thoughts on spatial tools and practices
In 1985, I was a junior in high school and I got my first job at a local chain steakhouse. I ended up staying there for a few years and did everything, including management. This particular location happened to be the busiest store in the chain, which had a couple hundred locations at the time. Basically, we just unlocked the doors and people came in. We often had a line and managers from all over the country came to see how we did business.
So I’m halfway through the largest geospatial event of the year, attending it for the first time in four years, and I haven’t blogged yet. As always, it’s a busy week. Because this event draws people from all over the country (and world), my dance card fills up pretty quickly. And, by the way, there’s a conference going on.
With a house move behind us and a lot of unpacking and other tasks ahead, I am nonetheless getting ready to head out to the Esri International User Conference next week. This will be my first time attending since 2010 and is the first UC since then that has aligned with my schedule in a way that I can make it. Of course, the price is right this year as well ($0.00).
This week, I attended the first-ever Esri DC DevSummit which followed the Federal GIS Conference (please switch it back to “FedUC”). This event, intended and a smaller, Federally-focused, companion to the annual Palm Springs DevSummit, came together quickly but was very well-attended with about 300 attendees.
I don’t usually cross-pollinate between this, my personal blog, and the company blog over at Zekiah. One of the great things about working at a place like Zekiah, however, is the opportunity to work with smart people and see what they are doing. At times, my colleagues will share components of their work on the company blog. We encourage this, and the experimentation that leads to the posts, as a way to keep our technical capabilities fresh and to also showcase what we do in a way that goes beyond the typical capabilities statements that exist on every site. My colleagues have been pretty busy but have managed to take some time to write a few posts about their work:
The 2014 installment of the Esri Federal GIS Conference (formerly known as the Federal User Conference) happens next week. I have attended the event off and on since its inception. While I originally was drawn by the presence of a large geo-related event in my local area, that gap has been filled by numerous, smaller events from various sources in the past few years. The FedUC has traditionally had something of an identity crisis, with the content often feeling a bit diffuse and somewhat rushed over its quick, two-day schedule.
Read moreEsri Federal GIS Conference Features Immersion Summits
I got word today that Esri is planning a one-day [Developer Summit] in conjunction with the 2014 Federal GIS Conference. It appears that the DevSummit will happen on the Wednesday immediately following the Fed Conference (which runs on the Monday and Tuesday) and will be focused on the issues and challenges that are unique to developing applications with Esri technologies for the Federal Government. I spoke with Jim Barry, who told me the DevSummit has come together rather quickly and Esri hasn’t had time to do its usual data gathering to prepare for such an event. As a result, they are canvassing the developer community for input on topics they should cover. Here are some things I suggested:
Read moreDC DevSummit in Works for 2014 Esri Federal GIS Conference
With the release of ArcGIS 10.2, Esri quietly added support for SQLite as a geodatabase container. This is big news as the community has been looking for such support for some time. An open-source RDBMS originally designed for embedded systems, SQLite has a very small footprint and is arguably the most widely deployed RDBMS in the world. (Thanks, in part, to the fact that it is embedded into Adobe Reader and other commonly used software.) Over the years numerous strategies for storing spatial data in SQLite have been developed, ranging from simply storing WKT or WKB geometries in a column up to full extensions like SpatiaLite, which adds OGC-compliant data types and methods. SQLite is also the engine that drives the popular MBTiles implementation used by TileMill and MapBox.
There has been a bit of buzz the past couple of weeks over the ability of GitHub to render GeoJSON and TopoJSON files automatically using and embedded Leaflet map and MapBoxtechnology. This buzz is quite justified as it presents an easy way to simply publish and visualize vector data sets. In the weeks since the initial announcement, the community has begun exploring the limits of GitHub’s capability. Probably the two biggest limiting factors are individual file size limits and API rate limits. Some, including myself, are exploring strategies for maximizing the ability to store, disseminate, and visualize data within these confines. For the near term, GitHub will probably not be the place to store terabytes of data or act as the CDN for a high-volume mapping application. That is perfectly fine and there is still a great deal of value to be found within GitHub’s current generous constraints.
A while back, I posted about my desire to see GeoJSON supported as an output format from ArcGIS Server. I found myself needing that capability so I recently completed, and posted to GitHub, a first cut at a server object extension (SOE) for ArcGIS Server 10.1 that enables output of GeoJSON via an HTTP GET.
Using the SOE is fairly straightforward. If you download the code and build it (ensuring you have installed the ArcObjects SDK for .Net), you can simply move the project outputs to your target machine and use the ArcGIS Server manager to install the SOE. Once you log into the manager application, click “Site” at the top of the page and then “Extensions” on the left. Click “Add Extension” and browse to the .soe file. You should end up seeing something like this: