Public Safety Community
This month we released the Flood Planning Map, the first in a series of maps and apps to help emergency managers and community leaders prepare for flooding events.
The Flood Planning Map provides flood planners with a set of tools and workflows to prepare for seasonal river flooding. These tools and workflows are based on real-world examples that have been used during previous flood events in the upper Midwest. Seasonal river flood planning is typically conducted weeks or months in advance of predicted crest in each community. This advance notice gives community leaders time to plan for securing assets, protecting infrastructure, or evacuating citizens within the impact area.
The first version of the Flood Planning Map provides the ability to do the following:
- Determine the flood impact area based on predicted flood levels.
- Identify critical infrastructure, facilities, and citizens that could be impacted.
- Create budgetary cost estimates for temporary levees.
- Share the results with others who will execute the flood plan.
Have you ever wanted to add live weather, recent earthquakes, or perhaps current fire locations to your applications without writing any code? Many of the projects we address in Esri Technical Marketing have this very requirement.
We tackled this challenge by using what we call the Aggregated Live Feed methodology. This process downloads data from live sources such as NOAA and the USGS and aggregates it into a geodatabase, which is then served through ArcGIS Server as map services. You can see some of these feeds in action by visiting any of the ‘latest incident maps’ on the Esri Disaster Response site.
Recently we’ve developed a much simpler approach called ALF-Lite that doesn’t require specialized knowledge of the enterprise geodatabase or third-party components. This methodology can be deployed to any large or small environment that supports Esri’s ArcPy site package.
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As you’ve probably seen there have been some changes to the blogs. We have switched to a new system. The good news is the Public Safety Content is all still there. The direct link is – http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/category/subject-public-safety/ and the RSS feed is http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/category/subject-public-safety/feed/. If you go to the ArcGIS Blog directly you’ll find a filter for the Public Safety content under Industry Communities on the left hand side.
As we have written about previously in this blog after the earthquake in Haiti (here and here), OpenStreetMap is a great source of data for you to support disaster and/or humanitarian operations. Esri has created a specific tool to empower the GIS Community to contribute and use OpenStreetMap data within ArcGIS. The ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap is a free tool you can download for ArcGIS Desktop from CodePlex. It allows people to do two key things from a disaster management / humanitarian relief perspective:
- Contribute data to OpenStreetMap using familiar tools
- Enable the conversion of OpenStreetMap (*.osm) files to a feature dataset for editing in ArcGIS
We’ve heard lots of feedback over the last few days from users who want to find the old “Insert your favorite” blog. Unfortunately the redirects we had in place when we deployed the new ArcGIS Blog pointed to its home page instead of these specific locations, leading to many unhappy readers. We have most of these redirects in place now & will have the rest completed today. If you’d rather not wait, here’s a table matching the old individual blogs to their corresponding URLs and RSS feeds in the new unified blog.
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By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead
ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 4 (SP4) for English, is now available to our users for download via the ArcGIS Resource Center. This Service Pack contains performance improvements and maintenance fixes. Here are links to the downloads:
Release Note: ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 4 for the other five languages (French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish) will be released in the next two weeks. A follow up blog entry will be posted to announce the availability once they are ready.
For the past few years the various ArcGIS product development teams have hosted a few dozen separate blogs covering the width of the ArcGIS system. Now we have pulled those together into a single ArcGIS Blog so that you can more easily browse, subscribe to, learn from, and stay up-to-speed on the latest information from all our engineers and developers. In addition, the single blog reflects ArcGIS as a system and allows us to better tell big picture implementation stories that we couldn’t in the fragmented system.
If you do want to narrow your focus, just click a Category (under Technical Communities and Industry Communities) or Tag to see the posts for that particular area. You should find a category or tag that matches up with the subject area for each of the old separate blogs. A few may have been overlooked or thought to be unnecessary. We appreciate your feedback on specific categories or tags that should be added to help focus in on subject matter that is of interest to you.
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Esri is committed to developing a community of partners that are actively implementing and extending ArcGIS for Local Government. To do so, Esri created an ArcGIS for Local Government Partner Specialty, within the Esri Partner Network, to make collaboration with partners repeatable and successful. The specialty is designed for partners focused on the local government marketplace that want to work more closely with Esri on the development and deployment of ArcGIS for Local Government.
Partners in the ArcGIS for Local Government Partner Specialty provide one or both of the following:
- Complementary applications that are based on the ArcGIS for Local Government solution
- ArcGIS for Local Government implementation services
Recently, several Esri partners have applied to be part of the Partner Specialty, and we are pleased to announce that we now have a growing network of partners that can assist Esri users to install, configure, and extend ArcGIS for Local Government. In the coming days, you’ll see these approved partners highlighted on the new ArcGIS for Local Government resource center.
Some really good improvements are coming soon to the Resource Center. Checkout this sneak peak of the updates that will be released in conjunction with ArcGIS 10.1.
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As the year winds down, we wanted to take a minute to thank everyone for the participation and feedback this year. It’s been really exciting to see the user community embrace the maps and apps on the ArcGIS for Local Government resource center and provide feedback that will ultimately make these ArcGIS maps and apps better for everyone using them. The team really enjoys the ongoing dialog with our local government users and looks forward to working with each and every one of you in the near future.
In 2012, we’re excited to incorporate the functionality emerging in ArcGIS 10.1 and ArcGIS Online, along with what we learned in 2011 from you, into the ArcGIS for Local Government solution. And we’ve got some plans we’d like to share with you for 2012 that we hope will make your adoption and use of ArcGIS simpler and more successful.
