Tag Archives: ESRI

Mar 22, 2011

#11NTC & Nonprofit Technology Mapping Resources

By

I always return from the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference energized to do even more to support the nonprofit sector.  Why?   Because the people are amazing.   They are bringing dictionaries to students, helping people find volunteering opportunities, helping environmental organizations mobilize their communities, ensuring we have safe food and water from farmland that is local, and providing nonprofits with advocacy tools that they need to create change.

I left the nonprofit world a year and a half ago to join Azavea, but I would have never done so if I hadn’t found a company that was dedicated to creating true change which just so happened to be a for-profit.   This is one of the reasons Azavea became a B Corporation a year ago — to demonstrate just how committed we are to improving the community around us.

Azavea is not new to working with nonprofits and change makers.   We’ve helped a theater better understand their ticket buyers and supporters, a public arts program share their collection of murals and keep track of mural conditions over time, a sustainable business organization encourage the use of sustainable transit, and advocacy organizations to engage the public in redistricting through open source tools to name a few.

The projects we take on (whether for nonprofits or not) have three qualities:

  • the project has social value
  • the project is more than simply putting dots on a map
  • the project leverages geography (and typically the web or mobile technology)

Here are four ways that we can help you, as a nonprofit, move beyond dots on a map:

1. Putting Maps to Work:  A Webinar for Nonprofits

My colleague, Tamara, recently put on a series of seminars at NPower PA to demonstrate the different ways that a nonprofit can utilize GIS software.   From helping you to better plan outreach to reporting program outcomes to funders, generating compelling maps can help your organization to tell your story more effectively.   Tamara and I are hosting a condensed, webinar version of the seminar on Thursday, April 21, 2011 from 1-2pm EDT.    Registration is free at the link below and we are planning to cover:

-  Best practices for collecting, managing and sharing geodata
-  An introduction to geocoding
-  An overview of key map types
-  Pointers to free and low-cost resources to get you started with mapping and GIS

 

2. Leverage Esri’s Software Donation on TechSoup

Azavea is a business partner with Esri, the market leader in geographic information systems (GIS) software.   Like most commerical software, Esri’s products are not free, but thankfully you are a nonprofit and can leverage their donation program on TechSoup which includes training.

Esri has different versions and extensions of their desktop software.   A good starting point is ArcView which will meet most nonprofit needs.  Your nonprofit can request an ArcView license on TechSoup.   The software has a bit of a learning curve if you are not familiar with GIS software, but where there is a will, there is a way. Esri includes online training with the product donation to help you get started and when you are ready to jump to web-based geographic analysis, we can help you figure out the right mix of software technology that will best meet your needs.

3. Leverage Azavea’s Cicero API Donation on TechSoup

A few years ago we built an elected official district matching API to meet the needs of a local nonprofit arts advocacy organization.  Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance wanted to reach out to city council members but there wasn’t a way to match an address to a council district and thus was born the Cicero API.     Today, the API provides true geographic district matching for 100 US city councils, state and federal legislatures, as well as non-legislative districts such as watersheds, school districts, and police districts.   Cicero has been used to power legislator look-up tools on websites, stamp databases with electoral districts for reporting, and power advocacy calls-to-action.

We’re pleased to announce that we are bringing the Cicero API to TechSoup Stock in a few weeks.   Stay tuned for more information or drop us a note to be notified when the donation program rolls out on TechSoup Stock.

Update:  You can find the Cicero API listed in TechSoup Stock here.

 

4. Nonprofit GIS Brainstorming & Assessments

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to get started and having the knowledge of what is possible and what questions to ask can help immensely.    We believe in being generous with our time, and are more than happy to spend an hour of our time answering your GIS questions or bouncing around the mapping idea you have.

Drop us a note and say hello, we’d love to get to know you better.

 

Comments Off
Mar 14, 2011

Esri Partner Conference and Dev Summit 2011

By

I just returned from the annual Esri Partner Conference and Developer Summit and wanted to jot down a few notes. The Partner Conference plenary was both exciting and stressful (for me). The layout and format was a significant departure from past events. Instead of the rows of chairs that are the usual layout, there were beanbags and couches (and even bleachers for the Esri staff). There were also dual stages with a small, circular TED-style “forum stage” placed in the middle of the audience. The lineup was a mix of reports from Esri and sneak peaks at future directions, interspersed with short “insightful ideas” and stories from Esri staff and partners.  It was stressful for me because I was giving one of those three minute “insightful ideas” talks (mine was about our B Corp status and a custom partner newsletter we prepare for Esri each month).

I think the event was a significant success.  Kudos to the Esri staff responsible for setting it up – there were a lot of really great ideas that made it fun to attend.  The highlights I saw last week included:

  • Ismael Chivite talking about how the Table-of-Contents and the Identify Button represent crappy design.  Developers need better friends and those friends should be Designers.
  • Demo of ArcGIS Server 10.1 in which a drive-time polygon and population summary was being calculated so fast that it could respond to the mouseover event as the cursor passed over the map…and do so with a national scale road centerline with 43 million segments – very impressive.  60 millisecond response time.  It was a great illustration of how high performance geoprocessing is not just faster, it changes what is possible from a user experience perspective.
  • ArcGIS Server 10.1 will be faster for many types of features – 64-bit goodness plus lots of work in the server.
  • Simpler architecture, fully REST-ful architecture – SOM, SOC, DCOM and Java dependencies are all gone.
  • Other ArcGIS Server 10.1 improvements will include: broad printing/PDF support; dynamic symbology (the final feature we had in ArcIMS that has been really hard in ArcGIS Server); private clouds; and WPS support (yeah!).
  • Lauren Rosenshein showed some really interesting ideas around geoprocessing packages that combine models and data for sharable processing elements.
  • Lots of love for Python in 10.1 including better ArcPy, faster cursors and NumPy support,
  • There are more than 11,000 public objects in ArcGIS 10.0.
  • New, simpler ArcGIS runtime that can be installed on Win or Linux with a simple file copy (and it’s smaller than Adobe Acrobat).
  • Demo by Morten Nielsen (@sharpgis) of a Kinect with OpenNI drivers being used to control a map with gestures – very cool – the YouTube video below is from a month or so ago, but you’ll get the idea.

  • Talk by Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) and Jennifer Pahlka (@pahlkadot) on the Code for America program. Azavean and CfA fellow, Aaron Ogle (@atogle), was there with CfA fellow, Ryan Risella (@RyanRisella), presenting some of the work they’ve already accomplished since January.
  • Tim O’Reilly also did a great talk in the Dev Summit plenary (starts at about 12 minutes into the 2nd video), where he spoke about a) the Internet as an operating system (with location as an important sub-system); b) government as a platform (with GPS as a prime example – a risky but innovative platform provider); and c) doing work that matters.
  • Met Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen Design – I’ve admired Stamen’s work for years.  I liked the structure of their talk, which used a very compelling diagram that related speed to power (fashion and business move at relatively high speed but have little long-term power, while nature and culture shift only very slowly but are enormously powerful), and gave lots of love to the many people that work hard to create data and systems that Stamen uses in their work.
  • Some excellent photography of the Partner Conference and Dev Summit posted on the respective home pages
Comments Off
Mar 10, 2011

Pushing the Boundaries of Geographic Data-Processing Over the Web

By

Most contemporary work in GIS involves one or more of three major types of activity: a) database development; b) spatial analysis and map production; and c) web-based map display.  Applications of GIS analysis technology are enormously diverse:  land planning, climate change modeling, assessing the impact of sea level rise, natural hazard risk assessment, military scenario planning, cell phone tower placement, and business siting, and many more.  Currently, these applications, which involve large amounts of geographic data-processing are usually tied to desktop workstations because of the significant amount of time, memory, and processing power required to execute the operations.

As computing power continues to grow, Azavea has become increasingly committed to making substantial improvements in the performance of GIS data computation (sometimes referred to as “geoprocessing”) over the web.  Ultimately, what we are seeking to make possible web-based GIS modeling that are so fast that you might think you’re playing a video game.  That’s no small endeavor, but the possibilities are mind-blowing.  Thanks to a National Science Foundation grant in 2010, we made significant progress on testing the feasibility of using graphics processing units (GPUs) to do just that.  If you’re interested in how we can hijack GPUs for GIS, check out our blog series on the research.

It is that context that this past January, our colleague, Tamara Manik-Perlman did a presentation on community planning tools that prioritize place-based decisions at the Esri GeoDesign Summit.  Make sure to watch her presentation and learn what we are up to.

Video credit: Esri. For more videos of the Esri 2011 GeoDesign Summit, visit: http://video.esri.com/series/13/2011-geodesign-summit

Comments Off
Feb 23, 2011

Esri Removes Usage Limits on ArcGIS Online Base Maps

By

Esri announced on Friday that they are lifting most of the usage restrictions on ArcGIS Online map services. As of February, ArcGIS Online base maps hosted by Esri will be freely available to all users, regardless of the use (commercial, non-profit, internal, external, etc.) The only restrictions will be on very high volume transactions of 50 million or more per year. While some of these services could be better, some have some really terrific cartography.  I really like the World Topographic Map, particularly for communities that have contributed to the Community Maps Program.   And I remain excited that Esri is supporting OpenStreetMap as a base map option.

ArcGIS Online is evolving into an increasingly useful service with not just base maps but also high quality, specialized data sets, such as the US National Wetlands Inventory or the US National Soil Survey Map.   There is also the ability to embed the maps in personal web sites.  The ArcGIS Online blog has a nice set of examples for how these capabilities can be applied to a number of different scenarios.

ArcGIS Online Soil Survey with OSM base map

We have found ArcGIS Online to be useful for several of our projects, particularly those that need a high-quality base map with good cartography but for which there is no budget or no need for an actual web map server.  Since we frequently use the OpenLayers javascript library for many of these projects, we have recently submitted a new feature to the OpenLayers project that adds tiling support for ArcGIS Online base maps.  There’s more on the OpenLayers submission in a post by David Middlecamp on our Labs blog.

Comments (3)
Feb 08, 2011

Esri File Geodatabase API Released

By

Over the holidays, Esri pre-announced a beta delivery date for the File Geodatabase API and today it was released in beta.  The shortcomings of the shapefile have been apparent for a decade or more, but it’s less clear to me why something has not taken it’s place.  SQLite Spatial has been a potential open source option, but it’s not one that has taken off.  Esri’s File Geodatabase (FGDB) has had a great deal of potential as an alternative because it is:

  • Cross-platform – runs on Windows and Linux
  • Supports many data types including raster, vector, networks, 3D, relationships
  • Doesn’t require a full relational database (Oracle, SQL Server, MS Access, etc.)
  • Lots more headroom in terms of the size of the database than the shapefile ever had
  • High performance (Esri recommends considering File GDBs over SDE under some high capacity server scenarios)
  • Support for editing

But since its introduction at ArcGIS 9.2, we’ve only been able to use the File GDB via ArcObjects.  Enterprise Geodatabases (née ArcSDE) have had a every useful C API for many years, and there’s been significant demand for something similar for the File GDB.  Such an API would enable the potential replacement of the shapefile as a much more sophisticated cross-platform interchange format.

So, as I was saying, the Esri GDB team released some information in mid-December and released the API in beta today.  You’ll be able to use the API as a C++ library.  We now know that this initial version of the API includes:

  • Create, Open and Delete file geodatabases
  • Read the schema of the geodatabase
  • Create new schemas for simple features (tables, points, lines, polygons)
  • Read feature classes
  • Insert, Update, Delete support for simple features (tables, points, lines, polygons)
  • Perform attribute and some limited spatial queries

There are some limitations:

  • No editing for complex feature types – annotation, networks, topologies, terrains, representations and parcel fabrics
  • No raster support (bummer)
  • Only very limited spatial query functions (envelope intersects only)
  • Only supports ArcGIS 10 File GDBs
  • Only supports Windows (Linux support has been promised in a subsequent release)

This API is something that people have been requesting for years.  Why the heck did it take so long?  My guess is that Esri developers needed to stabilize the internal structures before releasing a API for reading and writing those structures.  The fact that there is only support for FileGDBs created from ArcGIS 10 suggests that this may be correct.

So it’s out in beta now.  Go get it while it’s hot.

Comments Off
Oct 04, 2010

ArcSquirrel, ZigGIS, OSM and Alternative ArcGIS Editors

By

I recently listened to a DirectionsMag podcast regarding a new product by a Welsh company, exeGesIS, called ArcSquirrel.  Apart from an awesome company name and humorous product name [since we changed our company name, I think a lot about names.  How cool is "exegesis" for a GIS company?], it’s a plugin for ArcGIS desktop that enables direct editing and data management of SQL Server 2008 spatial data layers.

While I think it is really great that Microsoft implemented a spatial data type as part of their flagship SQL Server database product, the initial release was a somewhat crippled product.  You could query spatial data stored in SQL Server using a wonderful series of extensions to the SQL language, but MS did not package any tools to actually load data.  Further, the ADO.Net and LINQ database access frameworks didn’t really support the new spatial data types very well either.  Some open source spatial data tools were posted on CodePlex and that was useful, but there weren’t really great tools for editing the data directly.

ArcSquirrel logoEnter, ArcSquirrel.  This extension for the Esri ArcGIS desktop tools will enable you to edit the SQL Server spatial data columns using your favorite desktop GIS tools.  ArcSquirrel adds a new toolbar to the ArcMap application as well as tools for loading GIS data to SQL Server, support for multi-user editing, metadata integration with ArcCatalog and support for joins and spatial functions.  At $240/seat, it’s pretty affordable.

OpenStreetMap logoThis is not the first such specialized GIS data editor that extends the ArcGIS desktop product.  Obtuse Software has created ZigGis, an extension to ArcMap for editing PostGIS data.  More recently, Esri has developed and released an open source extension to ArcMap that supports editing the OpenStreetMap database.  I’m particularly impressed that Esri has not only created an extension for OSM, but has elected to release it under an open source license.  The beta version was released in July and the 1.0 release was out last week.  Software like this is going to enable the 100,000′s of ArcGIS desktop users to contribute to the global OpenStreetMap database and thereby make it more useful for everyone.  Based on the Esri demo at the US State of the Map event, Randal Hale has written up a nice review of the extension.  Kudos to Marten Hogeweg and his colleagues at Esri.

Resources

UPDATE:

10/13/2010: ArcSquirrel has released an API that enables programmatic control over the data management and editing process.

Comments Off
Sep 25, 2010

Geoprocessing and the Esri GeoServices REST API

By

In my previous article, I wrote about the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Processing Service (WPS) standard and how it can be used to enable different geographic data processing capabilities to work together.  In this article, I’m going to discuss a second example that has been under development by Esri for a few years, but was just released as a published specification.  At this summer’s International User Conference, Jack Dangermond announced that Esri would be publishing a REST API as a new standard.  A couple of weeks ago, Esri made good on that promise and released the GeoServices REST Specification.

What the heck is the GeoServices REST Specification?

While I’ll admit that I have not read the entire 220 page specification document, I’ll try to summarize the salient points.  First, I should note that while I’m pairing this blog post with a related one on WPS, I do not see the GeoServices REST spec as an alternative to WPS.  It’s actually much more broad.  And, unlike WPS, one could probably make the case that it’s already in fairly wide use by a large community.  The spec hews closely to the ArcGIS Server REST API that is already supported by Esri’s entire client product line, including the Flex, Javascript, Silverlight, iOS and Android API’s as well as the ArcGIS Desktop, Engine and Server products.  Anyone that elects to implement this new GeoServices REST spec will basically have a huge built-in client base that can take advantage of their services.

Rather than an alternative to WPS, one might actually see this as an alternative to the WMS, WCS, WFS, WPS and Catalog standards while also providing services for which there are no existing OGC standards, such as geocoding.  The REST-based specification supports JSON, HTML and KMZ responses, with JSON being the default format.  The full list of service categories includes:

  • Catalog Service – a list of available services.
  • Map Service – make maps as well as query, ID and other map functions; much like WMS, though with more functionality.
  • Geocode Service – turn addresses, intersections and place names into map coordinates; also includes reverse geocoding.
  • Geoprocessing Service – you can probably guess that this is my favorite service; both synchronous and asynchronous execution of tasks; this is the service that most closely resembles WPS.
  • Geometry Service – utility functions for commonly used vector geometry operations such as reprojection, simplify and densify, buffer, area/length calculation, label points for polygons, distance calculation, generalize, trim/extend, convex hull, cut, difference, intersect, union and reshape; these could also be implemented as WPS services (or through the Geoprocessing Service) but these are provided as a lighter weight, easy-to-use set of utilities; there’s a lot of overlap here with JTS and NTS and one could imagine a rapid implementation of this service using these toolkits plus a projection engine.
  • Image Service – provide access to existing imagery, in particular raster catalogs and mosaicked images; this service also includes local and neighborhood transformations of the imagery, such as recolor, hillshade, slope, aspect, NDVI, statistics, stretch and identify functions.
  • Feature Service – provides functions for querying and editing vector features stored in a geodatabase; the closest OGC equivalent is WFS.

What will this mean?

On its own, the GeoServices REST spec does not mean much.  It will need a community of developers that are willing implement the specification.  That will mean building back-end server processes that will respond to requests made according to the specification.  The open question is whether or not developers will embrace the standard and will it catch on in the marketplace?  That’s obviously impossible to answer right now, but some of the potential can be seen in Brian Flood‘s work on the Arc2Cloud product.  Brian and his brother  got to be feeling pretty smug at this point.  By implementing many parts of the ArcGIS Server REST API, his Arc2Cloud product already supports the majority of the GeoServices REST specification with the server processes running in the Google App Engine cloud computing infrastructure.  This is a very compelling concept – build geoprocessing services that operate against cloud infrastructure but enable many, many people to use them by doing so on top of an established standard.

For Esri, this is a risky move.  Similar to the risks ERDAS faces by embracing WPS, Esri is creating a specification that, if broadly adopted, will make it easier for some people to not use their flagship ArcGIS Server product.  On the other hand, by demonstrating leadership in the geoprocessing market, they will both encourage the growth of that market and their broad product line puts them in a good position to capitalize on the larger marketplace.  I see this as a smart move by a company that feels sufficiently self-confident in its spatial analysis, geoprocessing and data management capabilities that it can invite both partners and competitors to the table.

There has also been some early criticism of the GeoServices specification.  Some punters have remarked that this is not really an open standard since it hasn’t been submitted to an independent standards organization and is not open for public comment and changes.  Browsing the specification, one my colleagues also remarked on the extensive use of the “esri” prefix in things like enumerations.  That’s something that we would generally not see in an open standard and suggests that this isn’t really intended as something to be used outside the Esri ecosystem.

On the other hand, the new specification is being made available under the Open Web Foundation agreement, which should make the spec free of copyright and patent claims as well as enable others to revise, share and implement as they see fit.  Further, there are many paths for specifications and standards as they evolve.  As the OGC has amply shown, submission to a standards body does not guarantee usefulness.  While the OGC has several standards that are in broad use (Simple Features, WPS, WMS, WFS, KML and WCS), it has also got a bunch of “standards” that have been submitted for narrow, commercial purposes and have failed to gain broad market support.  As the longevity of the shapefile has demonstrated, open publication of protocols can have a significant positive impact on interoperability, even if it’s not managed by a standards body.  Further, as Google showed with KML, commercial shepherding of a protocol for a few years can be a precursor to later submission to a standards organization.

Resources

Comments (1)
  • Azavea Journal
  • Azavea Atlas
  • Azavea Labs
  • Azavea.com