arcgis

Return on Non-Investment

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Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on Clubhouse, hosted by Todd Barr and Jordan Cullen, and including Will Cadell of SparkGeo. Clubhouse seems to be a really convenient venue for setting up such a forum with low barriers to entry, so that was enjoyable. The topic of the discussion was “Geospatial ROI” and we talked about various ways to articulate the value of geospatial (the data and the concept) and GIS (the toolset to exploit geospatial).

One topic that we didn’t have time to get to, but has been at the front of my mind for a while is the “return on non-investment” with regard to open-source tools, geospatial or otherwise. Open-source has been mainstream for quite some time and platforms like Github make it easier to publish, manage, and maintain open-source tools. As a result, it’s easier than it’s ever been to find and use open-source tools to solve your problem.

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BigQuery and Koop

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As I continued my experimentation with BigQuery, I found myself wanting to more easily use it with my regular GIS tool set. BigQuery has a lot of powerful analytic capability, but the SQL console is intimidating for the casual user and the GeoViewer tool is fairly limited. As I began digging deeper in my previous … Read more

Routing with BigQuery and ArcGIS Platform APIs

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This post is a continuation of last month’s post about analyzing location change with BigQuery. At the end of that post, I was already thinking of ways to extend the analysis and visualization. I decided to take the opportunity to explore Esri’s recently-announced ArcGIS Platform APIs. These APIs are the same that have been available via an AGOL subscription or an ELA, but they are now presented in a consumption-based model, similar to Google or Mapbox APIs, that allow you to make use of them without having to make a larger up-front commitment to the rest of the ArcGIS stack. Esri’s basemaps and their location services have always been high-quality, so it’s nice to see them available under a more accessible model.

Decided to use the Esri routing API to visualize possible routes between the various locations of the “Sample Asset” from my last post. I chose to build a very simple Node API to access the BigQuery data and use that API from a simple page that calls the Esri API and displays the output on a Leaflet map. The first thing I needed to do was add a little extra SQL in BigQuery to return coordinates in a format consumable by the Esri API. The raw API expects coordinates delimited as such:

-76.519989228,38.303696474000006;-76.695443826137989,38.376038894414251;-76.635015354340467,38.29745667728772;-76.519989228,38.303696474000006;-76.695443826137989,38.376038894414251;-76.635015354340467,38.29745667728772;-76.519989228,38.303696474000006;-76.495959193,38.236694621

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Watching COVID-19 Data for Your County with PostgreSQL and Node

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I have addressed the topic of triggered notifications a couple of times on this blog previously. I’ve taken the opportunity to apply the technique to a current use case – the ability to get notifications whenever the confirmed count of COVID-19 cases changes in my county or surrounding ones.

I am basing this workflow on the Johns Hopkins University county-level data available as an ArcGIS feature service here: https://services1.arcgis.com/0MSEUqKaxRlEPj5g/arcgis/rest/services/ncov_cases_US/FeatureServer

Using the “f=geojson” parameter, it is possible to download the data in a format (GeoJSON) that is readily consumable by OGR. As a result, I was able to initiate a core workflow using the following steps.

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Personal Geospatial Workflows, July 2016 Edition

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It’s hard to believe, but I last touched upon this topic over two years ago, when my family and I were living in our between-houses rental. One of the goals I had when building our current house was to create a space where I could more effectively work from home. To that end, I have a dedicated office that I’ve been working toward optimizing for my technical work.

One advantage of a dedicated space, which I did not anticipate ate the time, is compartmentalization. One of the dangers with working at home is the blurring of the boundary between work time and personal/family time. In our old house, I definitely felt that as I was working from the dining room table. Now, I can more effectively shut the door and step away. I’m not perfect at doing that, yet, but I am getting better.

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As a consultant doing federal work, I don’t get to work off-site all the time. I’ve been fortunate, however, to have worked a few projects over the past couple of years that have allowed it, so I’ve taken advantage of it as much as possible.

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Esri User Conference 2016

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Aside from a day at the Esri Federal GIS Conference, I’ve been laying fairly low from geo industry events for about the past year. There’s no single reason for that; it’s been more that a combination of things like work deadlines or family happenings have taken priority over conflicting conferences and events. I’ve generally been watching from afar, finding tweet streams and their attendant embedded links to be particularly effective.

playground-swing-540

I had been considering heading out to San Diego for the Esri user conference this year. It’s the largest gathering of geospatial people in one place every year. Even if you are not an Esri user and can’t attend the event itself, it’s worth going and being in the vicinity as 15,000 geographers descend on San Diego. Even Mapbox is getting into the game on this.

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Toolbars

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The convoluted user interfaces of most desktop GIS software is something I revisit from time to time. James’ most recent issue of his SpatialTau newsletter got me thinking about it again. A while back, I got caught up in a Twitter discussion about it. Tools like geojson.io and TileMill have fantastic interfaces, but they also perform narrow functions (data editing and map composition, respectively).

For a while, I’ve been thinking that this might be an approach worth investigating: rather than one piece of software with everything in it, a suite of tools dedicated to different aspects of the typical GIS workflow. This would not be a panacea as some tasks are just more complex than others. (Think of all of the editing options available in any piece of CAD software, and this is devoid of any analytical tools.) As attractive as this approach seems to me in concept, I suspect it would break down in execution. I think it could end up multiplying the problem with many overly-complex applications instead of just one.

Over the last year or so, I’ve become somewhat enamored of another approach: the search tool. This requires a little back story.

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A Brief Retrospective

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This is the time of year where retrospectives of the previous twelve months become all the rage as content providers have column inches and/or pixels to fill up while skipping out the door on holiday breaks. As an independent blogger, I have no such requirements and the topic of this post, while retrospective, has nothing to do with 2014.

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ArcWhat? I Just Want My Map.

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TL;DR:

What follows is probably my last post related to the Esri User Conference and is highly Esri-centric. Open-source readers may want to jump off here, or exercise a willing suspension of disbelief.

A couple of posts ago, I did something that I generally try to avoid. I took Esri to task for its confusing product names without really offering any thoughts on how to make things better. I don’t really like it when people do that to me so I’ll try to correct that here. It bears noting that I was not the only person feeling this way at the UC. I was happy to see Adena’s post over at Directions touch on this and it also came up in a number of conversations I had while I was in San Diego.

Here are some things that I think may help. They represent most of the stumbling blocks I typically encounter when doing consulting/integration with Esri-centric users, especially new ones.


“Spaghetti”. Licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

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