I came away from this year’s excellent Esri Business Partner Conference with one clear message: ArcGIS is a Web GIS system (or rather, ‘an integrated Web GIS Platform’ in Esri speak). Now Esri have talked about the importance of Web GIS for several years, but this year the message was unambiguous. If you want to…
Read detailsLook around, and you’ll find GIS everywhere – in obvious and less obvious ways. From Google Maps to air traffic control, from parcel tracking to land use analysis, geographical information systems have come to underpin every major aspect of our economy, including oil and gas. GIS is no longer a standalone concept or system, it’s…
Read detailsI have recently been looking at the ArcGIS Pro SDK to develop some custom apps. When I started using the fine grained API to create functions I soon found that I needed to use Esri’s QueuedTask. For example, if I try to get the table of a feature layer I receive this error: “This method…
Read detailsThe focus on web mapping application is back, or maybe it never really went away. As we use browser-based mapping technologies more and more I think it is time to discuss what, in my experience, has been important in web-based map creation. In this blog I suggest some things to consider when publishing from a…
Read detailsIntroduction In my current role, scripting is by far my favourite activity. I’ve always enjoyed language, and in the same way I enjoy writing and reading other’s scripts. Although reading, understanding, and altering scripts written by others can often be seen as an area where the drudgery must be mitigated or avoided, I enjoy trying…
Read detailsTopology is the study of geometrical properties and spatial relations that are unaffected by continuous changes in the shape and size of a figure. A topologist doesn’t see any difference between a donut and a coffee cup. In ArcGIS, topology in a geodatabase is the arrangement that defines how point, line and polygon features share…
Read detailsThere can be times when data which is available to you may not present information exactly as you would like. Variations in units are common. In many cases, you can simply create a new column and calculate a converted value. What happens when you don’t have write access to the data? Suddenly you have an…
Read detailsThere’s only a few days left before the 2015 Esri User Conference (UC) in San Diego, and Esri has released the UC Q&A, which aims to answer common questions about Esri’s products and services, and also sets the scene for the UC. It’s a comprehensive document; the PDF download stretches to 169 pages; so here (in…
Read detailsBuild once, process many! In a previous blog it was discussed how you can use ArcPy to perform batch geoprocessing instead of using the ‘batch’ option for a tool. There is however a 3rd way you could consider that is far quicker than using the ‘batch’ option, plus you don’t need to know any Python!…
Read detailsIn 2005, an unnamed oil & gas operator quietly set the world record in drilling furthest from the intended location. Positioning a rig offshore, not far from the equator, someone managed to misread Latitude North as South. As a result, the well spudded 400 kilometres off target.1 This is an extreme example but, in our…
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