ArcGIS Explorer Blog : ArcIMS

PIGWAD and Mars (or creating your own Mars Explorer)

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:10:00 GMT

NASA's PIGWAD (Planetary Interactive GIS-on-the-Web Analyzable Database) site offers a wealth of planetary information, including lots of information for Mars. PIGWAD's mission statement from their Web site:

(1) Produce a web-based, user-friendly interface aimed at the planetary research community that will support Geographic Information Systems (GIS) graphical, statistical, and spatial tools for analyses of planetary data, including the distribution of planetary GIS tutorials, tools, programs, and information; (2) Create planetary GIS databases consisting of peer-reviewed digital geologic maps, feature maps, topography, and remote-sensing data under the scientific oversight of the NASA Geologic Mapping Subcommittee (GEMS); and (3) Support and encourage the use of GIS in planetary research including geospatial open standards.

What this means is that there's lots of information for you to use with ArcGIS Explorer, both downloadable data in the form of shapefiles and rasters, as well as Web-based content services, and for a variety of planets and their moons.

Here's one of PIGWAD's ArcIMS-driven sites that allows you to view a variety of different information for Mars.

Though the content above is viewed in an ArcIMS Web application, we can also copy and paste the URL that we see in the address bar at the top of the app and create a connection directly from ArcGIS Explorer to the underlying ArcIMS services. To do that we had to do a little trial and error to determine the correct URL (PIGWAD doesn't publish the direct connect information), but it was easy to determine. In Open Content we chose ArcIMS as our connection type to create, and typed the connection information shown below:

Once connected we can view the entire list of available services, and a good one to choose is Mars_general_image.

Once chosen we're presented with a series of dialogs that allow us to choose specific sublayers, how they are displayed, and other parameters. You can accept the default for most of those, but there are two that we'll take a closer look at.

The first is the dialog for choosing the Service Imagery Format. If you know the service is imagery-based, or global in context, select that option. If you know it's vector-based, choose the vector option. For vector services that provide only partial coverage this is the best option since it will make transparent anything outside the data. For a more thorough discussion of the options, see the Imagery Format Help topic.

And here's where we choose the specific sublayer(s) that we want. There's a lot of them, and the easiest way to choose just one is to turn them all off with the topmost checkbox, then scroll down and choose just the sublayer we want. Here we've chosen the color shaded relief layer.

We can repeat these steps as many times as we like to access the specific sublayers we want to use in our Explorer map. See the Selecting IMS Layers Help topic for more details.

Since we're technically still working with good old Planet Earth as our foundation, we also may want to remove things that aren't appropriate for Mars. So we can turn off the positional text (Tools > Options > Map Display), atmospheric halo and fog (File > Map Properties > Environment) and also remove tasks and layers that don't apply.

Here's our completed map showing the use of the swipe tool. You can see we've turned ArcGIS Explorer into a "Mars Explorer."

Hooray for NASA's Phoenix!

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Though only given 50-50 odds, NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander completed a successful touchdown just a short while ago, completing a remarkable 296-day, 422-million-mile journey. In celebration of the milestone, the first-ever landing near Mars' north pole, we decided to have a closer look at the red planet using ArcGIS Explorer.

How'd we do this? We made use of some of the freely available content published on the Geography Network. Here's how.

First we started ArcGIS Explorer and clicked File > Open to show the Open Content dialog. We choose Servers, and then clicked the button at the top to choose ArcIMS (all services on the Geography Network are currently published via ArcIMS). We typed in the connection information shown here:

For Geography Network services we don't need a user name or password, so we just left those fields blank. Once you establish a connection to a server it will be saved in your list of connections, and you won't have to enter this information again. Once connected you'll see it open in the connection list.

Here we've scrolled down the list of available Geography Network services (there's a lot to choose from) until we reached NASA Mars, then double-clicked it.

We also accepted the defaults for the dialogs that appeared after our selection, except for the IMS Layer visibility. ArcIMS services can contain many sublayers, and you can choose which ones you want to add. In this case we wanted to add the two sublayers in the Mars service as individual layers so we could control the label visibility independently of the Mars imagery. So we repeated this twice, once to add the Mars imagery, and a second time to add the place labels.

When we were finished, we had two new layers in our map that allowed us to create the mars scene at the top of this post.

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.

Explorer at the PUG

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Earlier this week we posted on the Explorer presentation during the plenary at the Federal User Conference.

Here's an overview of the Explorer presentation during the plenary at the Petroleum User Group meeting (PUG), held in Houston last week.

The first part of the presentation was similar to the FedUC demonstration, showing how the default ArcGIS Online maps and a wide variety of other content services, including ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server map and globe services, and WMS services, could easily be accessed and integrated into a common map.

For the next section, Alaska was used as the study area to showcase the ability to add a variety of local data. Shown below are:

a raster (BSQ image) downloaded from the EROS site
a file geodatabase of the ANWR and Area 1002 boundaries
a shapefile with airport locations
a KML file showing soil chemistry downloaded from the USGS Minerals Resource site

Next, Area 1002 was visited, showcasing some of the new symbols available in Explorer (the camera symbols in this case). These notes were linked to popups showing Quicktime panoramas taken by USGS field crews.

The next section highlighted Explorer's capabilities for integrating a wide variety of non-map content based on location. In this case some of the wildcat wells studied by the USGS were shown, with each popup linking to a wide variety of online information published for each well. For example, links could be followed to view the photos of core samples taken at varying depths in each well, and other information such as depths to stratigraphic horizons, gamma ray data, and drilling and geologic reports.

Finally, the demonstration moved to the Gulf of Mexico where several custom tasks were used. Shown below are the fields in play in the Gulf region (the colored splotches indicate varying degrees of oil and natural gas yields) and the outlines of the oil leases in the Gulf (from a geodatabase obtained from the Minerals Management Service).

Leases were selected belonging to a particular oil company (the orange highlighted fields), and all adjacent leases expiring within 90 days were found (the red highlighted fields). This was accomplished using a geoprocessing task authored using ArcGIS Desktop, and published as a task for Explorer via ArcGIS Server.

The expiring leases were then sent to another custom task (by right clicking the result and using Send To) which generated a report for the selected leases, summarizing ownership, the terms of the lease, area, and other information.

ArcGIS Explorer = Many Kinds of Layers

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:29:00 GMT

One of Explorer's distinguishing features is its ability to connect directly to a wide variety of Web service-based content and a wide variety of local data, both vector and raster, and integrate and manipulate them all in a single map. It's truly in a league of its own in this regard. Shown below is Explorer with:

2 ArcGIS Online layers
1 WMS layer
1 ArcIMS layer
2 2D ArcGIS Server layers (1 of them dynamically updated every 10 minutes)
1 3D ArcGIS Server layer
1 KML (from the USGS site)
1 KMZ (from the NOAA site)
1 Shapefile
1 Result (a collection of points imported from GPS coordinates in a textfile)
1 BSQ raster image (from the EROS Data Center)

And we could add even more.

Several of the layers have been made partially transparent so they can be overlayed, and several have scale dependencies. The underlying data sources for the Web-based content include everything from enterprise ArcSDE geodatabases, file and workgroup geodatabases, and local sources that include shapefiles, rasters, and points added from textfiles containing GPS coordinates.

Using Dynamic Content

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:22:00 GMT

ArcGIS Explorer 440 includes enhancements which make it easier to use and manage dynamic layer content from services that are continually being updated, like weather or active fire perimeters.

When you connect to one of these services you have full control over the refresh interval, and with Explorer 440 the cache for dynamic layers is automatically refreshed on open, so you'll always have the latest information. This now applies to all content sources, including both 2D and 3D services published via ArcGIS Server, 2D services published via ArcIMS, or local vector and raster data.

In this example we're going to use a weather service provided by Meteorlogix, one of ESRI's business partners. The Meteorlogix weather information service that ESRI taps into provides updated information every 15 minutes, and the data is being manipulated and stored in an Oracle-based enterprise geodatabase. As part of the geodatabase input process the data is generalized somewhat (for performance) and cell-based information is aggregated into polygons. As the data is refreshed in the geodatabase it is also being date-stamped, so that historical weather trends can be analyzed using ArcGIS Desktop's Tracking Analyst.

In ArcGIS Explorer we're interested in adding this service as a dynamic layer which refreshes automatically. To do this, we connect to the service in Explorer by choosing File, then Open, and selecting Server as the content type we wish to open.

Below we've clicked ArcGIS Server from the Create New Connection choices along the top, and have provided the necessary connection information to connect to the ESRI internal server that is publishing the weather (sorry, we don't yet publish weather as a publicly accessible service).

Now that we've established a connection to the server, we can scroll down and see the list of published services that are available. Below we've chosen to connect to the Meteorlogix weather service that we described above.

Now that we've chosen the weather service, we're guided by a wizard to specify certain parameters. Note that there is a user option to remember what we've specified the next time around.

First we're asked to specify the raster cell size, for which we accept the default chosen by Explorer. Next we're asked to choose from among the sublayers published in this service. And now to the important part - we're asked to specify the disk caching options. Since the weather data is updated on the server every 15 minutes, we'll choose the option for "Don't create a cache for the layer on disk." This also enables the choice for refreshing cache based on a time interval, and we'll specify 15 minutes as the refresh rate.

Using these settings Explorer will communicate with the server and refresh cache for this layer every 15 minutes. If the map is saved, when opened again it will automatically refresh the layer, then refresh at the specified 15 minute interval, ensuring that what you see is up to date.

You can experiment with this yourself using any service or local data source. For a detailed discussion on cache and various cache management options, refer to the Cache management in ArcGIS Explorer Help topic.

Accessing IMS Sub-Layers

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:16:00 GMT

Among the new capabilities in Explorer 440 is the ability to choose from sub-layers published in ArcIMS services. In previous versions of Explorer the connection would be to the default IMS service layer, and you were not able to access and control individual sub-layers.

In the example below, we've accessed the ESRI-Soils service from the Geography Network. We've chosen to add all the layers, the only option up until now. Note that we get more than just the soils layers, we also get the oceans, and as we zoom in we see city labels, country boundaries, and other layers that we may not want or need to use:

Now let's use the new capabilities in Explorer 440, and choose just the sub-layers we want. One of the first changes you'll notice is that when you choose File > Open... and then choose Servers, the IMS choice (as well as WMS) is visible along the top, since both map and globe service types are now the default.

Click IMS, and enter the connection information for ESRI's Geography Network as shown:

Click to open the connection, and scroll down the list and choose ESRI_Soil. This is one of many ArcIMS services published at this site. Step through the dialogs to add the IMS service. One of your choices will be the Service Imagery Format:

Here we choose the option for vector, scanned, or thematic maps since the ESRI_Soil service is a thematic map, and we want to choose a subset of its layers.

Advancing to the next dialog, we can now choose from the available sub-layers that are published. In this case we're only interested in the Soils, and don't need or want any of the other sub-layers.

Below is the result. Compare this image with that at the top of this post, or just try it for yourself. You'll find that these new capabilities in Explorer 440 will make IMS services more useful, and enable you to combine and control just the sub-layers you want.