SpatiaLite 4.1.0 Beta Preview Available

On the SpatiaLite Google Group this morning, Sandro Furieri announced the availability of a beta preview of SpatiaLite 4.1.0. The primary focus of this preview is to get early comment on new capabilities supporting the storage, validation, and query of XML documents. More information about this update can be found here. Says Sandro: The main … Read more

Cutting Tiles for ArcGIS Server Using TileMill

There’s been a lot of talk about TileMill and CartoCSS lately, with good cause. TileMill makes it very easy generate beautiful map tiles using the Mapnik engine and CartoCSS provides a familiar method to author the cartographic representation of spatial data. As Brian Timoney points out, CartoCSS has the added bonus of making best practices shareable via copy-and-paste.

Naturally, the best way to take advantage of TileMill is to export your tiles to MBTiles and use MapBox hosting. If that’s not an option, you can pretty easily self-host with TileStream. That said, there are some organizations that, due to larger GIS workflows, IT policies, and a host of other legitimate reasons, need or choose to use ArcGIS Server to do map hosting. For those organizations, TileMill is still an option to create attractive basemaps, within certain constraints.

So I set out to see if I could bridge the gap between the two. Two blog posts pointed the way. A while back, Dan Dye blogged about how he had forked mb-util and added support for exporting WeoGeo tilepacks from MBTiles. Also, a co-worker of mine, Eric Mahaffey, had blogged some time ago about how to use Arc2Earth to manage tile caches across air-gapped networks. Using these posts for guidance, I was pretty sure I had all the pieces I needed.

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Still Jonesing for zigGIS? Try this OGR Plug-In for ArcGIS.

So I’ve actually noticed a surprising uptick in traffic related to zigGIS lately? We also had someone asking about ST-Links on the zigGIS mailing list last week. Clearly, there’s still a level of interest out there for the problem that zigGIS was designed for. ArcGIS reading SpatiaLite natively, thanks to OGR and Ragi Burhum Along … Read more