Use ArcGIS Online to Manage Your Own Custom Map Gallery

Here is a link to a super post by ESRI's Keith Mann in the Fall 2011 edition of ArcUser magazine that provides a tutorial on how to customize your Map Gallery on ArcGIS Online.  This should help organizations bring their own look and feel to what is an otherwise bland map gallery provided by ESRI at ArcGIS Online.  The ability to customize should help us who use ArcGIS Online eavery day to bring our own flavor to our ESRI hosted maps.  Kudos to ESRI for providing the capability to customize our ArcGIS Online galleries.

New Route 66 Community Map Added to ArcGIS Online

We finished digitizing the primary Route 66 highway from Chicago, Illinois to Santa Monica, California on ArcGIS Online.  You can see the map on ArcGIS Online at:  http://bit.ly/ouLaKV or view it from the applet below.

The entire route is digitized along with selected roadside attractions along the route in Illinois.  We would like to solicit your favorite content (places, pictures, postcards, etc) from places along the route.  If you have content you would like to see added to the map please let us know at rick.marshall@verticalgeo.com

You can follow the progress on the Route 66 Community Map on our Digital Route 66 Blog located at: digitalroute66.blogspot.com/


View Larger Map

ESRI TV: What's New in ArcGIS Online

ESRI just released the latest in their ESRI TV video services.  The latest shows us "What's New in ArcGIS Online."  I really like the capability ArcGIS Online brings to those who don't have a server to publish their work online.  I think as this capability matures it will help ESRI catch up to the head start they have given Google Earth and Google Maps.  It is very interesting to see the race to capture the "economy and power of free." 

PostGIS Version 2: A Game Changer?

There is a great post over on GeoRelated.com about PostGIS Version 2 being a game changer. Good summary of how PostGIS Version 2 relates to PostGRES and the options PostGIS Version 2 provides.  Here's the post:

PostGIS Version 2: a game changer?

PostGIS for PostGres

For many years there has been a limited choice of geodatabases when looking for a single solution for all geodata models. Only Oracle and ESRI offered comprehensive coverage of spatial models. OracleSpatial provided database models and algs for vector, network, raster and topology in addition to the usual database refinements and in database geocoding. ESRIoffered ArcGIS Server with comprehensive support for Vector, Network and raster models but left topology to the clients and had no offering for geocoding.Competitors such as PostGIS, MapInfo Spatialware, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL only offered support for vectors.

It seems the status quo may be about to change. The elephant in the room has started to shuffle its feet towards the finish line. PostGIS version 2.0  not only has big plans but appears to a considerable way into delivering the promise of support for network and raster models. For those of you in the US a tiger geocoder is also available. It looks like the initial support will provide a reasonable coverage of raster and topological models but as always seems to be the problem with open source projects there is very little supporting visual tools.

Raster
Raster support is delivered through dedicated database data types for raster and GDAL based PostGIS drivers to support a wide range of raster formats. There is reasonably rich support for a first edition including:

• Range of functions to access raster metadata
• Raster band manipulation
• Raster processing
• Raster value manipulation/calculation (Algebra, reclass, value manipulation)
• Reprojection
• Vector to raster conversion
• Transform to GDAL formats

Topology
Support for topology is also provided using PostGres data types. The implementation looks less mature than the raster model appearing to offer predominantly CRUD and import/export style capability only at this stage. There are also limited support for transforming data into the topological model in the database.

Vector  Geometry, Geography and Linear Referencing
PostGIS already has comprehensive support for vector geometries including 2D, 3D and linear referencing. PostGIS also supports geography types often used for global representations in its vector model.

PostGIS v2 will be worth watching in 2012 as it heads strongly into the world of GIS. The open source community makes a strong step forward with this release.

Geo APIs Summer Learning Series: Map Your Business, Inside and Out

Google posted this great video and update last week on their GeoDeveloper’s Blog about the Google Maps API:


http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2011/09/geo-apis-summer-learning-series-map.html

They sure have some great stuff and smart people at Google.

SlashGeo Poll: Esri ArcGIS Online vs Google Earth Builder?

SlashGeo conducted a poll to find out which platform people preferred with regard to the ESRI ArcGIS Online vs Google Earth Builder debate.  The results are totally split.  Here are the results of the poll:

ESRI ArcGIS Online will prevail:  24%

Google Earth Builder will prevail: 24%
Both will be successes in their own way: 42%

Microsoft Bing Maps will rule them both: 2%

VerticalGeo is an avid user of both ESRI and Google Products.  This poll should have been a little more explicit in the question it asks.  ArcGIS Online and Google Earth both both do a great job with the presentation tier when producing geospatial data.  Neither do a very good job with the data authoring tier when producing geospatial data.  As far as VerticalGeo is concerned the ESRI suite of software products can’t be beat with it comes to authoring geospatial data.  The ESRI suite of software tools though is very expensive.  I believe there will soon be a proliferation of open-source geospatial creation and presentation tools that will compete against both ESRI and Google Earth.  What we really need if we want to develop a geospatial powerhouse are the robust tools that ESRI provides with the open source pricetag.

VerticalGeo will be venturing more deeply into the open source market to help provide just that.  We intend to combine cloud computing, open source tools for geospatial data authoring and maintenance, with a top notch presentation layer, all with a web-based interface, for free, in an attempt to help guild a community of geospatial users that will have a new alternateive to the ESRI vs Google Earth debate.

OpenLayers 2.11 Released

OpenGeo has announced that Open Layers 2.11 has been released.  VerticalGeo has been using Open Layers 2.10 and it has proven to be a powerful open source web-based visualization platform.  Open Layers does a great job of combining services and static content into a web-based map.  You can read the OpenGeo release article here:  Link.

VerticalGeo will be adding a “Maps” tab this week to our website where we will showcase what some of the open source mapping applications can provide.  We plan to open our “Maps” tab with an Open Layers Map.  These maps will not always be a finished product, but will contain some maps that are works in progress.