I read an interesting article today in the May ‘09 issue of Government Technology magazine. They have a great interview with Jack Dangermond by Chad Vander Veen about where ESRI is headed. One of the best questions was, “What exactly is FedStat and how might it pair with Obama’s (open transparent government) initiatives.” Here’s Jack’s answer…
So we began to prototype and play with the vision of FedStat. The examples we’ve been looking at give some of the early prototype evidence of how to take government expenditures - first stimulus funding and later all government funding - and visualize where the money is going and hold the people who are spending that money more accountable with performance measurement.
It’s a whole new frontier for GIS. It’s taking the power of spatial visualization and analytics, and opening government up so legislatures, administrators and virtually everyone can see, understand and openly direct government into the future. It’s probably one of the most exciting applications I’ve ever had the opportunity to support. I think it will change the way we look at ourselves and the way we run our democracy. It’s almost like another step in the evolution of democracy itself.
Hyperbole aside, it is an interesting solution to finally marry (perhaps ‘marry’ is too strong? how about ‘amicably introduce’) GIS and financial data. The next problem in getting GIS and government financial data together is how to easily and securely automate the collection of this financial data from whatever system it’s currently residing in.
A pre-release of StateStat is currently available on the ESRI Flex Code Gallery.
CitiStat, economy, ESRI Flex API, FedStat, Jack Dangermond, StateStat
I’m a pretty big fan of FiOS (Verizon? not so much, but that’s another story). I often dream about how amazing it would be to a have decent internet service provider in this state. But alas, there are limitations we must live with here in the beautiful southeast and being the last to get new technology is unfortunately one of them.
But where CAN you get FiOS? After seeing a few user generated maps and lists of counties that have the service I decided to create my own map. The above map was made using the ESRI Flex API…without any ArcGIS Server involved! That’s right! I’ve slipped the surly bonds of ArcGIS Server to touch the face of easy free web mapping. Now it wasn’t exactly a pain free exercise and I’m not sure I’d want to do this for anything as complex as a line or polygon map but for very basic maps like this one it shouldn’t be too awful.
The map uses ESRI’s free online World Street Map and a clever wordpress trick to hide their wonderful logo (if you view the swf, it’s technically still there). The points were generated using one of those FiOS lists I cannot find at the moment, joining it to some county data and then exporting it as KML points and then by picking the X & Y locations out of the XML.
Enjoy the map.
ESRI Flex API, FiOS, maps
Street Views Widget
One of the best additions I made to my Sample Flex Viewer is the Street Views Widget. This widget allows the user to choose which service (Google Streetview or Pictometry Virtual Earth Birds Eye) they wish to use and then click on any point in the map to bring it up in a separate browser window. I do not provide support for this widget, use at your own risk.
Click more to view the code.
Read more…
Google Street View, Pictometry, Sample Flex Viewer, Virtual Earth, Widget
Here’s a neat replacement for the LiveMapsWidget that adds functionality for a dynamic legend add on. It does take a moment to load in the live demo but if this is a good solution I might use it. A legend is one of the most common suggestions I get for my modified sample flex viewer.
Area near USC
Above is my lovely cache I’ve spent roughly a week designing. I’m really happy about the direction it’s headed and I’m hoping to have at least the first cache ready on monday. All that’s left after that is the design of my next flex app and to wait for delivery of some very high res 2009 ortho photos.
cache, Sample Flex Viewer
Somehow I missed the Sample Solar Radiation Analysis and Widget released on the 20th of March. It looks very cool and useful for cities like Boston (who pioneered it) who have alternative energy initiatives. Last Friday, while I was out sick, ESRI also released two new applications during the Developer Summit. The WMS and AIR demo shows ESRI’s method of extending the dynamic map service layer to support WMS, somebody already beat them to the punch on that one. It’s also running in Adobe Air, which is cool although I haven’t found a use for it yet…to me, the whole purpose of creating a web map is so that I wouldn’t have to install software.
Cartography!
The other application and the one most interesting to me, is the Thematic Mapping demo. This demo shows off programmatic thematic mapping, base map / aerial photography / cartography opacity sliders, a mouse over tool tip identify function and an awesome flex effect when you mouse over parcels (which I tried to capture in the screen shot above). I will definitely try to incorporate some of these features into my next flex website.
Adobe Air, Cartography, ESRI Flex API, Thematic Mapping, WMS
Click Here to View the Map
The Road is the most well written novel I’ve read recently. I tore through the book in two days barely able to put it down, and when I did, I was constantly thinking about the fate of the boy and his father. While reading it I was intrigued at how vague McCarthy is about the wasteland the pair travels through and yet he seems to drop plenty of hints for those who are familiar enough with the area to find them (the one that caught my attention was “See Rock City”). After reading it I thought it would be interesting to make a map of The Road and I searched Google looking for somebody who had the same thought before me. I didn’t find any maps but what I did find was a paper by Dr. Wesley G. Morgan called “The Route and Roots of The Road.” In the paper Dr. Morgan pinpoints the locations described in the novel with amazing accuracy.
Seeing that the hard work had already been done for me I couldn’t resist creating a Flex Map of The Road. To read the excerpts from the book that describe each location as well as pictures Dr. Morgan took of the area, click on the white map markers. I used the new Google Maps Flash API (because I don’t have a ArcGIS Server of my very own) and the KMLParser example provided by Google to create my map. The paper and this map that came from it are both spoiler free (but you may want to skip the next paragraph if you like to figure things out for yourself first).
As for deciding where the end of the road was I thought of three possibilities. If you accept that the man and the boy found themselves in what is today the Savannah River Site then it makes no sense for the pair to go to Charleston unless they walked the extra 50 miles to get back on the right road that would take them there. So it must be either Hunting Island (off Beaufort), Tybee Island (off Savannah), or Hilton Head Island. As for Hunting Island, the book (in my memory) did not describe any famous lighthouses or mention a word about nearby Parris Island (though it might not be there anymore). To get to Tybee Island they’d have to travel through Savannah which I don’t remember and traverse the salt marsh separating Savannah from Tybee Beach. It seems to me that the most direct route and easiest to get to is Hilton Head Island. It would also be the easiest place to find a boat because there are marinas on the east side of the island.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of the above. I need to re-read the book to be sure. Please let me know if you find other locations in South Carolina or Georgia mentioned in the novel. Enjoy the map.
Cormac McCarthy, Google Maps API for Flash, KML, KMLParser, maps, The Road
I will be posting a video demo of my very first flex website here as soon as I’m done compressing and uploading it. I’ll put it in this post and in the new Gallery page. It’s based very heavily on the Flex Sample Viewer but I’ve made some pretty extensive adjustments and I’m very happy with the results. Enjoy.
UPDATE: Having problems re-encoding the demo unfortunately. It will have to wait until I get back to the office on Monday. Sorry!
UPDATE again: The gallery is now up. I ended up using YouTube, sorry for those who have it blocked at work (like me) I couldn’t find another way.
Flex Sample Viewer, maps
Just a small post today about map caching in ArcGIS Server. Caching was an abominable operation in 9.2 that was supposedly made less horrible in 9.3. ESRI’s efforts to make caching a barely tolerable experience include caching by feature class which was recently covered in depth on the ArcGIS Server Blog. This delightful post has many tips and tricks to speed up the infernal process by limiting the number of tiles you have to create and breaking a big caching job into smaller parts. I think it should be required reading for anyone who dares attempt this abhorrent procedure.
Also, if you haven’t noticed I added a contact page up top. Feel free to tell me how much you love me and my lovely website.
ArcGIS Server Blog, cache
My plan for a Public Flex API Website
Planning for a web mapping project is just as important as any major GIS project. Even for a one man show like mine, I find a good plan keeps me on track and minimizes the time I waste chasing various related distractions. I’m not a huge fan of Microsoft Project 2007 but I haven’t used any other program (so I don’t know any better). The first objective in my plan is to study Flex in depth. I’ve found it’s easier to learn a bunch of stuff you might not ever use rather than flail about for hours chasing a problem caused by simple ignorance.
In lieu of using the O’Reilly Flex Books, which I will hopefully be getting soon, I’ve found two resources that have already helped me several times even though I haven’t completed either one. Flex in a Week is the best of the two and it’s Adobe Air video format is perfect for following along. The exercises make sense and are somewhat interesting (although not usually map related). Flex in a Week is a great way to learn the Flex framework. Tour de Flex is the other one I’m using and while it’s very informative I just haven’t found much use for most of the examples. Tour de Flex is a standalone application and it’s layout is very similar to ESRI’s Flex API Samples section with the live sample running in a window on top and it’s code in a window underneath. It does not have any code for ESRI API and while it does have a couple mapping examples, they are very basic Google, Yahoo and Mapquest samples. These and other heatmap and presidential election results map examples seem to be of limited utility for what we’re trying to accomplish.
Adobe Air, Flex in a Week, O'Reilly, Planning, Tour de Flex
I tried to use the Stimulus Reporting Application this morning with little success. It seems well made enough but it will require a lot of work to get something useful out of it, far from the sample flex viewer which was functional out of the box and you could work on gradually to make it your own.
KML works in Google Earth, at least
I also looked at finding a use for the Google Maps API for Flash. The interface is just as slick as every other Flash map implementation but the support just isn’t there for custom maps. Specifically, creating a map with a thematic overlay is just about impossible unless you want to break it down and build it back up from scratch, polygon by polygon or parse a KML file through some ethereal means. Make sure you star that post in the latter link if this is something you’re interested in. Google Maps API for Flash deserves some one-line KML love. Oh well, my election results ‘08 map will have to await some other implementation.
Google Maps API for Flash, KML, Stimulus Reporting Application
