During Monday morning's opening day plenary presentations, ArcGIS Explorer 480 was showcased. We'll review the Explorer presentations here.

Jami Garrison, from the Arizona Department of Transportation, was the Explorer featured user, and was introduced by Explorer product manager Bernie Szukalski. Bern explained that Explorer has been evolving rapidly, with the 480 release in July, and a preview of the forthcoming 600 release to be shown in the afternoon plenary session.

When ArcGIS Explorer starts, it connects to a home server which by default are ESRI's. But you can choose a different home server, and using your own you can control the startup map and tasks, the look and feel of the application, and enable or disable capabilities. Jami used a custom home server for Explorer, and had changed some elements of the skin; adding a custom logo, using a display overlay (for "ADOT Explorer'), a cactus north arrow, custom home page, and her own startup map and tasks.

 

Jami first talked about the need to connect to and use not only GIS assets in the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT), but also GIS content that comes from other state agencies and local governments that they work with. Here is a map showing the Maricopa Association of Governments IMS service along with ADOT's fuel depots.

Jami added results that showed ADOT's live traffic cameras, enabling users to get the most recent image of traffic conditions from a variety of locations along the highway system. By clicking on the result, the latest traffic image is displayed in the popup window.

At any given time, ADOT has numerous construction projects going on around the State.  Jami showed how aerial imagery helps ADOT track and monitor the progress of these multi-million dollar projects. These local data sources can be added quickly to Explorer, and tools like swipe and transparency can be applied to aid visualization.

ADOT's Explorer users really liked the ability to quickly add data to their maps using the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center.   ADOT took that idea and created their own Resource Center to quickly distribute news and data to the Department's users.  For instance, if a user needs to view the Engineering Diagrams for a bridge, they can go to the resource center and choose what they want to view. 

Explorer zooms to the location of the bridge and then opens the Engineering Diagram in the popup window.

Jami described how the Incident Management teams at ADOT really like the ability to perform GIS Analysis right in the application.  For example, if there was an incident involving a chemical spill, the Incident Manager could right-click and send the location information to the model (in this case she used the Emergecny Response Guide (ERG) by Chemical model).   Then input some parameters about the incident: type of chemical (select from a drop-down list), wind direction, time of day and size of spill.    After the model is run, a containment area based on the input parameters is added to the map. 

Explorer has a lot of great features. ADOT has another type user, though, that does not need all of these features. They just need something simple so that they can quickly and easily get information about various incidents and projects around the state. The latest release of Explorer (Build 480) introduced the Quick Content task. The Quick Content is an embedded webpage so it can be quickly updated to provide current information on top events. Jami showed how easy it is to use the Quick Content to click on an icon and Explorer then zooms to the location of the event and pops up information about that event. The example below shows information about a landslide northeast of Phoenix.

The Quick Content area can also be used to get project data and information out to anyone. Jami demonstrated a project along State Route 260 designed to reduce vehicular collisions with wildlife.  ADOT had built several wildlife underpasses along this section of roadway but there were still a significant amount of crashes in the corridor. The Arizona Game and Fish deparment used telemetry from GPS-collared Elk to determine where they were crossing the roadway, as incidated in the analysis shown below (the high red columns are the areas where the elk were corssing the roadway most frequently). 

Using the analysis, the project team was then able to determine the locations to place fencing so that the wildlife could be funneled into the underpass areas.

The results of that project are then shown in the 2005 crash data where the amount of vehicular collisions with wildlife are greatly reduced, providing a much safer environment for both the wildlife and the traveling public.