At the opening of yesterday's ESRI Petroleum User Group (PUG) meeting, the upcoming new release of ArcGIS Explorer (build 1200) was showcased. First, an Explorer presentation was used to highlight the new ArcGIS Online basemaps, with detailed imagery, streets, and topo data worldwide. Bing Maps aerials, hybrid, and streets are also featured in the updated basemap gallery, and will be available for free for Explorer users.

Shown below is the newly updated ESRI World Imagery basemap, showing some of the oil facilities and wells in Bahrain.



One of the new capabilities demonstrated was the new Analysis Gallery which provides a way to connect to any ArcGIS Server and use geoprocessing tools directly.

 

Here we've entered the URL for an ArcGIS Server and connected to its services directory. In the Geoprocessing folder we've discovered several published geoprocessing services, and have chosen one of them.

 

Once we've connected, the tool becomes part of the Analysis Gallery where it can be managed.

 

The parameters in the geoprocessing service define the user interface. Here we can see how the tool allows us to draw a polygon to select gas transmission lines, buffer them by a specified distance, and locate leases that fall within the buffer distance that expire in the next three months,

 

The parameters are sent to the waiting geoprocessing service which performs the analysis, and returns the results. When completed we see a message appear:

 

The resulting leases can be viewed, and clicked to view additional information.

 

This is just one of the ways that ArcGIS Explorer can be extended with additional GIS tools. The Analysis Gallery makes it easy to connect to server-based capabilities that can perform advanced GIS analysis.