ArcGIS Explorer Blog

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

New Streaming Video: Creating and Using Notes

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:20:00 GMT

A new streaming video showing some of the things you can do with notes is now available. The video was produced by Jim Barry, Program Manager for the ESRI Developer Network, and shows Explorer team member Bernie Szukalski working through some note examples.

View the video

You may also want to check out some of the previous blog posts on notes.

Adding Photos and More to Note Popups

Liven Up Explorer with Live Content

And you can review the creating notes Help topic for additional information.

Exploring Londinium

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:26:00 GMT

ESRI Education Manager George Dailey travels to London, and examines its history as Londinium using Explorer in a recent GIS Education Community blog post. In a subsequent post, George uses the Wikipedia Search task (found on the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center) to locate places of interest during his travels.

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!

New Explorer Video Posted

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:21:00 GMT

An Overview of ArcGIS Explorer video has been posted on the ESRI Web site. The video captures a demonstration presented at the ESRI Business Partner Conference earlier this year. The demonstration shows adding various Web services, local content, and KML to Explorer, and also shows using notes and various tasks, including custom geoprocessing tasks published via ArcGIS Server.

More Mars Exploration

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:44:00 GMT

A couple of posts ago we showed how to use content from the Geography Network and the USGS PIGWAD site to turn ArcGIS Explorer into a Mars Explorer.

George Dailey, ESRI Education Manager, ups the ante and takes things further in a recent post on the GIS Education Community blog. We really like the use of both online and local content, and also popup photos from the NASA Photojournal site. Check out these cool screenshots.

ArcGIS Explorer Receives 2008 Geospatial Leadership Award

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:24:00 GMT

GeoTec Media announced the winners of its annual Geospatial Leaderhip Awards earlier today, and in the Private Enterprise category ArcGIS Explorer was recognized, bringing the award to ESRI. The Private Enterprise Award is:

"...given to a private organization that has either successfully extended GIS throughout its enterprise or contributed significantly to the advancement and adoption of geospatial technology."

We're pleased that with ArcGIS Explorer ESRI was recognized for contributing to the advancement and adoption of geospatial technology.

The award was sponsored by Microsoft Virtual Earth. Honorable mentions in the category included Google Earth.

More details are available at the GeoTec Web site.

Mapping a Walkabout (and another sneak peek at 480)

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:28:00 GMT

Part II of a two part post on the GIS Education Community blog appeared the other day, picking up where the previous post left off with a discussion of how to take GPS readings and turn them into shapefiles, and then add hyperlinks.

But there's another way to accomplish the same thing, and also new capabilities coming in ArcGIS Explorer 480 which will make things even easier.

One option might be to save the GPS coordinates as a comma or tab-delimited text file, and import the file to create results. We covered this topic in a post back in July, 2007, and while we were working with a much older version of Explorer at the time, the information in the post is still correct. A nice thing about results is that it's very easy to do interesting things with their popups, which we covered in another post not long ago. So these methods could have been used instead of the shapefile creation method described in the Education Community post.

But soon there will be an even easier way. New in Explorer 480 is support for GPX format files. Wikipedia describes GPX as follows:

GPX, or GPS eXchange Format is an XML schema designed for transferring GPS data between software applications. It can be used to describe waypoints, tracks, and routes.

We visited the GPXchange site to download a file of interest, one with locations of hot springs in California. In the soon-to-be-released Explorer 480 we imported the GPX file and created a collection of waypoints from the downloaded file. We'll save the step-by-step details for a later post, after we've released Explorer 480, but we ended up with a result group, with each result representing a waypoint in the file. Here we've clicked a couple of them to open the popup window to display more information about the waypoint.

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.

Creating and Saving Bookmarks for Navigation

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 22 May 2008 05:10:00 GMT

Bookmarks are handy for navigating to a particular location that you want to visit often. Here's a tip on how to create and manage your own collection of bookmarks using results.

First, remember that each result has a view property that you can set that enables you to click the result to zoom to a location/view of your choice. Just navigate to where you want to zoom, right click the result and open its properties. Choose Location > View.

Use the camera button to capture the view snapshot for the result, and save your changes. Now whenever you click on the result you will zoom to your specified view.

You can also set these properties for folders, and that's how we'll create a few bookmarks. Let's create a collection of bookmarks that will take us to New York, London, and Redlands. Begin with an new folder by right clicking the result panel and choosing Add Folder.

The default name is "New Folder," which we'll want to change. Right click to open the context menu and choose Rename, or hover over the name and click to activate text entry, and change the name to Redlands.

Repeat these steps two more times, renaming the folders New York and London respectively. You should see something like this:

Now we'll set the view for each of them, beginning with Redlands. Use the Find Place task or navigate to the view of your choice over Redlands. You can also tilt your view. When you're happy with the view, open the properties for the Redlands folder.

Once the properties are opened, choose Location > View. You'll see that we've not yet captured a view property, and the entry fields are blank.

You'll also see the camera button in the upper right. To capture the current view, just click the button, then click OK.

Now whenever you click Redlands, you'll zoom to the saved view. Repeat the steps for the New York and London bookmarks, and you'll now have a collection of bookmarks that you can click to zoom to the desired location.

We can improve our bookmarks by creating another folder, renaming it, and dragging and dropping the bookmarks we created above into it. You should see something like this:

We can save these bookmarks with our map, or export the My Bookmarks folder to open again later, or share with others. Now you're just a click away from any destination.

For more information on result properties, check the Results Window item properties Help topic.