Spatial Data Management Group Meeting, Thursday, April 25, 2013 @ 10:00 a.m.; Richardson 313

Attendees: Burke Greer, Max Taylor, Nick Hallahan, Ken Crouse, Kuuipo Walsh, Theresa Valentine, Patti Haggerty, Matt Gregory, Terralyn Vandetta, Dave Hockman-Wert, Heather, Kelly, Cole, ….

Treats: Matt

Notes: Ken

Facilitator: Kuuipo

Topic: ESRI Dev Summit in Palm Springs

This month’s speaker was Nick Hallahan, a student at OSU, who attended the ESRI Dev Summit meeting in Palm Springs on March 25 - 28. ESRI speakers presented their vision of the next generation of GIS systems in which the “ArcGIS Platform” extends the traditional ESRI business model to encompass cloud-based computing. The trend is to move away from a software delivery model where users purchase and install ESRI software on their own computers to a software-as-a service model where users run GIS software in the cloud and pay on a per usage basis. Reflecting the paradigm shift, “ArcGIS Online” is now known as simply “ArcGIS”. The developer’s site is now at developers.arcgis.com.

ESRI has embraced GitHub for both version tracking and software developer collaboration. It is using GitHub internally in its own software development and is making the open source software available to users at esri.GitHub.com. In a session on HTML5 and JavaScript it was reported that of all the software development at ESRI, 60% was being done in JavaScript and the remaining 40% was mostly Python and C#. Online ArcGIS and Server APIs constitute most of the current development effort. The JavaScript API is being promoted for new Web maps.

The GeoEvent Processor is an ArcGIS Server extension that uses Connectors to enable streaming data, e.g. from sensor networks, to be channeled through TCP/IP sockets to applications. Nick showed a video from the Dev Summit that gave an example of how continuous processing of streaming data might be used to track a fleet of emergency vehicles. An event could be a vehicle exceeding the speed limit or a vehicle entering a polygon around a hospital. Events trigger alerts, which can be in the form of messages on social media or email or data entries written to enterprise data systems. A new subsidiary of ESRI, Portland R & D, (formerly GeoLoki) specializes in location-based messaging, and offers a capability similar to that provided by the GeoEvent Processor. It makes use of the GPS tracking capabilities of smart phones to establish GeoFences of points and polygons surrounding an area and utilizes GeoTriggers to alert the user of the event of crossing over a GeoFence. An alert can send a message to the user’s smart phone or cause some action to occur.

One significant change to raster functions in ArcGIS 10.2 will be the ability to chain raster functions together without having to write a script to read and write intervening files. ESRI is anticipating the need to be able to deal with Big Data, wherein petabyte datasets are accessed across distributed networks. The Hadoop distributed database model uses an open source spatial framework, which enables users to “bring the software to the data” on the ArcGIS Platform.

Using real-time data from multiple sources poses challenges for developers. Security restrictions may require workarounds, and large raster datasets may push the limits of a device’s display speed, especially in the case of a complex map such as Heatmap.js. Web sockets can be helpful in getting around the limitations of the HTTP request-response communication model by pushing data without requiring an initiating request. Another issue with real-time data on mobile devices is that the user can move outside of the coverage area, causing data dropouts. To avoid gaps in the display it is useful to think of a vector as a projection of movement and predict an upcoming location, correcting it when there is a deviation from the observed location.

Meetings: (for information only)

  • GIS in Action: April 30 – May 1, 2013, Portland State University;
  • GIS open source Unconference in conjunction with GIS in Action, April 29, Portland State Univerisity
  • ESRI Developer Meetup, May 1, 2013, Portland Grill (Theresa to present Lightening Talk.)
  • ESRI Users Conference, July 8 – 12, 2013, San Diego, CA
  • 2013 Northwest GIS Users Conference, October 14 – 18, 2013, Sunriver, OR
  • Open Street Map Mapping Party, date TBD, Alsea Geospatial, 257 SW Madison, Corvallis, OR

Software/Hardware:

  • John Sharrard, ESRI, is the speaker at the next SDMG meeting; prepare lists of questions and issues and send them to Theresa.
  • Microsoft hotfix rollup KB2775511 can cause file geodatabases in ArcGIS 10.1 to be unusable. Several workarounds exist. See ESRI Knowledge Base article 41119 for details.
  • Theresa reported that the solar radiation raster tool in ArcGIS 10.1 consumed all available disk space when one point was out of bounds, but Kelly had run the tool successfully on ArcGIS 9.3.
  • Two plotters are up and running, in FSL 217 and FSL 270.

Data:

  • Nothing noted.

Training:

  • Nothing noted.

Round Table:

  • Matt – The Northwest Forest Plan has new models based on data from 1984 to 2012. The entire Plan will incorporate the new models in two months. The 20-year report uses baseline data from 1993 and 2012. Asked if anyone knew of a user group for Ubunto users at OSU. No one knew of one.
  • Theresa – Has been using the Footprint program for analysis with overlapping rasters.
  • Patti – Using the Pit Removal tool in ArcGIS 10.1 Toolkit with flow models using LiDAR grids. Has delineated watersheds on Ranier with flow models of areas up to 7 km and found the results to be better than with other methods for LiDAR.
  • Heather – nothing noted.
  • Kelly – nothing noted.
  • Terralyn – nothing noted.
  • Coe – nothing noted.
  • Dave – Has been looking at deriving network-to-network distance using something other than FLOW on ArcGIS 9.3. An OCD matrix with a geometric network ran on 9.3.
  • Kuuipo – Sitting in on Julia Jones’s Advanced Spatial Analysis course ( They are using the new Spatial Statistics Toolbox in ArcGIS 10.2 and have created a blog about their findings. The Spatial Statistics tools can’t be used on raster data, but a Webinar led by Lauren Scott covers other spatial tools.

Next Meeting: Scheduled for May 30 with John Sharrard.