Arc2Earth

What’s Coming in the next Arc2Earth Sync Beta

admin — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:29:09 +0000

The next version of Arc2Earth will have much tighter integration between the extension that runs inside ArcMap and the Arc2Earth Sync application that runs independently of ArcGIS. In fact, with the new toolbars and ArcCatalog integration, you probably won’t even open the main Arc2Earth Sync user interface at all, everything is accessible directly from ArcMap. The new version is still several weeks away (and will continue to be in beta) but it’s a huge improvement in working with services that exist outside of the ArcGIS ecosystem.

We’re attending the ESRI FedUC next week (we’re in our partner’s booth New Light Technologies), stop on by and we’ll give you the inside scoop. We’re also co-sponsoring the FedGeoDay event on Thursday, 2/28 where we’ll be talking about Arc2Earth Sync and TileMill Connect.

Here are some of the highlights for the next version:

All new startup and login, you will not be required to have a Google Account anymore. In many cases, if you’ve already activated your serial number, Sync will just start up automatically
New and Rebuilt Table Providers
- Google Maps Engine – Google has been pretty quiet about this service, I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the near future. With Sync, we aim to make all the data types (vector and raster) easily accessible to ArcGIS desktop users.
- MapBox – We’ve talked about MapBox in the past here and here, it’s an amazing service for building and publishing your maps. The MapBox team is also second to none.
- CartoDB – We’re rebuilding to CartoDB connector to take advantage of all the new features they released in V2 of their service.
- Fulcrum - An incredible Mobile Data Collection service
- ArcGIS Online for Organizations – Esri clearly has this covered but we’re building this provider for older desktops and interop with other services.
- DropBox and Google Drive – We’re experimenting with multi-user editing using these services. The new editing subsystem (outlined below) allows us to proxy any file (shapefile, PGDB, FGDB etc) that you are sharing, without holding locks. This prevents the file corruption that will inevitably occur if multiple editors attach to files directly in DropBox. This process shows a lot of promise and if it works out, we’ll be completely scrapping our Table Sharing infrastructure in favor of these simple file sharing services. A shared, multi-user File Geodatabase for project based work would be a huge win for many of our clients.
All new editing subsystem (outlined below)
A new Arc2Earth Sync root directory in ArcCatalog, super easy access to all of your services.

A New Approach to Editing

In the current version of Sync, tables are fully downloaded from their source and kept up to date via editing events or by merging a new full download at set intervals (hourly or daily). This works pretty well but misses edits that occur in the source database until the next full synchronization is run. It’s also not practical for very large tables (1 million features+ etc). A new approach was needed that gives us access to fresh data, works with very large databases, provides offline caching when needed and works with ArcGIS for Desktop Basic (e.g. ArcView) editor license.

In the new system, we’re using two different methods for displaying tables in ArcMap. Query Layers and a custom Plugin Datasource. Query Layers appear to be the fastest way to communicate with ArcGIS from our local Sync service and since they are native ArcGIS datasources, they behave very well within the ArcGIS ecosystem. We’ve re-provisioned some of the work we did for TileMill Connect to make any external service look like a Postgres database running locally. ArcMap thinks its talking to PostGIS. The custom plugin datasource works well for older versions of ArcGIS.

In both case, ArcMap will treat these datasources as read only. To allow editing from the ArcMap Editor (or via scripts, code etc), we maintain a write-behind cache for each table. It has several options on how it is kept fresh but for large tables, it’s on-demand during map refreshes. As you pan the map, you’re seeing the results first while Sync is updating the cache in the background. Just prior to editing, the writable featureclass in the cache (a local File Geodatabase) is swapped into place in ArcMap. The good part is this happens automatically in the background, as far as the user is concerned, it’s the same layer in ArcMap. Featureclass extensions catch the edits and post them to their respective services.

It would be incredibly awesome if Esri made Plugin Datasources first class citizens in the ArcMap Editor but as of right now, they do not seem to work. If full read/write access comes to Plugins, we’ll definitely be using them but I would not expect it to be back-ported to previous version of ArcGIS anyway (10.0 and less).

We’re excited about this new form of display and editing in Sync, it’s a very simple and intuitive way to work with data services outside of the ArcGIS ecosystem.

The screens below show a Google Maps Engine table being displayed in ArcMap as a Postgres Query Layer

The post What’s Coming in the next Arc2Earth Sync Beta appeared first on Arc2Earth.

New MapBox Toolbar Coming Soon

admin — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 18:27:14 +0000

As mentioned in the our last blog post, MapBox is getting it’s own toolbar in ArcMap via our forthcoming UI makeover. The toolbar provides a single location to control loading and publishing data to your hosted MapBox account. Once you connect to your account, all of your maps and tilesets are available to display in ArcMap as tiled layers. They can be saved in any Mxd document and will reload when that document is opened again.

For publishing, Arc2Earth supports two methods for producing tile caches that can be used by MapBox. You can use the built-in tile cache exporter (using ArcGIS’s rendering and labeling engine) or you can use TileMill Connect to convert your Mxd document into a Carto project. Buttons on the toolbar allow you to easily initiate each process using the currently loaded map document. Either way, your map is published to MapBox and can be used in any of their amazing apps and APIs (as well as displayed back in ArcMap via the process above!)

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New Tiled Map Layers Coming Soon

admin — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 18:47:33 +0000

The next release of Arc2Earth will have a lot of core changes to main user interface inside of ArcMap. It includes lots of new menus and toolbars for dealing with the growing number external services available to ArcGIS users, new exporters, new Sync Table provider toolbars (Google Maps Engine, CartoDB, ArcGIS Online and Fulcrum) and whole new ArcGIS editing sub system for those table providers as well. (I’m really excited about this one)

One of the changes is a complete rewrite of the Map Tile Layer toolbar and it’s underlying custom layer. Previously, this layer worked by dynamically loading tiles into a single ArcMap layer that was controlled via the main toolbar. This provided excellent feedback when users wanted to quickly cycle though various tile datasources but it did not persist when you were done with the document. In the new version, this same feedback is still available but the layer can now be saved and reloaded with the map document. There’s a new toolbar that allows you to load any XYZ/TMS cache format and then save it with your map document. Likewise, premium tile map providers like Bing Maps and MapBox have their own toolbar for loading and saving their tile caches.

I’ll talk about the MapBox toolbar in a later post but here’s sneak peak of the new Bing Maps toolbar. ESRI has recently changed it’s policy on providing Bing Maps for free to all ArcMap users and while you’ll still be able to load Bing Maps in 10.0/10.1, 9.3 will go out of support. Arc2Earth continues to be supported from 9.2 through 10.1. Both the new Esri version and the new Arc2Earth Bing Maps toolbar will require a valid Bing Maps map key from Microsoft. One plus for our new version is the visibility of imagery date ranges to the user. The average date range for all visible tiles is always displayed on the screen and a new overlay color codes each tile to display it’s relative freshness (from green to red).

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Open Mxd Documents in MapBox TileMill

admin — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:42:14 +0000

Update – Added a quick video at bottom showing TileMill Connect in action

In the current version of Arc2Earth Sync, we support building tile caches from your data and then automatically publishing them to MapBox for hosting. The tiles are drawn using the ArcGIS rendering engine and will match your existing Mxd maps symbols, renderers and labels exactly. We also offer some pseudo anti-aliasing to produce tiles that are visually more appealing than the default ones. For many users, this is all that is needed.

However, MapBox also offers a robust client side tile creation app called TileMill. It uses the Mapnik rendering engine and very intuitive CSS-like syntax called Carto to build and style maps. It contains a lot of functionality that is not available in ArcGIS, like native anti-alias drawing, Adobe photoshop-like compositing operations and easy to use zoom syntax for working with the standard tile cache levels (ex: #my_layer [zoom > 15] ). For example, check out this blog post to see what’s possible.

It would be great to use your existing Mxd documents directly in TileMill but they both structure maps/layers/symbols in fairly different ways. Likewise, TileMill is not able to view all of the vector feature class data that you can display in ArcGIS. What is needed is twofold:

A converter to dissect the contents of an Mxd document and translate the structure (layers, renderers, labeling etc) into the equivalent Carto and TileMill project format.
Once loaded, a way for feature data locked in ArcGIS formats to display correctly in TileMill. A one time export to shapefiles could work but is not necessarily optimal for users who want ongoing access or have very large datasets. In it’s current form, this limits TileMill to shapefiles, SQLlite databases and PostGIS datasources. The traditional ArcGIS user has data in shapefiles, Personal and File GeoDatabases, SDE (version and non-versioned) and any number of other esri specific formats.

Enter TileMill Connect. It accomplishes the first item as best as possible and then uses a pseudo PostGIS proxy service (running and serving locally) to stream data from your Mxd’s into TileMill. Connect runs as an optional service inside of Arc2Earth Sync, you’ll need to turn it on before you start playing with it.

Mxd to Carto

Converting an Mxd layer hierarchy into it’s Carto equivalent is never going to result in a one for one match, the structures are just too different. However, we can extract enough common information to make the process worthwhile. The reality is there are a lot of Mxd files out there and manually recreating them is not a feasible option. Here’s what is converted:

All Feature Layers are added to TileMill project. Shapefiles are added as native connections and all others are routed through the PostGIS proxy. Layer’s with Minimum and Maximum scale dependencies set will have the proper Carto zoom selector(s) added
Simple, Unique Value, Class Break and Proportional feature renderers are converted into their equivalent Carto filters.
Nearly all Marker, Line and Fill symbols are converted into Carto. Multi Layer symbols are added as Carto attachments or in the case of certain marker symbols, converted to SVG. Picture and Marker lines and fills always use flattened SVG versions of the markers. There’s also a Style Editor window where you can select or build any type of symbol and then immediately see it’s Carto equivalent. (and with an easy copy/paste, have it running in TileMill in seconds!)
Most major label attributes are converted however this is work in progress. There is a lot of great label information stored in Maplex that we need to find a way to get out. Also, the flexible PostGIS proxy design allows us to server annotation layers as point tables, so all of your exactly positioned labels should translate ok.

Pseudo PostGIS Proxy

An original design for Connect relied completely on OGR’s ability to open all of the ArcGIS datasources and I’m certain that in the future, this will be a viable option. However, in the short term there are some issues with how well the drivers could deal with all “flavors” of ArcGIS data, TileMill not shipping any of the esri compatible drivers and most importantly, how we could deal with data that doesn’t even have a driver (TINs, Terrains, Lidar etc).

To get around these issues, we decided on a local proxy that would load Mxd documents into memory and then make the feature layers inside them appear to be PostGIS tables. It mimics the Postgres Backend wire format and handles just enough message types to make it appear as a read-only database table to TileMill (note, it is *not* a real PostGIS service)

To wire this up in TileMill, the connection string looks like this:

dbname=C:\Users\Public\Documents\Arc2Earth\LocalGovDemo.mxd host=localhost port=54321 user=sync password=sync

and to connect to individual table, you use standard SQL schema/table syntax:

[LocalGovDemo.mxd].[Railroad]

All of this is handled automatically during the export from the Mxd into a TileMill project but you could add the tables manually from any Mxd that is accessible from the computer.

Future

TileMill Connect is not in the current Arc2Earth Sync beta yet, we’re expecting it to be ready in early December. Based on user feedback, we’ll decide what to work on next. Serving raster data via the pg_raster syntax in PostGIS is an obvious choice. We’re excited to see what maps users can make when leveraging the power of both ArcGIS and TileMill together.

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KMZ Tracking using Google Analytics

admin — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 21:04:34 +0000

Update 10/19/12 – due to popular demand, we created a new version that allows all Community Edition to create trial KML/KMZ tracking codes for a short 3 hour period so you can test the new functionality. If you need tracking that lasts indefinitely, you’ll still need to purchase Arc2Earth (Desktop or Subscription). You can get this latest version here

We added a cool new feature in the latest version of Arc2Earth Desktop to track your exported KMZ files using Google Analytics. As users open your KMZ files from anywhere, you’ll see them popup in the Google Analytics Realtime Dashboard and then have all of their browser (Google Earth version too!) and location information in the standard reporting area.

All you have to do is specify your GA Account Number (it looks like this “UA-XXXXX-XX”, the same value you put on your public websites) and an optional “path” paramater to help filter results in the GA Dashboard and in reports. You can add these values via the main KML Exporter window using the “Options” tab. You can also use the new KML Exporter Command Line tools for batch exporting of individual layer to add the tracking codes.

After you export the KMZ, you can send the file to anyone and once they open it in Google Earth the tracking image will be downloaded into the GE TOC (users must have internet access for this to work).

Inside your Google Analytics account, open the Realtime Dashboard and watch as users interact with your KMZ file. Their relative location, Google Earth version and the path/name of the KMZ file they opened will all be available for visualization and reporting.

Knowing who is viewing your data is a critical asset, it’s something we take for granted when building websites. Now you can use that same value when tracking your Google Earth data. Arc2Earth Enterprise (Desktop or Subscription) is required to use the Tracking functionality.

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Arc2Earth Sync Update – Local Tables, Tile Caches and MapBox hosting

admin — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:25:37 +0000

It’s been a awhile since the last public beta of Arc2Earth Sync was released, we’ve been busy changing some of the core functionality and as always, it took longer then expected. That being said, we’re really excited about the changes and now that they’re in place, we can roll new beta versions quickly. Sync is still a work in progress but its beginning to pick up steam (2500+ tables and over 2.3M features being synchronized), we hope the new additions below will keep the momentum going.

You can sign up for the Beta here using an Arc2Earth Community Edition or just check out the new online docs here.

Local Table Provider

No online table provider needed! Sync can use any local shapefile, Personal GDB, File GDB or SDE datasource and you’ll be able to share, accept online edits and publish services. This method works so well, we’ve made it the default option for all new tables. Click the Add Data button and select the featureclass just like when you’re in ArcMap. Or for Shapefiles and Layer files, you can use the new shell extension to work with your Sync tables directly from Windows Explorer.

We still support other table providers but we think you’ll get a lot of usage out of simple, one click publishing. Best of all, there’s no Cloud lock-in or stale data. Your data is secure on your computer and network, simply remove from Sync to prevent access.

Tile Caches

Tile Caches are pre-rendered versions of your table data, Sync will create three types of tiles: Images, UTFGrids and GeoJson tiles. Each has benefits depending on how you want to visualize your data. As edits occur, the Table’s tile cache will be updated only in the areas affected by the edit (or group of edits). If the cache is hosted on MapBox, the changes will be uploaded there as well.

Arc2Earth Desktop has always had the ability to create tile caches from your ArcGIS maps, we’ve now added this same exporter to Sync for your individual tables. In the future, we’ll be adding the ability to monitor an MXD file and create/manage a tile cache for it (and some really cool TileMill integration as well!)

MapBox Hosting

MapBox is quickly becoming one of the most impressive online mapping services available. Their infrastructure is built from the ground up to provide the fastest and most efficeint delivery of maps online. Arc2Earth Sync has built-in storage of tile caches but we recommend using an external service like MapBox if you need highly scalable maps.

Sync can publish your Table tile caches directly to your MapBox account. As your data changes, Sync will also update the data in MapBox. Check out this demo map showing ArcGIS styles and renderers hosted from MapBox

Other Goodies

Fulcrum Table Provider – Read only access to your Fulcrum data, streamed directly into ArcMap via their new API. Fulcrum is an amazing way to collect offline point data, we’ll definitely be improving this provider to add read/write support. Also, since A2E Desktop and Sync can now create MBTiles files, you can get your ArcGIS maps offline in the field!
Major overhaul of Table Sharing – Table Sharing has been completely overhauled. It’s much faster to share and download your tables, editing has been fixed and if you are using Local Tables, it can be shared in it’s native projection. It works a lot better with large sets of data that would be too slow when queried directly from ArcMap over the internet.
a published MapService now uses a table’s Tile Cache so its incredibly quick when viewed online or in the mobile apps. The best part is when the data is edited, the Tile Cache is updated automatically
Better ArcGIS Online Web Map support – Your table is published as two Web Maps, one with the Feature Service for editing and one with the Map Service for quick display and query (your Popup Window definition will be used in the Web Map).
DropBox and Google Drive support – this is in its infancy now, when your table performs a Full Sync a copy is updated on these services, but we think there’s some amazing collaborative features that could be built with other services using DropBox/Drive as the bulk-copy api. For instance, check out this video from Safe Software that shows workflow automation with FME using DropBox as the trigger mechanism.
Lots and lots of little fixes and additions

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Arc2Earth Sync – Live Mobile Data Collection in 5 Minutes

bFlood — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:00:35 +0000

This post is aimed at ArcView users working alone (or in small, remote groups) that want to collect data from mobile field devices efficently, without having to deal with any server or server software. Arc2Earth Sync works a lot like DropBox for syncing your local ArcGIS data but you can also publish your online tables using the Open Geospatial REST specification, the primary benefit being out of the box interop with all of the existing (and future) ArcGIS applications. You are not limited to using ArcGIS as your main editor but for the purpose of this post, we’ll be looking at how to use the ArcGIS mobile apps to edit data in the field.

What you need to get started:

ArcView 9.2 or greater
Arc2Earth Sync Beta (signup here for free)
Google Account (signup for a Gmail account here)
ArcGIS.com Account (signup here for free)

Signup for the Sync Beta and Login to Sync

To get started, signup for the Arc2Earth Sync beta and authorize your account so you use Google Fusion Tables as the backend database for your data. Once you’ve authorized your account, startup Sync and login using your Google and ArcGIS.com accounts.

Create a Table

Open the main Table Explorer window and click on the Add Table button. The wizard will walk yout hrough the process of creating a table manually or uploading an existing one to your Table Provider (Fusion Tables and CartoDB in the beta, more to come soon)

For this example, we’ll create a polygon table in Fusion Tables with two string fields. For the second field, we want easy and controlled data entry so we’ll setup a Coded Value domain that will be honored by all the ESRI apps (web, mobile and ArcMap). We’ve streamedlined this process so all you need to do is enter a comma delimited list of values for the domain. Click the Create button wait a few seconds while the table is created in the local cache and on the Cloud service.

Once the table is created, we need to publish it to ArcGIS.com so its available to all of the mobile clients automatically. Open the table’s Properties window and goto the Publish tab. Set the ArcGIS.com slider to “On” and click Ok to save the options. While saving, Sync is publishing an ESRI web map to your ArcGIS.com account, into a special folder called Arc2Earth Sync Maps. You’ll now be able to interact with this table on any of the mobile apps (Android, iOS, Windows etc) simply by going to that folder. To share this map with other ArcGIS.com web and mobile users, add it to a Group or share it with individuals.

Open in ArcMap

Select the table in the listview and click the “Open in ArcMap” button on the toolbar, this will either add the layer to an existing ArcMap or open a new one. You now have a live connection with Fusion Tables and ArcGIS.com, as edits come in from mobile apps, you will see them automatically in ArcMap. Likewise, as you edit in ArcMap, they will be streamed automatically up to the cloud and will be visible to all of the mobile clients (note – some of the ArcGIS mobile apps cache data so a map refresh might be necessary to see new data). Also check out this blog post on Table Sharing to see how could further the reach of this table by sharing it with other Sync users located anywhere in the world.

Add Data from the Web or Mobile Client

Now let’s make some edits from three different clients (ArcMap, ArcGIS.com web app and the ArcGIS Android app) and watch as they automatically synchronize between your local cache and the backend Google Fusion Table

Photos and Attachments

A great feature of the new mobile apps is the ability to attach photos and documents to any feature you’ve editing in the field. The was previously a tedious process that required matching up feature Ids and photos timestamps once data was brought back to the office. Now it happens automatically and even better, Sync will download any photo attached to a feature into a folder on your local computer. You’ll also be able to view it online using your Sync admin pages or as thumbnails images in your popup Info Windows in other apps

Online Feature Page screen grab

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Table Sharing in Arc2Earth Sync

bFlood — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:34:29 +0000

In many ways Arc2Earth Sync was modeled after DropBox, the excellent service to synchronize files between computers. One of the best features of DropBox (besides that it *just works*) is the ability to share folders with other users. Everyone sees the exact same data and can colaborate easily without the usual friction of file downloading or emailing attachments. Likewise, the originator of the folder share has the ability to control who has access and how long that access exists.

It was this same type of frictionless data sharing that we wanted to bring to ArcGIS users looking to work on small, ad-hoc projects with a list of remote users, some of whom were not always online. For early Arc2Earth users, this was accomplished using KML files that were edited by remote users in Google Earth and then emailed and imported into the master file back at some home base. This actually worked once it was setup correctly but has a myriad of small issues that when taken as a whole, make the solution sub optimal at best.

Table Shares in Sync look to change this completely. A Share is time based access to a private table in any Sync Table Provider (Google Fusion Tables, EarthBuilder, CartoDB etc) that *just works* from the Sync desktop client. There’s not much needed to share a table, just the email address of the intended user. An notification is generated and sent automatically, they would only need to click on the link to accept the share. After that, their Sync client will add the table and immediately start downloading the latest data. If you set the Share to expire at a certain time, the table automatically disappears from their table list. All edits through the share are done via a proxy so those users never have native access to the underlying table (say, in Fusion Tables) so you can be assured that Sync is the only way they can access your data. Once the share is in place, they can interact with the table in ArcMap/ArcCatalog/models as they would with any other local geodatabase. If they went offline, they could continue making edits in ArcMap that would subsequently be synchronized when network access was restored.

Another benefit of DropBox shares is the folder is available online from the website. With Sync, this applies as well except that access is available using standard APIs instead of by download. So, if editing data via ArcMap on a laptop in the field is not available, they could use the ArcGIS iOS or Android app to collect data instead.

To share a table, open it’s main properties window and goto the Shares tab

This would generate a invite email that looks like this:

After accepting by clicking on the link, the table would immediatley appear in their Sync client. Start editing!

The best way to understand Sync Table Shares is to try it out, you can sign up for the beta here. Invite a friend or two and share a table between the group, you can all make and see edits in near real time.

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New Provider Model and CartoDB Provider for Sync

bFlood — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:04:02 +0000

We just rolled out a new Beta version of Arc2Earth Sync, all current users will be updated automatically. New users can get the latest version by signing up for the beta here. There was a lot of bug and feature fixes in this build but we also added some fairly major functionality as well.

First, we overhauled how Table Providers are used by the desktop client. The original design had assumed a user would choose a provider (Fusion Tables, Earth Builder CartoDB etc) and use that exclusively for all of their work. However, what we found was users wanted to mix and match tables from different locations or accounts. So, in this version, there is still a default provider (Google Fusion Tables) that needs to be authorized on setup but there is a also a new “Connect” button that allows you to add any number of other providers as well.

Second, and the primary reason for this post, is the addition of the CartoDB provider in the beta. CartoDB is an excellent GIS cloud service, a lot like Fusion Tables except more power is exposed to the user. Under the hood, CartoDB is PostGIS, portions of TileMill and a lot of extra code to host your data and expose it via SQL and Map Tile APIs

By adding a CartoDB Provider to Sync, we make it available directly in ArcGIS. You can edit the points/lines/polygons in ArcMap and watch as it changes in the online CartoDb tables (and map tiles). We also allow it to work with other services like ArcGIS.com or any of it’s online APIs and applications.

One other item of note in this provider, its the first one to take advantage of Sync’s ability to translate ArcGIS renderers and symbols into other formats that can be used to draw maps outside of ArcGIS. In CartoDB’s case, that other format is Carto from DevelopmentSeed (the makers of MapBox/TileMill ). Carto is an excellent format for map symbology/labels and is drawn via the excellent Mapnik graphics library, so the results are visually beautiful.

In CartoDB, Carto is used as the custom format for styling and labeling any of your tables. Sync will translate the symbols used in any simple, uniquevalue or classbreaks renderer in ArcMap, into the appropriate css attributes. What’s better is that Carto supports “attachments”, or the ability to apply multi-pass rendering of different drawing attributes to the same feature on the map. The best example of this is drawing streets, one wide line is drawn as the outline while a second smaller stroke is applied over the top (after all of the features have been drawn). This makes for a smooth transition and visually appealing linework. ArcGIS has a very large set of symbols that use multiple levels to achieve the desired result, Sync will translate all of these into the appropriate “attachment” for the style. It will then upload the style when it detects a change, keeping your online map looking just the way you want it (note – this can be optionally turned off)

Here’s some sample multi-layer line symbols from the standard ArcGIS style gallery applied to a CartoDB based table. You can see the levels, colors, dash-arrays and x/y offsets are all applied correctly to the Carto CSS attributes. There is a limit to what can be translated but it seems to be the best correlation between ArcGIS symbols and another format that we’ve run into so far.

And here’s the live result up on cartoDB

There is currently a known issue on CartoDB that prevents url-based images to be used in a carto stylesheet, however, when this is fixed, all of your ArcGIS markers, marker lines and marker fills should work as expected. Many of our users have complained that Fusion Tables does not support custom markers for symbols (an issue Google is working on) so I’m hoping the CartoDB folks get this worked out asap

CartoDB is a great service with flexible pricing, give it a try for free and see if its a good fit.

The post New Provider Model and CartoDB Provider for Sync appeared first on Arc2Earth.

Arc2Earth Sync Beta

bFlood — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:22:45 +0000

Arc2Earth Sync is a new service that provides a bridge between your local ArcGIS data and the new, evolving world of Geospatial Cloud Services.

On the desktop, Sync runs as a small utility that synchronizes your local ArcGIS data with any number of online Table Providers. For the Beta, we support Google Fusion Tables and CartoDB however we have many more in development. You can share these tables with other ArcGIS users (9.2 or greater) to create cloud based, collaborative layers. All edits from ArcMap or mobile clients are automatically synchronized with the online provider and your local cache. Here’s a quick video showing the live editing process from ArcMap and mobile clients.

As a service, Sync provides a host of features that extend and homogenize the data from other providers. For example, Sync will make all of your Tables appear as OGC Rest and WFS layers for use in ArcGIS.com or other GIS software. It also provides full edit tracking and history for each of your tables as well as Edit Rules/Actions that can be applied before or after an edit takes place.

Arc2Earth Sync brings some peace of mind to your Cloud deployment. A local copy of your data is always current and available. You can work online or offline and be confident your data will always be correct. And switching between Table Providers for all or just a few tables is as easy as a button click. Try out a new service and switch back to the original provider if needed. Or mix and match tables from different providers, use the best features from all of them.

Table Providers in Beta

Google Fusion Tables
CartoDB (hosted PostGIS and TileMill service)

Table Providers in Development

Find out more about Arc2Earth Sync here or signup for the Beta and try it out now.

We’ll be at the ESRI Federal GIS Conference tomorrow at booth 500 (New Light Technology), come say hi and we’ll show you how Sync can work for you.

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