcGIS 9.x so demand for an alternative will probably be high for some time.
Abe Gillespie made it official today on the zigGIS Google Group: development on zigGIS will cease.
Arc2Earth (disclaimer: my company is an Arc2Earth reseller) has focused a lot on extending their integration with the Google cloud infrastructure. This started with Cloud Services, which provided the ability to push data into Google AppEngine and serve it through emulation of the Esri REST API (among other options). This was expanded to include live editing of data hosted on AppEngine. More recently, Arc2Earth added support for Google Fusion Tables.
Late last year, they announced their Arc2Cloud initiative to expose Google’s spatial data services to ArcGIS users. This has seemed to fall of the radar a bit lately but, as we know, there have been changes brewing on the on the Google end of things so some delays from Arc2Earth are understandable.
Esri announced late today that Service Pack 2 for ArcGIS 10 is available. It looks like a fairly sizable list of issues was addressed with this service pack. Who knows, we could be witnessing history as this could potentially be the last service pack to address ArcIMS. (Well, I can dream, can’t I?) Anyway, if … Read more
A few weeks ago, my company announced the availability of the first beta version of WeoGeo Tools for ArcGIS. Unlike the previous version, which opened a separate browser window, this new release allows a user to order a data set from WeoGeo Market or a library from inside ArcMap.
One of the challenges was enabling data set previews. If you browse data sets using the WeoGeo online tool, you can get an idea of what the data set contains by using the data set preview images supplied by the data set provider.
When we developed the first version of WeoGeo Tools for WeoGeo, they used kamap to create preview tiles for data sets. This was accomplished by used either one of two desktop tools: the weoapp (command line) or gWeoApp (GUI). The first version of WeoGeo Tools used the weoapp in the background to create tiles when uploading data.
I generally try to keep my blog separate from my daily work life in that I usually don’t directly blog about the projects on which I am working. I’m going to deviate from that today to make a couple of announcements.
It’s been a while now, but you may recall that, about a year ago, WeoGeo announced the availability of WeoGeo Tools for ArcGIS. It was an ArcGIS Desktop extension that integrated the ability browse data sets on WeoGeo Market or hosted libraries as well as providing the ability to upload your data directly from ArcMap.
My first bit of news is that my company, Zekiah Technologies, produced that extension for WeoGeo. We did not announce it at the time because the original plan was for WeoGeo to support it after it was released. That arrangement has continued to the present.