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Esri Dev-Meet Up Boston – This Thursday

Esri’s Dev Meet Up tour rolls into Boston this Thursday at the Bell In Hand Tavern, which is easily accessible through either Haymarket, Government Center, or State Street T stops.  If you are driving in I couldn’t tell you a good place to park since I don’t drive anywhere in this town.

The event’s page is still accepting RSVPs.  If you are available come check it out.  I know there are a lot of GIS professionals and GIS enthusiasts in this town.  We should take advantage of Esri kindly providing free food and drinks!  As usual, there look to be a few good talks listed, and maybe someone’s talk will inspire you or bring you to a GIS “ah-ha” moment.

Event Details: http://www.meetup.com/DevMeetUpNortheast/events/66079722/

Esri Dev Meet Up Page: http://www.esri.com/events/dev-meetup/index.html

See you there.

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Does anyone write code for custom map mash-ups anymore?

Hey geo-folks, I will be updating my mash-up pages this weekend to make sure they all work, but I don’t plan on adding any new ones or updating features unless I am really inspired. One of the problems of using data from a variety of sources and different APIs is that sometimes stuff changes, whether the API is updated or data sources become invalid.  This means that the author of the mash-up needs to keep an eye on their pages to make sure they are up-to-date, which I haven’t been doing lately.

I think the era custom mash-ups is over and has been for a while and I am sure others will agree.  There are so many great options for users of any skill level to create and post maps online that writing custom code for a simple online map is old news.  And that is the way it should be.  I am a big believe that the more people who can create maps and share geo-data and geo-ideas, the better off we will all be!

But…there will always be the need (and market) to create a customized online maps for specific and advanced needs, so don’t go and forget all that JavaScripting you know and love!

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How to Troubleshoot a Slow ArcMap (Story of my Life)

Esri’s Support Services blog posted a good piece today on how to troubleshoot slow performance in ArcGIS Desktop.  As someone who has spent their fair share of time troubleshooting ArcMap performance I will say that there are a few good tips in the article.  The author does make a good point at the end about understanding the realistic expectations of the software, unfortunately, most of us (including myself) tend to disregard realistic expectations and create our own on the fly 🙂

Overall, a good read and worth checking out.

I reject your reality and substitute my own…

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Esri Dev Meet Up, Boston – June 28th!

The folks from Esri will be back in town on June 28th, hosting another Dev Meet-Up at the Bell in Hand Tavern, literally steps away from the Haymarket T stop (a.k.a., easy to get to).

The Dev Meet-Ups provide a great opportunity to meet other GIS professionals and to catch some interesting talks about GIS development projects happening in our neck of the woods.   Another great aspect of these meet-ups is that Esri usually picks up the tab!

Dr. Raj Singh from the OGC will be keynote speaker at the event and they are currently looking for lighting talk presenters.

So, Boston area GIS pros, come on out for a night of GIS fun.  Meet others in the field and listen to some interesting projects.

 

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Dear ACS, if you are killed off, I will miss you…

Since it is widely regarded that killing the American Community Survey is a bad idea it would make complete sense that portions of the Senate still want to end it.  The main arguments against the ACS are that it is expensive, intrudes on privacy and is “unconstitutional”, whereas the benefits (which in my opinion far outweigh any of the negatives)  generally go along the lines of better data equals better decision making.

I wanted to write a full post about the dangers of ending ACS from the point of view of a geographer, but I became very frustrated reading the stories about why it should be ended that I just deleted everything I had except the first paragraph you just read.  However, I do think it is important to at least give my opinion as a geographer and someone who values good, unbiased data:

Without current and quality spatial data you won’t know where you are or where you are going…

In a world where big data and quantitative analytics are essential to data-driven decision making the loss of the ACS could send shock waves through the business, academic, non-profit, and government worlds.

Now, I am going to volunteer some personal information, tag my location, and post some pictures to Facebook.  Now, there is a data collector I can trust!

 

Note: It is reported that the White House will veto this if passed.

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OSMapping my Alma Mater

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to contribute to OpenStreetMap more often.  I started out 2012 by mapping my hometown, as the city I currently live in already has  very good coverage.  My next mapping challenge was to map my undergraduate Alma mater, Keene State College in beautiful Keene, New Hampshire.  When I started the mapping project I was surprised about the lack of mapping data contributed for the college and city!

With essentially a blank sheet I used JOSM to digitize (what geographers call tracing) the pathways, parking lots, and athletic fields using the Bing Imagery as a reference layer, while adding a few placemarkers throughout the campus, and finally altering the existing road vector attributes to correctly reflect what was on the ground.  These low-hanging fruits quickly spruced up the map:

The next step was the hardest (not that it was mentally challenging, just that it involved several steps).  I wanted to add all the buildings on campus to the map so the services that now rely on OpenStreetMap had the most accurate representation of the campus as possible.  Anyone who has ever been apart of a digitization project knows that creating a somewhat planimetric building layer can be a tedious task.  Basically, I didn’t want to digitize all the buildings, so I went searching for a layer with the buildings already digitized for me.  After searching the KSC website (and source code) I extracted the geojson layer from KSC’s campus map.  I then opened the geojson layer into Quantum GIS and exported the data to a shapefile.  From this point I converted the shapefile into the OSM format using Merkaator and completed the editing using JOSM.  (Side note:  If anyone knows if it is possible to import a shapefile into JOSM let me know!)  With the buildings now available in an OSM format I could edit the data through JOSM.

After a couple hours of tweaking the original building footprints (including moving the footprints to the rooftop outline, not the oblique outline) and editing some other features I wrapped-up my mapping session with the latest version of KSC’s OSM contribution:

I think most will agree that a couple hours contributing and editing data can drastically improve any part of OpenStreetMap, but there is a larger message here for higher-ed GIS and geo-educators.  Having students in GIS and geo-classes contribute to a campus’ OpenStreetMap can be a great educational tool.  I graduated from KSC eight years ago.  How come a geo-savy student or geo-class didn’t do this over the course of the past few years?!?!

There are plenty of schools that have excellent data in OpenStreetMap (Example 1,Example 2, Example 3, Example 4, Example 5), but there are just as many schools (that have geography departments or GIS programs!) whose OpenStreetMap campus map could be improved very easily (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4, Example 5)!

If you are a higher-ed geo-educator check out your campus’ OpenStreetMap and get your students to contribute.  They’ll learn about GIS, VGI, and open source while your campus map, and potentially community map, improves!  Everyone wins!

Next, maybe I’ll map my graduate school Alma mater so I can take it off the bad examples list!

 

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Today’s Project – Installing PostGIS 2.0

I took today off from work to catch up on a couple things, including installing Postgres 9.1 and PostGIS 2.0 on my home machine.  Lately, I’ve been neglecting how I manage my geo-data on my home machine for my personal projects and I told myself it was time for an upgrade. The recent release of PostGIS 2.0 was good motivation for this project as well!

I was planning a couple hours from start to finish for this project, and did I over estimate the time it would take!  After I downloaded, installed and configured Postgres 9.1 for a 64 bit Windows machine and ran the StackBuilder to install PostGIS 2, I had everything configured within a hour (and that includes me watching several random YouTube videos!).

I then used the handy shapefile loader to batch load a few global datasets and voila, PostGIS 2.0 data in Quantum:

It has been a really good year for the OpenGIS community so far, and the release of PostGIS 2 should really keep the momentum going.  I haven’t been a Postgres or PostGIS power user for a couple years now, but I hope to get back on track soon, exploring all the new features of PostGIS 2.0.

We should be very thankful to the community of developers who create and maintain these amazing tools and applications, who then give them away for free!  If you are a GIS aficionado and you don’t have PostGIS, Quantum, TileMill or any other open source GIS tools go and install a couple of them and test them out.

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My ArcGIS 10.1 Wishlist

ArcGIS 10.1 will be released soon and according to Esri, ArcGIS 10.1 will be the company’s biggest release ever.  Plenty has been published by Esri about the 10.1 release, including an overview of  10.1 from the Resource Center, a number of videos from the 2012 FedCon and a 10.1 “What’s Coming” site.  From what I have read and seen I am looking forward to a number of improvements including those for spatial analytics,  saying goodbye to ArcSOC and ArcSOM, improved database management functionality (which there looks to be a lot of), and generating buttons with ArcPy scripts.

However, if you have visited this blog before you have probably have seen this post or this post and have read the comments about user experiences with previous versions of ArcGIS.  I’m sure these users have many items they would like to see in the next release of ArcGIS and in their spirit here is my ArcGIS 10.1 wishlist.

My Unsolicited ArcGIS 10.1 wishlist!

64 bit ArcMap:  It’s not going to happen with this release, although ArcGIS Server will be.  However, I can still dream about lighting fast geoprocessing until then.

Provide a Consistent Product: One of the biggest items on my 10.1 wishlist is software consistency.  Too often users encounter geoprocessing errors, screens of spatial death, or the map refresh freeze.  Problems like this become major choke points when using the software when it is a critical component of a business process.

Simplify the Product:  I believe this is where the competition is killing Esri.  Look at Quantum, MapBox, OSM, or SpatiaLite.  Simply and elegant products with big time returns.  I know that many, from the once a week user to all-day-every-day user believe that ArcGIS is too big.  I consider myself a power user and I probably only use 20 to 30 percent of the product.  If Esri could produce a lightweight, stripped down version that still gets the job done (and is bug free!) I think the user base would be very, very happy.

Improve the Map Draw/Refresh in ArcMap: Am I the only person who is not a fan of the way ArcMap draws and refreshes the map?  Have you ever waited and waited watching a map load on screen?  I find it frustraing that I can visualize vast numbers of points faster in an html5 application than I can on-screen in ArcMap.  Now, this may only be me, but I would love if someday Esri could improve the map draw/refresh rate within their product.  Esri has had the best mapping tools in the game for a long time and improving the draw/refresh rate would make the already strong set of cartographic tools even better.

Get Rid of ArcCatalog: Since ArcGIS 10 I have probably used ArcCatalog 10 percent as much as I did during the ArcGIS 9.X days.  The major components of what I need are now embedded in ArcMap, which is great.  Roll the rest of the functionality into ArcMap and send ArcCatalog out to pasture where it can go hang out with ArcView 3.x.

No More 999999 Errors:  There are too many general errors that occur on a regular basis.  From the comments in this post I know this happens to others as well.  If geoprocessing tools have limits to them let the user know what those limits are so they can work around it.  I run a very clean analysis machine, I don’t run third party extension (I write my own code)  and I get unexplained 999999 errors running mundane and simple tasks.  Tell me what I am doing wrong!

If Esri could make my wishlist come true I think their user base would be very, very, very happy.  I know that this wishlist is a little late for 10.1, but Esri developers and product teams are free to wrap all these suggestions into 10.2 (thanks!).  Now when will I be installing 10.1?  Probably sometime after the first service pack is released (September, October, November?).

On that note, what would you, the user, like to see in 10.1?  What would be on your wishlist?

Disclaimer: I’m not a beta tester for ArcGIS 10.1, as I am too busy using the current version to test the next version.  What I know about ArcGIS 10.1 comes from what I have seen on the interwebs.