Mapdex Blog

Mapdex at the UC

2006-08-04T16:01:24-05:00

I won't be able to make it for the UC this year. Go figure...the State of Kansas wouldn't pay for me to attend the UC in sunny and cool San Diego for my last week on the job. I tell ya. Some government agencies sure don't have their priorities straight!

Not to fear...The Mapdex talk will go on. Keith Hunsiger of the Survey will be taking my place to give the talk.

UC2144 - Using Mapdex to Discover the Geospatial Web

Room: Room 29-C
Date: Tuesday, August 8, 2006
Time: 3:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Thanks Keith! I will pay for one of your drinks at the Embassy...

Jeremy

Super Swanky Swiper (SSS)

2006-08-04T15:47:00-05:00

Hi All,

A while back I blogged about mining historical imagery from the Mapdex database. Basically there is a lot of time based imagery available to the user. With this historical imagery you can see how a river meanders or how a city changes through time. It is pretty neat. (This is a much less disturbing example than the one that Frank from VerySpatial blogged about today).

Well around that time Keith, Asif, Ken, and Amber from our group (man am I going to miss working with them...) thought it would be neat to be able to visualize images through time. Building on the idea behind ESRI's swipe tool, they built a flash application that allows multiple images to be blended and swiped. I can't really explain it. How about a couple of visuals....

You can also create a faded movie for any area. Check out the animation here.

This application is built to work with any ArcIMS service (as long as all the layers are in the same projection).

It takes in a configuration file that contains which server, service, and layers should be viewed.

Once launched you zoom to the area of the map you want to be able to compare and then hit the "Start Swiping" button.

Here are some examples...

Fond-Du-Lac county, Wisconsin ( http://www.co.fond-du-lac.wi.us/ )
http://neutrino.kgs.ku.edu/swiper/swipeParent.cfm?configFile=http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/ags/infra.xml

Ogrady park in Washington (from PRISM Spatial Data Servers at the University of Washington)
http://neutrino.kgs.ku.edu/swiper/swipeParent.cfm?configFile=http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/ags/ogrady.xml

Kansas orthos
http://neutrino.kgs.ku.edu/swiper/swipeParent.cfm?configFile=http://neutrino.kgs.ku.edu/agstest/swiper2.xml

Build your own or discover a new series here. It has a few bugs...Let Keith know if it doesn't work for you.

Cheers,

Jeremy

A new beginning...

2006-07-26T11:02:00-05:00

Hi all-

I guess I should get right to it...I will be leaving the Kansas Geological Survey and taking a position with ESRI in Redlands, CA to join the core ArcGIS Server team. I am very sad to leave the Survey and the University of Kansas. It has been a great place to work. I never imagined I would get such freedom to explore new technologies, mine an amazing amount of data, build visualization tools, and work with such great people. I truly will miss the great people I have worked with (especially Ken, Amber, Asif, Keith, Brownie, Kurt, Tim, Lynn, Bob, and everybody else I have worked with over the last 7 years).

Mapdex will live on past me. I have really enjoyed building it and talking people into working with me on it (Praveen, Asif, Amber, Kurt, Ken, Dana, Keith). The future for Mapdex is quite bright (there is actually some funding possibilities on the horizon!). Once I leave the Survey (August 11th) I will not post on the Mapdex blog. I will ensure that there is smooth transition between personnel here at the Survey for Mapdex. Look for Ken, Asif, and Keith to keep up Mapdex well into the future.

Praveenkumar (my graduate student who has done much of the work with the front end of Mapdex) will also be joining ESRI (ArcGIS server Unix/Linux) this summer. I expect great things from him as he continues to grow.

I also want to thank my wife for taking the risk with me. We are definitely leaving our comfort zone. Thanks buddy!

Cheers!

Jeremy (here is my new email for now... mapdex@gmail.com )

BTW...There should be a great job posting here at the Survey over the next couple of weeks.

ArcIMS and Google Maps version 2 for ASP

2006-06-21T14:09:46-05:00

This is why I like blogging...I find some WMS to Google Maps examples from people I don't know (Brian Flood, Just van den Broecke, John Deck, etc), apply their examples to my problem (a cache on the fly ArcIMS interface for Google Maps), and then somebody out of the blue rewrites my code from ColdFusion to classic ASP.

Awesome. Chris McGarry from the City of Rockford, IL has done the work in translating my arcims_image.cfm and coord_conversion.cfc to classic ASP. You can get the well documented code here. And you can check the site out here.

Great job Chris!

Jeremy

Data Mining

2006-06-16T10:11:31-05:00

I was inspired by an article I read in April-June 2006 ArcUser (yes James I still read ArcUser and ArcNews) about comparing ortho photos from multiple dates in Peirece County, Washington. I got to thinking that there has to be a way to mine Mapdex for date information. Basically image services indexed in Mapdex have five sources of information:

Server DNS name,
Map service name,
Individual layer name,
Layer geographic location,
Individual field names within each layer.

So if we want to discover imagery from a certain date we need to parse that information out of the layer name. Check out the results here. Read on if you want to see the nitty gritty details

So here it goes...

We need to query each layer name by the individual words in each layer name. So if a layer name were, "Kansas Digital Ortho Photo 2004," we would need to look for "photo" and "2004." Finding layers that might contain imagery is pretty easy. I can look for keywords like...

    where (a.layer_name like '%photo%'
         or a.layer_name like '%aerial%'
         or a.layer_name like '%image%'
         or a.layer_name like '%ortho%'
         or a.layer_name like '%orto%'
         or a.layer_name like '%doq%'
         or a.layer_name like '%raster%'
         or a.layer_name like '%naip%'
         or a.layer_name like '%fsa%'
         or a.layer_name like '%color%'
         or a.layer_name like '%foto%'
         or a.layer_name like '%modis%'
         or a.layer_name like '%avhrr%'
         or a.layer_name like '%aster%'
         or a.layer_name like '%ndvi%'
         or a.layer_name like '%spot%'
         or a.layer_name like '%ikonos%'
         or a.layer_name like '%landsat%')

The number part ("2004") is a bit trickier. I don't want to specifically look for every instance of a number in my query, I want to let the database do the work.

So I use a custom Oracle function (thanks AskTom) that turns a string with spaces into multiple rows.

create or replace type myTable as table of varchar2(750);
/

create or replace function str2tbl( p_str in varchar2 )
return myTable
pipelined
as
      l_str   long default p_str || ' ';
      l_n        number;
begin
      loop
          l_n := instr( l_str, ' ' );
          exit when (nvl(l_n,0) = 0);
          pipe row( ltrim(rtrim(substr(l_str,1,l_n-1))) );
          l_str := ltrim( substr( l_str, l_n+1 ) );
      end loop;
      return;
end;
/

Now for each word in a layer name I can check to see if it is a number...

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION isnumber(p_val IN VARCHAR2) RETURN NUMBER IS

l_val NUMBER;

BEGIN
   l_val := TO_NUMBER(p_val);
   RETURN 1;
EXCEPTION WHEN VALUE_ERROR THEN
   RETURN 0;
END;

Finally I can put all this together and find all layers that have imagery type names in the layer name AND a date.

create table ORTHO_PHOTO_BY_DATE_T as (
SELECT a.layer_name LAYER_NAME,
       a.server_name SERVER_NAME,
       a.service_name SERVICE_NAME,
       a.layer_id LAYER_ID,
       to_number(t2.column_value) CNUM
FROM layerinfo a,
       TABLE(str2tbl(a.layer_name)) t2
    where (a.layer_name like '%photo%'
         or a.layer_name like '%aerial%'
         or a.layer_name like '%image%'
         or a.layer_name like '%ortho%'
         or a.layer_name like '%orto%'
         or a.layer_name like '%doq%'
         or a.layer_name like '%raster%'
         or a.layer_name like '%naip%'
         or a.layer_name like '%fsa%'
         or a.layer_name like '%color%'
         or a.layer_name like '%foto%'
         or a.layer_name like '%modis%'
         or a.layer_name like '%avhrr%'
         or a.layer_name like '%aster%'
         or a.layer_name like '%ndvi%'
         or a.layer_name like '%spot%'
         or a.layer_name like '%ikonos%'
         or a.layer_name like '%landsat%')
        and isnumber(t2.column_value) = 1
        )

Once I do that I have almost 3000 imagery datasets that can be identified by a time period.

So check the list out here (I apologize for the large download). I am trying to talk my friend Keith into finishing his really cool date swipe flash viewer so users can really compare imagery from one date to the next. Stay tuned...

This is just one way to do this. You could use regular expressions or use a text based data mining tool like Oracle's Intermedia.

Questions/Comments?

Jeremy

Geo Developer

2006-06-12T18:40:00-05:00

Ok I finally made it to Google's Geo Developer. I missed the first bit, but am enjoying the Google Maps breakout group. I do think that Google needs some people working for them that have some GIS background. When people are asking about the source of the data for the geocoder and nobody in the room has an answer (I am assuming that is from Navteq as they say it is from their road data). Or when they try to suggest (not to pick on the guy, this was not his area of expertise) that KML came before GML...

UPDATE...Somebody just asked about implementing a rendering scheme for KML and the entire team gave him a blank stare. Don't you think users would like to map graduated circles based on crime counts for example.

Oh Well....

It is good to see GIS reaching the masses. This should be an exciting year.

The KML/Z to Google Maps sounds pretty cool. I am looking forward to trying that. They are also storing KML/Z on their servers. It would be nice to be able to spatially query that information. Not just the bounding box, but point in poly queries. That would require a new backend to store that kml/z spatially. No xpath queries would work on that...

More later.

Jeremy

I don't want my site on Mapdex

2006-05-31T11:13:00-05:00

If your site is found on Mapdex, then it is publicly available. It may have not been advertised or it is not supposed to be publicly available, but if I found it (via simple Google or Yahoo searches) it is out for anybody to use/discover. The way to keep people like me (or the Navy) out of your site is to enable authentication on your ArcIMS server (or keep your site behind a firewall). This is similar to the setting that keeps search engines from crawling files (robots.txt) on your web server.

Here is an article by ESRI on enabling ArcIMS authentication.

Authentication can be set for specific map services or for the entire server. We do a mix at our organization.

If you have questions/concerns please send me an email.

For those keeping score....around 20 organizations have asked to have their server added and two have asked to be removed.

Jeremy

ArcIMS and Google Maps version 2

2006-05-30T17:04:00-05:00

I was able to dive in and play with Google Maps version two last week. There are quite a few changes between version one and version two. Basic things like map type name changes, reversal of the zoom level (0 is the coarsest now), changes to the GLatLng class, numerous method name changes, and addition of an overview map control. One of the key things for us tile replacers is that most of the undocumented functions available in version one have been changed or are no longer supported.

Version two actually makes it easier to create new tiles and integrate (merge) them with eachother or with the data that Google provides. Take the following code...

    // Create tile layers
    // Kansas orthos. 2002 1meter Ortho Photos from the Kansas Data Access and Support Center
    var ks_orthos= new GTileLayer(copycol,1,17);
    ks_orthos.myBaseURL='http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/googlemaps/arcims/arcims_image.cfm?servername=geoportal.kgs.ku.edu&mapservice=ks_ImageViewer&layer_id=1,0&cache_name=ks2002orthos';
    ks_orthos.getTileUrl=CustomGetTileUrl;

Here we have created a new GTileLayer (copyright, minscale, maxscale), assigned the base url to the tile object, called the custom javascript file that converts the Google Map request to a geographic bounding box. The custom javascript file then sets the url to my service that takes the parameters and either pulls from a cached tile or generates the map on the fly (as Mercator projection).

The really cool thing about how the Google Maps two is built is that you can add multiple GTileLayers to a custom GMapType.

    var layer5=[lawr_orthos,G_HYBRID_MAP.getTileLayers()[1],parcels];
    var lwOrthoParcel = new GMapType(layer5, G_SATELLITE_MAP.getProjection(), "Lawrence Parcels Ortho", G_SATELLITE_MAP);
    map.addMapType(lwOrthoHybrid);

So here I am adding local orthos from the city of Lawrence (bottom), Google hybrid road maps, and parcels from the city of lawrence (top). Not a bad way to integrate multiple datasource into one view. Check it out...

So view the source code and give it a try.

http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/googlemaps2/gm_arcims_ex.html

Thanks to John Deck for reworking the overlay code to work with Gooogle Maps version two.

Questions/comments?

Jeremy

Global Geology and Topography

2006-05-18T10:56:00-05:00

I have been spurred on by Brad's work....

We are developing a portal for global geochemical data (http://www.earthchem.org). One of our map interfaces will be done with GoogleMaps + our cached ArcIMS implementation.

Check it out here:

http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/googlemaps/earthchem_cache.html

There is soooo much more to a map than just air photos and street maps!

Cheers,

Jeremy

Google Maps + ArcIMS Implementation

2006-05-15T21:49:53-05:00

I happened upon the West Virginia Conservation Agency map site the other day. Brad from WVCA is doing some great stuff with Google Maps as the viewer and ArcIMS as the raster data provider. I have long been a fan of adding better localized data to the Google and Yahoo map products.

Here is what Brad told me about his site:

"Our agency is involved with a lot of stream restoration projects, and more importantly we respond to locations in WV that may be flooding. When we are in flood conditions it is very important that we can identify these locations and share the information with other emergency responders. Combining the speed of Google Maps, with the higher quality aerial photography that we have available to us seems to be the perfect solution. For example, if I need to share the location of a site with FEMA or any other agency, I can now just send them a simple URL that they can locate the site with instantly."

Give these two a try...

The WVCA link to the West Virginia State Capitol.

The Google Maps link the West Virginia State Capitol.

Great work Brad!

Jeremy

Calling ArcGIS Server from ArcIMS

2006-05-03T14:13:04-05:00

I just finished a project where we needed to generate and visualize a least cost path between two points from our existing ArcIMS based geographic portal (http://www.natcarb.org).

While map services (ArcIMS & WMS) are quite powerful they can not run geoprocessing models. To execute the least cost path model I am using ArcGIS server 9.1. ArcGIS server is built on the underlying ArcObjects that run ArcGIS desktop.

Here are the basics...

Computing the least cost path requires two steps. The first is to generate the cost distance from your first point to all the cells in the cost raster. The second step actually generates the path from: the to point, the cost distance raster, the backlink raster (both computed in the first step), and the type of path to be generated.
Both points (from and to) will be generated by the user selecting two points on the map.
The cost raster has already been computed for the region.
I decided to build a REST based servlet that takes in the two points (in the appropriate projection) and calls my java class that then constructs the distance raster and exports the final map as an image (along with the appropriate world file information).
The image is then downloaded and loaded into ArcIMS as a dynamic image layer. The key thing to note here is that any image (png, jpg, gif) can be loaded into ArcIMS as a new layer as long as it has a valid world file (pgw, jgw, gfw). For more information on doing this in ArcIMS see the Birds of a Feather powerpoint below...

Step 1:

Step 2:

The service can be tested here. Make sure you view the source to see the returned XML response.

So in wrap up we are using ArcGIS server within our current ArcIMS configuration by calling a REST servlet that executes the servlet and returns an xml document with a link to the image. This image is then added to our ArcIMS request as a dyamic image (with appropriate world file).

For you java hounds here is the source file. Go here for the basic concept if it were run from model builder.

Questions/comments?

Cheers,

Jeremy

Finished Talks

2006-04-27T21:39:24-05:00

If any of you are interested, I am posting the talks that I gave or was part of over the last month. Enjoy. Be warned most of them are large...

ESRI Petroleum User Group (PUG) Conference. April 3-5th Houston, Texas.

Evaluating Structural Controls on Phanerozoic Rocks. April 4th, 2pm. My collegue, Nick Callaghan will be presenting on applied visualization techniques on subsurface geologic data using ArcScene and ModelBuilder.
Using Mapdex to Discover Petroleum Web Mapping Services. April 4th, 4pm. I will be giving a Mapdex talk targetted to the Petroleum industry.

MidAmerica GIS Consortium (MAGIC) Biennial MAGIC Symposium. April 23-27th.

Getting the most of ArcIMS. A short course on April 27th, 1-5pm. Ken Nelson and I will be running this short course. We will touch on topics such as: ArcIMS installation and configuration, database integration techniques, and ArcIMS management.
Mapdex: An OnLine Index of Map Services. April 25th, 2:30pm. I will be presenting on all things cool related to Mapdex.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Web Map Services + Yahoo! Maps

2006-04-18T18:10:37-05:00

Hi all-

I have been playing with Yahoo! Maps API for Flash (ActionScript). It is pretty powerful. I have built a demo application that allows image based map services to be overlain on top of the Yahoo! Maps data. To do this I am customizing the Yahoo! Flash API. I am using a REST based interface to my ArcIMS map service (I could just as easily use a WMS service for this) so that I can overlay the returned map image on top of the Yahoo! Map as a customImageMarker. Here is the function that calls my custom REST service:

function getArcIMSImage() {
    var arcims_url = base_url + "BBOX="+myMap.getBounds().minLon+","
                     +myMap.getBounds().maxLat+","+myMap.getBounds().maxLon
                     +","+myMap.getBounds().minLat+"&image_width="
                     +myMap.getWidth()+"&image_height="
                     +myMap.getHeight()+"&servername="
                     +servername+"&mapservice="+mapservice
                     +"&LAYER_ID="+layer_id+"&image_type="
                     +image_type;
    var latitude1 = myMap.getBounds().minLat;
    var longitude1 = myMap.getBounds().minLon;
    var LL = new LatLon (latitude1,longitude1);
    myMap.addMarkerByLatLon(CustomImageMarker,LL,{url:arcims_url});
}

Here is my sample application. If you are below zoom level 4 and within the city limits of Lawrence, KS, you should see the parcel boundaries on top of the Yahoo! Map data.

http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/yahoomaps/overexample.html

It could be anything though...elevation contours, landcover, imagery, etc...

Now I wish you had the ability to lay custom images below the Yahoo! Map road data (ie to replace the imagery with your own)...

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Jeremy

Upcoming Talks

2006-03-30T16:31:40-05:00

Hi all-

I have quite a few talks coming up that I thought I would share with you. If you happen to be at any of these conferences stop by and introduce yourself. I love talking about Maps and GIS.

ESRI Petroleum User Group (PUG) Conference. April 3-5th Houston, Texas.

Evaluating Structural Controls on Phanerozoic Rocks. April 4th, 2pm. My collegue, Nick Callaghan will be presenting on applied visualization techniques on subsurface geologic data using ArcScene and ModelBuilder.
Using Mapdex to Discover Petroleum Web Mapping Services. April 4th, 4pm. I will be giving a Mapdex talk targetted to the Petroleum industry.

MidAmerica GIS Consortium (MAGIC) Biennial MAGIC Symposium. April 23-27th.

Getting the most of ArcIMS. A short course on April 27th, 1-5pm. Ken Nelson and I will be running this short course. We will touch on topics such as: ArcIMS installation and configuration, database integration techniques, and ArcIMS management.
Mapdex: An OnLine Index of Map Services. April 25th, 2:30pm. I will be presenting on all things cool related to Mapdex.
Web Mapping Breakout Session. April 27th, 10-noon. Amber Reynolds of KS Data Access and Support Center, Patrick Brown of Iowa State University, Dan Haag of ESRI, St. Louis, Ricie Pierce of Arkansas Geographic Information Office, and myself will be on a panel discussing Internet mapping.

Cheers,

Jeremy

ArcIMS Birds of a Feather--UPDATE

2006-03-20T10:22:07-05:00

Hi All-

The ArcIMS Birds of a Feather at the ESRI Developer Summit went well. Even though it wasn't very well advertised, the discussion was great. You can download the powerpoint from Anne and I here.

Email me if you have any questions. Thanks to Anne and Ravi for joining us and to Brian Goldin for talking me into doing it.

Cheers,

Jeremy

ArcIMS Birds of a Feather

2006-03-15T16:21:24-05:00

Hi All-

Brian Goldin of www.spatiallyenabled.com talked me into running an ArcIMS Birds-of-a-Feather session at the ESRI Developer Summit. I know there are a lot of ArcIMS developers out there. Come and let your voice be heard. Anne Reuland and Ravi Narayanan from ESRI will join us. We will talk a bit about...

Using ArcIMS with your Enterprise Database;
Adding raster images (png, jpg, gif) dynamically into GET_IMAGE requests;
The value of setting your map service projection;
Creating web applications in ArcIMS 9.2 (Site Builder and Web ADF);
The role of ArcIMS and ArcGIS server.

See you there.

Friday March 15. 12pm - 12:45pm – Sierra / Ventura

Jeremy

Mapdex search in Cadcorp SIS

2006-03-07T15:24:00-05:00

Cadcorp has written a Mapdex plugin for their Cadcorp SIS 6.2 GIS software package. This allows you to search Mapdex via the REST api and add ArcIMS services directly to Cadcorp SIS. Great job.

Here are some screen shots:

Searching for "orto"...

Leads to ortophotos from the Czech Ministry of Environment (xeon.env.cz).

Cheers,

Jeremy

Targeted Geographic Portals

2006-03-06T11:53:37-05:00

I wanted to talk a bit about the project that led me to build Mapdex. In Winter of 2004 my organization was awarded funding from the US Department of Energy to build a distributed atlas for carbon sequestration (www.natcarb.org). We were tasked with creating an online atlas that integrated and displayed data from seven different partnerships. For this project we went with a distributed approach to managing and serving this spatial data. We built a portal that allows us to simultaneously request maps and data from remote disparate map services (ArcIMS and WMS 1.1.x). Essentially when a client requests a map from Natcarb we simultaneously request an image from each of the integrated partners, merge the images on our server, and send the final image back to the client. As we were building the framework to connect each of the partnerships, we realized that we could use data from ANY map service. National datasets like...

National Elevation Dataset from seamless.usgs.gov;
Digital Orthophoto quarter quads from terraserver.microsoft.com;
North America Satellite Imagery from the geographynetwork.com;
National Map Infrastructure maps from seamless.usgs.gov;

are at our fingertips.

This infrastructure allows us to serve approximately 150 geographic layers from over 15 different organizations in one portal.

I see targeted portals as an exciting/useful development opportunity. What do I mean by targeted portals? Something like (but not exclusive) the natcarb project. In that project we are building a website that makes use of distributed map services, but in a targeted way (we have picked the distributed layers that we want the public to see).

Some group might want an interactive map site that has NED and Landcover from the Eros data center, and population from the census bureau, & parks & rec data from Kansas. This distributed mapping approach pulls the data from the various sources, but integrates it within a website. The user doesn't have to know where to get the data or how to ingest it. It is a database driven application that allows the site manager to add specific layers (& columns for that matter) from distributed map services. The ease of management of the site is the key.

Cyberinfrastructure doesn't have to be that complicated. The technology is there, and it works.

For more info see the following powerpoints:
http://hercules.kgs.ku.edu/kgs/oilgas/powerpoints/UC2004_BARTLEY_NATCARB.ppt
http://hercules.kgs.ku.edu/kgs/oilgas/powerpoints/natcarb_regcarbSEQ_2005.ppt

Questions/Comments?

Jeremy

Mapdex in ArcNews

2006-02-23T15:43:00-05:00

Mapdex is featured in the Winter 06 version of ArcNews.

Quite a bit has changed since the article was written. For one thing we currently have indexed close to 1,800 servers, serving approximately 33,000 map services, containing over 500,000 layers. We have built a REST service, an ArcMap Toolbar, a Mozilla search plugin, a Flash Mapdex viewer, and a service that allows you to display map services on Google Earth.

I have to say that I have been very lucky to work with some outstanding people on this project (Praveen, Asif, Amber, Kurt, Ken, & Keith to name a few). I successfully conned them into working on this hair brained idea!

There is more to come. Stay tuned....

Jeremy

Projections, Projections, Projections

2006-02-13T14:41:55-05:00

I am reprinting a post from last August that deals with ArcIMS projection metadata. If you are an ArcIMS server administrator and you don't set your projection in your map service you are really doing yourself and others a disservice. The numbers have gotten better since then, but still only 36.5% of the map services have a valid projection.

From 22 August 2005:

One of the most disturbing things I have found out from building Mapdex is the lack of proper projection information set for mapservices. It turns out that about 56.5% of mapservices lack a projection or cannot be assumed to be geographic. Only 31.3% of mapservices have a valid projection while 12.2% can be assumed geographic.

What happens if you don't have a valid projection set?

You cannot use your mapservice within ArcMap with other data layers outside of your projection;
All of your data layers in your mapservice have to be in the same projection;
You cannot publish your mapservice to the National Map or to GOS;
Other groups cannot use the valuable data within your mapservice within their data and/or applications;
Your mapservice cannot be searched spatially within Mapdex or other map search engines.

There is a nice article in ArcUser about georeferencing ArcIMS services. I encourage you to check it out.

http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0205/files/georef_arcims.pdf

Cheers,

Jeremy

Google Earth Quad Tiling

2006-02-10T15:46:42-05:00

I have been playing around with ArcIMS image overlays in Google Earth. I like the ease of laying a single image down over the viewing window, but I don't like the loss of continuous panning that I get when I move the globe just a bit. Whatever happens when the camera stops GE goes out and makes the new request for the image. There is no buffer. I can make the image bigger, but that makes the actual image less detailed. I thought I would explore mutliple network links wrapped in a GE Folder. Give this a try: http://www.mapdex.org/GE_KML_LINK_TILE.cfm?servername=hercules.kgs.ku.edu&mapservice=lawrence_Imagery

I have fused together 4 network links and taken advantage of the cookie element on the networklinkcontrol element.

I have broken up the single overlay into four parts. It is sort of hack that allows continuous panning (because each image extent goes farther than what GE requests). I use the cookie tag as a way to use the previous image if the user only pans a little bit. It still seems a bit tacked on...And I am not sure the extra download time is worth it.

What do you think?

FYI: Here is the same service with the traditional single image overlay.

http://www.mapdex.org/GE_KML_LINK.cfm?servername=hercules.kgs.ku.edu&mapservice=lawrence_Imagery

Jeremy

Old Maps

2006-02-10T11:28:53-05:00

I love historical maps. I have a box full of early to mid 20th century National Geographic Maps. One of the powers of GIS is the ability to take historical documents, scan them, georeference them, and serve them through map services. If you search in Mapdex for historical maps you will find some real gems. Here are a few that caught my attention.

From the digitized_colton1855 map service on the gis.uta.edu server.

An historical 1921 Shaghai Postal Map from the shanghai map service on sig.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr server.

Here is a historical geologic chart of the Mexican Republic.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Mapdex Site Changes

2006-02-10T07:16:00-05:00

Hi all-

We have made a few changes to the Mapdex site. Here is a rundown...

Raster () and Vector () layer identification.

Selection of either the Raster or Vector thumbnail image will take you to our new layer info page. From this page you can get a quick preview of the layer. If scale dependency is an issue for a layer you can randomly try and zoom to the appropriate geographic envelope to view the high resolution gis layer. Praveen has done a nice job with this page.

This page also allows you to launch the layer and its associated map service into the new Mapdex map viewer. If the projection is set, then you can also launch the layer into Google Earth.

As you from the above image, the new Mapdex viewer is Flash based. Flash is a very nice environment for creating interactive mapping application. My colleague, Asif I., is the Flash wiz in our group. Send me an email if you are interested in finding out more about the application. We still have a few bugs to tweak so let us know if you see something that could perform better.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Mapdex ArcMap Toolbar 1.0

2006-01-06T15:00:18-05:00

Hi All-

Asif has finished up the ArcMap toolbar for Mapdex. It makes use of the Mapdex REST Interface. The Mapdex toolbar for ArcMap brings the Mapdex search to ArcMap. Currently the Toolbar has only been developed and tested for ArcMap 9.1. With the toolbar you can search for GIS layers from ArcIMS map servers and add them to ArcMap.

Download it here: http://www.mapdex.org/MapdexToolbar/

The Mapdex toolbar requires the Microsoft .NET framework to be installed on your machine. If you do not have this installed the setup prompts you to install it. We also recommend that you install the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1. We have had some issues with machines not having the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

Jeremy

Mapdex Search Plugin for Mozilla

2005-12-09T10:02:51-05:00

Hi all-

Praveen has configured a Mapdex search plugin for Mozilla/Firefox. This allows you to search GIS layer names in Mapdex directly from your browsers navigation toolbar.

The plugin has been submitted to http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ and you will be able to install it from http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=mapdex&submitform=Search

After installing the plugin you have to wait for ~15 seconds before clicking the search bar. Sometimes it takes 10-15 seconds for the image to appear alongside the plugin name.

Once you install and find it working you can click on the "Judge it" link and tell whether the plugin is working or not.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Mapdex REST Interface

2005-12-02T15:19:27-05:00

Hi all-

We are proud to release the Mapdex REST interface. Representational State Transfer (REST) is a lightweight interface to the Mapdex database. Simply send an HTTP request to a URL with your search parameters and get back an xml document containing the information that makes up the Mapdex database. This database is updated approximately once a week. If you use it in an application, let us know. We love the feedback.

http://www.mapdex.org/cfcdoc/mapdex.html

Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Mapdex ArcMap Toolbar

2005-11-23T16:26:00-05:00

Hi all-

Asif Iqbal, in my group, just finished developing an ArcMap toolbar plugin for Mapdex. This ArcMap extension will allow you to search Mapdex directly from within ArcMap. I think it is pretty powerful. It makes use of the soon to be released Mapdex REST interface.

Is anybody interested in beta testing the plugin? If so email me at: jbartley@kgs.ku.edu

Jeremy

Select the image for a bigger picture.

SQL for Geographers

2005-11-01T10:15:45-05:00

Hi All-

I wanted to alert those that interested on a new blog I am putting together.

This blog is dedicated to the integration between GIS and enterprise level relational databases. I am a Geographer by trade with a strong interest in relational databases. I have been in the GIS field for 10+ years and the database field for 7. The amount of data waiting to be spatially enabled within enterprise databases is extraordinary. I hope to show in this blog working examples of database-GIS interaction. Many examples that I will show are implemented within Oracle 9.2 and ESRI's SDE 8.3. Hopefully most of the SQL algorithms will transfer to your implementation.

http://geosql.blogspot.com/

Google Maps + ESRI's ArcWeb Services

2005-10-27T16:51:00-05:00

Hi all-

This is my last Google Maps post for a while! We just finished a demo application for the State of Kansas where a user can geocode a location and see that location on a Google Map client. While that is not that unique, the details of the application are pretty cool.

http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/googlemaps/ks_gm.cfm

Users can geocode by city (Lawrence), address (1930 Constant Avenue, Lawrence), zipcode (66047), or the intersection of streets (9th & Iowa, Lawrence). We are using the Public Services category of ESRI's ArcWeb Services.
The black and white imagery is coming from ESRI's ArcSDE through ArcIMS. We are using the ArcIMS cache on demand system that I mentioned here. The reason for this is the lack of quality imagery data that Google provides for most of Kansas.
The Map client is the Google Maps ajax client.
The Road data is from Google Maps (Teleatlas).

Let us know if you have any questions.

Jeremy & Praveen

Single Image Google Maps Overlay

2005-10-22T21:04:00-05:00

Hi all-

Praveen Ponnusamy, a savvy developer in our group, has cracked the Google Maps API so that single images can be used within Gmaps. For places that store high-quality imagery in SDE or use Mr. Sid files, building 256 X 256 tiles on the fly is not very efficient. It is much more efficient to just select one image over the entire vieawable window. Praveen has worked through the Google javascript and has a working example of publishing Kansas orthophotography as a single image tile within the Google Maps framework.

http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/googlemaps/arcims_viewer.html

Praveen has also done a great write-up and supplied the code. Read his write-up to find out more...

Single-tile version for publishing ArcIMS images using the Google Maps API.

http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/googlemaps/arcims_viewer.html

This is an example of using a "single tile" to publish ArcIMS images. The viewer shows the default Google Map datasets together with city of Lawrence six-inch imagery and State of Kansas one-meter imagery. The application uses and/or overrides undocumented methods of Google Maps code such as loadTileImagesLayer, configureImage, getBoundsBitmap, getLatLng and the much familiar getTileURL methods. Also, due to namespace restrictions imposed by the Google javascript code, some of the utility methods referenced by the aforementioned methods had to be imported (copied) to the application code.

The application uses its own methods in place of the default loadTileImagesLayer and configureImage methods to publish the ArcIMS imagery and restores them back to the GMaps's implementation when the user switches to one of the default GMap types. The overridden methods resemble their original implementation except for some minor changes to accommodate the single-tile architecture. The trick to achieve this resides in the loadTileImagesLayer method where the for-loop to create the tiles is modified to create just one and to relocate it to the view window. Finally, the moveend event is bound to query the image from server. The server-side script called (to query the ArcIMS server) is the same as that used by Jeremy's tiled-version of ArcIMS viewer.

There are some gotchas to this approach though,

1. The lat-long values for the overlay and the tiles, for the view window, differ a little due to the difference in aspect ratios of the 256 x 256 images used by the GMaps and the variable image size (as dictated by the div element size, for example, 800 x 600) we use for the single-tile ArcIMS images. The calculations for this adjustment are done in the getTileURL2 method of the new ArcIMS map specification class. Essentially, the distance between the envelope's corners and the center of the view window, as given by the GMaps, is "scaled" and latitude-longitude values for the envelopes are recalculated. This is important for the GMaps overlay (roads) and the ArcIMS image to be in sync.

2. Since undocumented methods are used here, the javascript code used by the application has to be updated whenever Google updates happen or else the application will break. However, it should not take much time to update.

Future improvements
1. There may be a better/shorter way to do some of the stuff done here.
2. Cache images on-the-fly.
3. Increase the size of the images (possibly by 50%) queried from the server so as to have a buffer around the view window.
4. Add the ability to publish our own overlays too.

You can download the source code here: http://geoportal.kgs.ku.edu/googlemaps/GM_ArcIMS_1Tile.zip

ppraveen@kgs.ku.edu