ArcGIS Explorer Blog : 480

Raster Transparency in Explorer 480

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:15:00 GMT

One of the new features introduced with ArcGIS Explorer 480 is the ability to set any color in a raster image transparent. This is very handy when working with georeferenced images with "no data" values. Have a look at the video, then follow along in this post.

Let's take a closer look. First, we've added a local raster file, in this case a TIF image that was used during the California fire response last year. To add a local raster go to File, then Open, and choose Rasters, and then browse for the file you want.

In this particular file you will see that we have black areas representing "no data" surrounding the image, and blocking the view of the underlying basemap information.

To set the black areas in the image transparent, first open the raster layer properties. To do this, right click the layer in Contents, then choose Layer Properties.

In the layer properties, choose Raster Background. You can specify the transparent color in one of two ways, by typing in the actual RGB values, or by clicking on the image on the map. It's easiest just to click on the color you want transparent in the raster.

After we apply the changes, you'll see that we've turned the black RGB values transparent, and created a much nicer overlay.

For more information, see the Raster Background Color Help topic.

Find Telephone and Find Computer Location

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Two more new tasks delivered with ArcGIS Explorer 480 are Find Telephone and Find Computer Location. Let's have a look at how to access these, and how they can be used.

There are two places where new tasks are found in ArcGIS Explorer 480 - the Tasks tab under Content on the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center, and in the Manage Tasks list. These are found in Manage Tasks.

Choose Tools > Manage Tasks. The left side lists available tasks, the right side lists tasks currently shown in Explorer. Highlight the tasks, and use the arrow to move them to the right column, then click OK.

You'll now see both available on the Explorer task panel where you can click to activate them.

Find Telephone

Find Telephone takes any land-based telephone number and locates it on your map. Here we've entered ESRI's phone number.

Click find to create a point result that locates the telephone number entered. The telephone subscriber, if publicly available, is also displayed in the Results window.

For additional information, visit the Find Telephone Help topic.

Find Computer Location

Find Computer Location creates a point result that is the geographic location of a web address or an IP address. Here we've typed the URL for the ESRI.com Web site. Click the result to open its popup window.

For more details, visit the Find Computer Location Help topic.

Adding Geotagged Photos To Your Map

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:03:00 GMT

One of the new tasks delivered with ArcGIS Explorer 480 is the Add Photo task. The Add Photo task places photos that have been geotagged on the map. Have a look at the video, then follow along in this post.

Let's take a closer look. First, add the task from the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center. Choose File > Resource Center and from the Content tab choose Tasks. You can also open the Resource Center by choosing Help > ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center, then click on the Content tab, then Tasks. The Add Photo task is circled below, just click to add it to Explorer.

Your photos must have been taken with a GPS enabled camera that can capture the location in the image header (written to the EXIF header). An increasing number of cameras (like the Ricoh GPS camera, some Nikon models, and others) and even camera equiped cell phones (like the Nokia N95) are GPS-enabled.

If you don't have one of these devices the location can be added to your photos afterwards using applications like Google Picasa and others.

Activate the task and click Browse to navigate to a folder containing geotagged photos. The folder's contents are displayed in the task (note that only JPEG format images are supported). Just check the photos you want to add, and click Place Photos.

A collection of results will appear, and the photos will be placed on your map.

When you click the result the photo will open in the popup window. Here we've added a couple of geotagged photos taken during a recent search and rescue operation in the San Bernardino Mountains near Redlands. These photos were taken by a member of the SAR team, and are now placed on our Explorer map.

The Add Photo task allows you to specify settings which let you control whether subfolders are searched, and how various image sizes are handled and displayed in the popup window.

Sharing via E-mail Video

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:47:00 GMT

Here's a video showing the E-mail capabilities in ArcGIS Explorer 480. The video complements a previous blog post that presents a short tutorial on the same topic.

Sharing via E-mail with ArcGIS Explorer

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:18:00 GMT

(View a video of how to share Explorer results via e-mail)

You've always been able to E-mail your saved or exported NMF files, but until the 480 release you've had to do that outside of Explorer. With the latest release (Explorer 480) you can now e-mail an entire map, a layer, or a result directly from ArcGIS Explorer. Here's how.

To e-mail your entire map, go to File and choose E-mail (or hit Ctrl+E).

To E-mail a layer, right click the layer and choose E-mail. Note that the E-mail capability is only enabled for Web-based services that can be shared, not for local data sources that might not be available to the e-mail recipient.

There are several ways to e-mail a result. The first is to right-click the result in the result window and choose E-mail. You can e-mail a single result, or an entire group or results this way.

The second way is to right-click the result on the map, and choose E-mail. Here we've right-clicked a result that is the location of a live traffic cam in the Phoenix area.

The third way is to open the popup window for a result, and choose the E-mail Result option which appears at the bottom of the window. If you e-mail a result with its popup window open, when the recipient opens it the popup window will automatically appear. Here we've chosen one of the traffic cam results, and e-mailed it with its popup window open so the recipient will automatically see the current traffic conditions.

In each of the above cases, the NMF file is generated on-the-fly and automatically added to your e-mail as an attachment, along with some descriptive text. You can add your own message to the text that is automatically inserted, or clear the message and start your message from scratch. All the recipient needs is to have ArcGIS Explorer installed (there are instructions automatically inserted in the e-mail) and then double-click the NMF attachment to view it using Explorer.

For more information view the Sharing content with e-mail Help topic.

ArcGIS Explorer 480 Has Been Released!

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:00:00 GMT

The ArcGIS Explorer Team is pleased to announce that ArcGIS Explorer 480 has been released.

If the ESRI servers are your home servers, you'll be notified that there is a new version available the next time you start the application. Just follow the instructions to download and install this new release.

For those that deploy Explorer from your own home servers, you'll need to swap your versions and update your version.html file to push out the new release to your users. With this release we've reorganized the home server folder structure. Please refer to the Migrating from a previous version of ArcGIS Explorer Home Server documentation included in the new ArcGIS Home Server Help.

This release has lots of new features, check out the What's New in ArcGIS Explorer 480 document for a detailed list of all the new features and enhancements. At the top of our list are improved performance, E-mail capabilities, support for GeoRSS feeds and enterprise geodatabases (ArcSDE), improved dashboarding, GPX file import, and there's a lot more. We'll be covering these in more detail here on the blog.

Feel free to send us your feedback, and let us know what you think. We'll also be monitoring the Explorer discussion forum to help you with any questions that you may have.

- The ArcGIS Explorer Team

NPS Air Quality Results

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:45:00 GMT

Here's a new result that you can open in Explorer. It adds the locations of National Park Service air quality Web cams, and the popups open the cam images which are updated every 15 minutes. The NPS Web site describes the cams:

The National Park Service operates digital cameras at many parks to help educate the public on air quality issues. These cameras often show the effects of air pollution such as visibility impairment. Because these cameras are typically located near air quality monitoring sites, the camera web pages display other information along with the photo such as current levels of ozone, particulate matter, or sulfur dioxide air pollutants, visual range, and weather conditions.

Let's take a look at these results. First start Explorer if it's not already running, and click the link below to access the file from this post:

NPS Air Quality Result

If you're prompted to save or open the file, choose to open the file. You'll see the results display immediately on your map. You can optionally save the file locally, and then browse to open it using File > Open > ArcGIS Explorer Files.

Open the result group, and have a look at the various cam locations.

Here we've chosen to have a look at the Sequoia - Kings Canyon National Park cam. Double-click the result, and you'll automatically zoom to its location, then click the cam symbol to open its popup window.

Links in the popup window open a new browser window. One of those links shows the view under ideal conditions, with landmarks labeled. You can see that when we checked this afternoon that it was not the best air quality day in the foothills surrounding the park. Compare the image below showing ideal conditions with the one shown in the popup window above.

If you open the properties for one of the results you can see how the popup contents work. It's siimply a URL to the Web page that displays the Web cam image and other links.

We covered how you can add various types of content to result popup windows in a previous post. This result is one of the new ones we're including on the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center for the 480 release, coming up soon!

Taking a Look at Earthquakes (in many different ways)

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:27:00 GMT

This morning a 5.2 quake hit Illinois, shaking a large part of the Midwest, with many aftershocks following the main temblor. The quake was believed by USGS scientists to have involved the Wabash fault, an extension of the New Madrid fault. That fault generated the 1812 New Madrid quake, one of the largest ever recorded in the US.

So this morning we took at look at things using Explorer, first connecting to an ArcIMS service found on the Geography Network. We connected to the Geography Network at www.geographynetwork.com and added the ESRI_Quake_Rec service to Explorer. That service is updated every 15 minutes by ESRI and the USGS.

We also added the USGS topo service (physical features layer) from the Explorer Resource Center (Contents > Layers) and here's how things looked.

Next we visited the USGS Hazards Program site, and downloaded the CSV file for magnitude 1+ earthquakes over the last 7 days. We used Explorer's import capabilities to create results from the lat/long coordinates to add them to our map. We chose the magnitude as the title, and date and time as the description. And below we've used the swipe tool on the topo layer to reveal the imagery underneath.

From the same site we also clicked to open the KML file.

Next, we imported the CSV file and created a file geodatabase. Why did we do that? You'll find out in a couple of paragraphs, but here's the local file geodatabase in Explorer. When we click on the earthquake location point, the attribute information for the quake is displayed.

Using the file geodatabase from above, we decided to be a little more creative. We buffered each point (to create polygons at each quake location for better visualization) then symbolized and extruded each of those polygons based on the earthquake magnitude using ArcGlobe. To make things more visually dramatic, we added a multiplier to the magnitude just to extrude the features further. We saved the ArcGlobe .3DD file, and published it via one of our ArcGIS Servers.

Here's the area around southern California, and you can clearly see that during the past week this region has been seismically active too.

Finally, we tapped into the USGS "Shakemap" GeoRSS feed for a real time feed of live earthquake information.

Now we'll have to be honest and let you know we're cheating a bit with this one, but only just a little bit. The above screenshot showing a GeoRSS connection was created using today's daily build of Explorer hot off the development machines.

For everyone else, you won't be able to connect to a GeoRSS feed using the currently released Explorer 450, but you'll be able to do everything else we've shown here. GeoRSS support is just one of the many new features we'll be releasing with Explorer 480.