(post submitted by Adam Pittman, ESRI San Antonio)

In Big Bend National Park cell phone reception is scarce.  To keep friends and family from worrying about me on last weekend’s camping trip I decided to use ArcGIS Explorer to enable them to keep a watchful eye on my status.  Using my SPOT satellite messenger I can send progress reports directly from anywhere in the world from any location that has a clear view of the sky.  SPOT maintains this web service tracking my location as an exposed XML file. 

We can’t bring this XML file directly into ArcGIS Explorer without writing a custom task, and I wanted a simple solution. So I used Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and massage this feed into a format I could use directly in ArcGIS Explorer.  Yahoo! Pipes is a free composition tool allowing you to collect and translate content from the web, and includes many examples you can start from. I found an example SPOT messenger pipe that I used. 

This pipe collects the XML information and converts it into a consumable format, in my case GeoRSS. 

To consume this service with ArcGIS Explorer all I needed to do is add it as a GeoRSS feed. 

If I set the layer to automatically update I can see new SPOT locations automatically in ArcGIS Explorer, letting users know exactly where I am.  By combining this service with other content, including the content available at the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center, my friends and family can not only know where I am, but also know what the weather is and what my surroundings look like.

Here's my tour of Big Bend using Yahoo! pipes and the SPOT messenger service in ArcGIS Explorer.