Mapping Center

2009 ESRI User Conference

abuckley — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Most of the Mapping Center Team will be at the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego, California over the next week (July 11-17). If you’re there, look for us in the following presentations:

The One Minute Cartographer - Aileen Buckley and Mamata Akella
Map Use Book Series - A. Jon Kimerling and Aileen Buckley
Local Government Basemaps using ArcGIS - Charlie Frye and others (Scott Oppmann and Steve Grise)
ESRI Geologic Mapping Template - Charlie Frye and Janel Day
Map Use: Reading and Analysis - A. Jon Kimerling and & Aileen Buckley

...(read more)

World Topographic Map

cfrye — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:02:00 GMT

The Mapping Center Team is pleased to share the ArcGIS Online News announcement that includes the availability of the new World Topographic Map. As several members of the Mapping Center team played a significant role in the design and production of this map, we would like to begin telling you about this map. The World Topographic Map covers the globe to about 1:1,000,000 scale. Within the U.S. (excluding Alaska), the map scale extends to about 1:18,000. The map is a cached map and uses the Virtual Earth/Google Maps tiling scheme (WKID = 102113). What follows are some of the essentials everyone should know about this map, including that the service is free....(read more)

ESRI Color Ramps Version 2.0

Jaynya — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve posted our recently revised Color Ramps version 2.0 styles on our site to be more suitable for your use. Our impetus was we needed something new to work on a project with the topic of Washington Landforms and it is specific to printed maps. This is a map that we will talk about in our "One Minute Cartographer" session at the ESRI User Conference this year. This presentation will be posted on the Mapping Center - Other Resources page after the conference. The color ramp used on this map was selected from the PNW_x set in the new Hypsometry style. (PNW stands for "Pacific Northwest".)...(read more)

Tips for caching ArcGIS Server map services faster

cfrye — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:00:00 GMT

How fast can you cache? We keep asking ourselves that and keep finding that the more we know the faster we cache.

If you’re involved in the job of caching maps for online map services, you are already familiar with the need to optimize the process as much as possible so that it takes less time and effort. One way you can do this is to optimize how your maps are displayed – another is to optimize the environment you are caching your map in or the circumstances under which you are caching. This blog post is dedicated to the latter....(read more)

ColorBrewer Version 2.0

makella — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Recently, a new version of ColorBrewer called ColorBrewer 2 (colorbrewer2.org) was released by Axis Maps (www.axismaps.com). ColorBrewer is a web tool for selecting colors for maps. The original ColorBrewer was released in 2002, and the update incorporates comments that the developers, Dr. Cynthia Brewer of Penn State University and Dr. Mark Harrower of University of Wisconsin Madison (he used to be a grad student at Penn State), have received over the years. Here are what some of the new features are....(read more)

Getting Started with Map Templates - Live Training Seminar

blackpoll — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:00:00 GMT

On Thursday, June 25, Charlie Frye (ESRI Mapping Center) and Mark Ho (ESRI Educational Services) will present the Live Training Seminar Getting Started with Map Templates at 9am, 11am, and 3pm Pacific Time.

This seminar will provide an overview of what map templates contain, how to get started, and how to adapt the contents of the templates or evolve your data to your mapping needs. Participants will learn where to find and download map templates. Templates include example map documents, data models, geoprocessing tools, and more—each template is a complete solution for a given kind of map. This seminar will then discuss how you can use your data with map templates to produce professional quality basemaps and publish them....(read more)

Angular and linear units in the projection file

marg3002 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:00:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, Aileen wrote a blog post called "About geographic transformations and how to choose the right one". In it, she described many of the parameters that you can set for map projections. Two that were not mentioned were angular and linear units, so I thought it might help to describe them here....(read more)

Using Map Algebra for filling and clipping a raster

blackpoll — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:30:00 GMT

Last week's blog post Filling in and clipping in a raster described how to fill in holes in a "bad DEM" using data from an existing "good DEM", then clip it to the outline of a feature.

The blog post suggested using some ArcGIS geoprocessing tools that available with the Spatial Analyst extension. As with most GIS operations, there is more than one way to get to the final answer! In this blog post, I describe how Map Algebra can be used to achieve the same results.

We can break this process down into three steps....(read more)

Filling and clipping a raster

abuckley — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes you want to use raster data, like a digital elevation model (DEM), but it doesn't have the same exact extent as the area you are mapping. For example, if I use gtopo30 and "countries" data (available on the ESRI Data and Maps CD) to create map of the Pacific Northwest, the coastline boundaries do not coincide. In some places the elevation values are missing for inland areas, and in other places, there are elevation values outside the extent of the land area. So we need a way to clean up the data and make them coincide. Just clipping won't work as this won't add the missing elevation values.

I can fix all this if I have some other elevation data to fill in the missing interior elevation. For example, I can use etopo2 data (also on the Data and Maps CD) to get the elevation values for the pixels that need them....(read more)

Historical GIS Template: Boston 1775

cfrye — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:28:00 GMT

This post, is to announce the release of a map template for historical GIS called Historical GIS: Boston 1775. If you’ve never given historical GIS a second, or a first thought, you might find the contents interesting and maybe even applicable to your work. Consider that the vast majority of GIS data is historical, even if it’s only a few minutes old....(read more)

Announcing the Map Templates Resource Center

cfrye — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:50:00 GMT

This post is to announce the Map Templates Resource Center. Map templates are useful examples. Each map template is a kit that contains a collection of resources needed to transfer a specific map’s design and ArcGIS implementation to you.

These templates are not the template map documents that you might have saved as an .MXT file. Instead these templates are .ZIP files that typically include:...(read more)

About geographic transformations and how to choose the right one

abuckley — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

You will often be prompted to select the geographic transformation when you are projecting data or setting the projection of a data frame in a map document. Here are some concepts that might help you understand what this is all about AND how to make the right selection.

First, "geographic coordinates" are expressed in terms of latitude and longitude. "Latitude" is the north-south angular measure from the equator to the point of interest. "Longitude" is the east-west angular measure along the equator from the prime meridian to the point of interest's longitude. Assuming that the earth is a sphere, geographic coordinates are determined relative to the center of the sphere - these coordinates are called "geocentric latitude and longitude". (See the figure at the right; all figures are from Map Use: Reading and Analysis, 6th edition, ESRI Press.)...(read more)

Web Mapping: An Interview with Jack Dangermond

abuckley — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Someone pointed out to me that ESRI's CEO, Jack Dangermond recently did an interview that focused on web mapping. You can read and hear it here: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/jack-dangermond-interview-web-mapping.html....(read more)

Adding Maps and Geographic Analysis to Recovery.gov

abuckley — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:31:00 GMT

This week, the Federal Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is hosting an online forum looking for input from the Information Technology (IT) community on how Recovery.gov can be designed to enhance information access and transparency. For more info, see http://www.recovery.gov/....(read more)

Quick & dirty method & tips for creating building footprint features

cfrye — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:05:00 GMT

From time to time we've had to create some building footprint data. A colleague was in my office yesterday looking at the map to the right, and remarked that he thought that adding building footprints to maps "humanizes" the map. An interesting observation, and one that I'm not inclined to argue against.

We've learned a few tricks for making haste with little or no waste to produce building footprint data....(read more)