Arc2Earth

Google IO Recap

bFlood — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:16:42 +0000

We had a very successful Google IO this year, many thanks to Google for inviting us to the Geo Developer Sandbox. Thanks also to everyone who stopped by, I have to admit there were a lot more “traditional GIS” folks there then I initially expected. As for those who had no idea what GIS was and still stopped by to chat, well, that is also the beauty of conference like IO. Everyone, regardless of their background or marketplace, was more then happy to listen and learn about something new. Lots of energy throughout the entire conference

I also participated in the GIS talk given by Google’s Mano Marks and Josh Livni. And by participate, I mean jam as much information into 10 minutes as possible while trying not to mess up some live demos. Here’s the link to the session. The room was about three quarters full which is much better then expected given the topic and timeslot.

My only regrets for the week were

a) not going up to Sergei and saying hi (he was actively wandering the conference, mostly by himself without a huge entourage)
and b) not trying the indoor stair-slide in the Google SF office

New Version, Data Services

bFlood — Thu, 05 May 2011 18:52:26 +0000

A new version of Arc2Earth has been released! You can read about the changes here or go directly to the downloads page to get the latest installer.

Arc2Earth Data Services

Data Services is a new product for use with Arc2Earth Desktop. It allows you to display Google Maps Street and Imagery data directly in ArcMap (legally, A2E is now an OEM of the Google Maps API). It also includes access to other Google Maps services like Geocoding, Routing and Elevation ( although these are still in beta for this initial release. our beta testers insisted the imagery service be released as soon as possible!) Future versions will also include some very cool Google Geo Cloud integration as well but you’ll have to wait for a future date to hear the specifics

Check out Getting Started with Google Imagery to see how easy it is to get started using this new service. Also, here’s a video showing how the imagery looks in ArcMap.

We have some new pricing and bundles available but one I’d like to highlight is the introductory offer for Arc2Earth Data Services and a free Arc2Earth Pro seat. You can’t beat this value, so get it while it’s hot (under the Professional Bundle section)

MapBox and MapStream Support

MapBox is a set of open source projects from DevelopmentSeed that allow you to create and host map tiles. TileStream is a paid service that gives you easy upload and management of your maps with a single monthy price. MapBox for iPad is a free application that allows you to download tile caches and bring them into the field without the need for an internet connection. Offline maps on the iPad are a compelling alternative to technologies like GeoPDF with the added benefit of exactly matching your existing desktop map symbology, labeling and renderers.

Arc2Earth now allows you to create map tile caches that are compatible with both MapBox for iPad and TileStream. You can easily export your maps directly from ArcMap and immediately have them available online or in the field. (also note that with this version, Arc2Earth Pro can create map tiles that can be used with MapBox)

For more information, check out this quick tutorial

Google IO 2011

bFlood — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:01:24 +0000

Google IO 2011, their annual developer extravaganza, is right around the corner and Arc2Earth was lucky enough to be selected as a Developer Sandbox attendee. We’ll be in the Geo area of the sandbox both days, talking about all things Arc2Earth and Google. Come on by to talk shop or just say hi!

Additionally, I’ll be a guest speaker during the GIS with Google Earth and Google Maps session given by Josh Livni and Mano Marks (Wed, May 11th at 4:15). I’ll be talking about how Arc2Earth integrates with existing and future Google Geo technologies.

Arc2Cloud – Uploading Data

bFlood — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:15:15 +0000

Arc2Cloud is our multi-tenant cloud solution for users who do not want to setup or maintain anything. You can get an Arc2Earth Cloud instance running on your own Google AppEngine account but for many of users, even this was too much overhead. You’ll still get your own logon, security and data configuration and enjoy all of the features of Arc2Earth Cloud, except now you can start instantly. Typical Arc2Earth Cloud url on your own AppEngine Account: http://myInstance.appspot.com/a2e With Arc2Cloud, you would use this instead: http://beta.arc2cloud.com/myInstance Everything else about how you interact and build applications around the APIs is the same. The only major difference is the use of Google Fusion Tables as the datastore for all of your spatial and attribute data. If you plan on keeping your data public and have modest usage needs, Fusion Tables if free. If you need private data or much larger usage limits, you’ll need to get Premier access from Google. Loading maps and data into Arc2Cloud is easy and for most users, it will take place directly from ArcMap. Simply select the layers in your map that you want to upload and click the upload button. In the background, Arc2Cloud will create Google Fusion Tables that exactly match your local layers (using OAuth to securely interact with Fusion Tables on your behalf). Once complete, an Arc2Cloud datasource that points at the newly created table is registered in your instance and finally, the data is batch uploaded to the table. By breaking this process up into batches, we can upload much larger quantities of data to FT. Once uploaded, you’ll be able to interact with the Map via the built-in and external viewers. There will be a future post on the Google Earth viewer but as a preview, it contains full auto-complete search, editing and automatic KML regions for all of your data (no configuration, no static exports). Your map is also available as a set of ESRI REST services as well (using the GeoServices REST spec). You can then use the excellent ESRI apps and APIs to build customer applicaitons or to tie your data into existing ESRI based ones. The maps are read/write (given proper credentials) so you can collect data online and your Fusion Tables will be automatically populated. Another powerful feature is the ability to import Map schema and data from other online sources. ArcGIS Server REST importer – Will import a MapServer or FeatureServer and create Fusion Tables for all layers. If it’s a FeatureServer, the renderer, labeling and feature template information is imported as well. (note – you should only import public services where there is no copyright infringement, we’ll likely build a bunch of free templates for different types of services) Fusion Tables – Simply registers an existing Fusion Table (your own or one that is publically available). The table must have a Location field and while Arc2Cloud does not care about mixed geometry types, many other services that will try to interact with your table via Arc2Cloud will expect tables to have uniform geometries (e.g. all points or all polygons) Twitter – This importer is not currently available (we are waiting on some cool new features in Google AppEngine to become available) however when ready, it will be a continuous importer. that is, you tell it a search query, an optional location and a time period and it will monitor the main twitter feed on your behalf, writing geo enabled tweets to a specifc Fusion Table. There’s also the base API for Arc2Cloud, where you can create maps, datasources and features on the fly and FusionTables will be created in the background. This is great for ad-hoc applications where you don’t know what needs to be collected until the time comes.

Arc2Earth Turns 5

bFlood — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:55:57 +0000

It’s hard to believe what started out as an afternoon project to convert ArcGIS data into KML turned into something I’m still working on five years later. So first and foremost, I’d like to thank all of our users, ESRI for a great developer platform, Google for blowing the lid off geospatial and everyone else who’s supported this project over the years. The design right from the beginning was to keep it small and efficient, so during that time we’ve always been profitable and have never taken on outside investment and still somehow managed to sell to users in over 30 countries. Many thanks to our resellers for their help! Arc2Earth is now a full featured KML exporter/importer, a map tile cache creator, a fast map tile cache consumer, a workflow tool, a geospatial Cloud provider, a data provider for Google’s Map API in ArcGIS and my current favorite, Arc2Cloud, a multi-tenant, read/write geo repository using Google Fusion Tables (1) There’s been lots of ups and downs during this time and like most small companies, we’ve been down a few blind alleys. But in the end, I think it’s always made the product stronger and quite frankly, it’s been a great learning experience as well. By my read, the geospatial industry is currently in a period of change, innovation and the economic realities of cloud sourced services have the potential of really changing the current software procurement process. While I expect all current players to be around, I do think things will look a lot different 5 years from now. I’m confident we’ll be able to keep ahead of the curve but it won’t be easy, James is certainly correct in saying: The World… She be a Changing… On another note, I’ll be doing a talk at this years ESRI DevSummit about some functionality in Arc2Cloud and given the brief time allotment, I’ll be doing a small brain dump on this blog as a primer to the talk itself. If you’re attending, please stop on by! 1. – I believe I’ve hit my max number of concurrent programming projects so if you’re in the market for a dev job, please drop me a line. I’ve got loads of new and interesting ideas lined up

New Version – Fusion Tables, Data Services and much more

bFlood — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:23:37 +0000

We just released a new version of Arc2Earth today, it contains a lot of bug fixes and new features. Below are some of the highlights but you can get the entire list of changes here. We’ll be at the ESRI FedUC next week in NewLight Technologies booth if you want to stop by and chat about the new features, any issues you are having or just talk shop. 2011 is shaping up to be an interesting year in for geo technologies, we’ll try to stay ahead of the curve! Fusion Tables Upload

Google Fusion Tables now support spatial queries and in combination with their amazing builtin mapping visualization, I expect them to be a very popular way to publish your data online. To help the average ArcGIS user work with this new service, we’ve built Fusion Table upload directly into Arc2Earth. You can still export your data to KML first and use Google’s web based uploader (or for that matter, this excellent shapefile uploader) however it’s much easier to use the builtin A2E tools since you can work directly against your FeatureLayers (which may be shapefiles, PGDBs, FGDB, SDE etc). It will also export the current renderer value for each feature and create additional columns to hold the symbology values.

Initially, you’ll need to manually set these values using the Fusion Tables web UI but as their API expands, we’ll be able to set the values automatically (and without the need for the extra fields). Here’s a quick video showing the process:

There’s additional Fusion Tables functionality built into Arc2Earth Data Services but that’s a blog post for another day.

Map Tile Caches

8bit PNG image format (yea I know, finally…)
Command Line Builder – Click the menu directly off the Tile Exporter window and all of your current settings will be made into a valid command line. You can optionally launch the exporter to cut your tiles outside of ArcMap.
Change Detection and Adaptive Exclusion Mask – There’s been some improvements to the Change Detection algorithm to deal with issues on 64bit servers. Also, a new Mask was added that works so well in certain situtations that it’s now on by default. The Adaptive Exclusion Mask will continually detect blank areas in your map as it exports levels, tiles below these areas in lower levels are then skipped when the exporter comes to them. If your maps contains a lot of transparent areas (like streams or discontinuous park polygons), this process can dramtically speed up exports. One samples export went from 20 minutes to 3 minutes with adaptive masking turned on.
WeoGeo Cache Format – We’re working with our friends over at WeoGeo to add full tile cache export for use with their API. Initially, you can choose WeoGeo from the cache format dropdown to create tiles. In a later release, the tiles, preview images and necessary metadata will be packed up into a zip file, ready for publishing to WeoGeo’s growing list of online datsources

Arc2Earth Data Services (beta)

While there have been several plugins to view Google’s Street and Imagery data inside ArcMap, all of them rely on downloading Google map tiles directly. This is not supported by Google and is in violation of their TOS. We actually removed this functionality from our Map Tile Layer way back in Arc2Earth V2. That being said, many of our users have always asked for access to Google’s data as a both backdrop and to help position their own data in ArcMap

Well, we’re happy to say that with Arc2Earth Data Services, you now have access to thier worldwide imagery data for a yearly, per user fee. The Google Maps toolbar, which was previously only to be used by Premier/Enterprise users, can now be used by everyone who joins the program.

This service will also include the other Google Mapping APIs as well. So worldwide geocoding/reverse geocoding, elevation data and directions/routing. We’ll be adding simple toolbars to access these services directly from ArcMap

We’re still in beta now but if you want to help test this functioanlity or provide valuable feedback, please fill out this survey and we’ll get you on the list. Even Arc2Earth Community Edition users can participate! Arc2Cloud (private beta)
Arc2Earth Cloud Services has been well received by our larger, more technically savvy users. However, Arc2Earth got it’s start by serving the everyday ArcGIS user and by helping them make the most of their limited budgets and time. Arc2Cloud will now bring you one step closer, one click publishing of your maps to the Cloud. You can be up and running in minutes with your data available (read and write!) in Google Maps, Microsoft Bing (using map tiles), Polymaps, Google Earth (with automatic search and regions) and in ArcGIS.com (and all of its great applications and APIs). Arc2Cloud has the exact same featureset as Arc2Earth Cloud Services except that all of your datasources are hosted in Google Fusion Tables. So that means your Fusion Table data will appear as GeoJson in OpenLayers and Polymaps, Regionated KML in Google Earth, as a WFS-T service or as an ArcGIS Server to the myriad of applications and APIs on ArcGIS.com. We’ve also added some great upload tools to Arc2Earth Desktop so you can get an entire map in Fusion Tables and registered in Arc2Cloud with a single button click! Now you’ll get best of both worlds, Google’s amazing Maps and Search services and compatibility with the growing number of GIS and ArcGIS Servers in the world. Since it’s read/write, you could immediately start using the ArcGIS iPhone application to collect features in the field. Your data will be synchronized with both Fusion Tables and your local desktop. I’ll be attending the ESRI DevSummit in March to (hopefully) talk about geoprocessing with Google AppEngine, Fusion Tables and ArcGIS Server. Much of what will be presented is baked directly into Arc2Cloud so if you’re interested to see another take on where Cloud based geoprocessing is heading, please vote up this talk

Arc2Earth in Italian Telecoms

bFlood — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 16:41:31 +0000

Mapping Anywhere, our EMEA distributor, has recently closed deals with two Italian telecom companies for enterprise access to Arc2Earth V3. Make sure to visit them at the upcoming ESRI EMEA Conference in Italy!

Telecom Italia Sparkle purchased an Enterprise site license for all of their ArcGIS users

WIND purchased 90+ seats of Arc2Earth Pro for use with their Telcordia Network Engineer seats

Ubisense myWorld Demo

bFlood — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:44:36 +0000

Peter Batty from Ubisense has put together some great videos from his conference tour and for a demo product they’ve built to display SmallWorld data on Google Maps. The myWorld application uses an Arc2Earth Cloud for both storage and search. His thoughts on building simple user interfaces and leveraging the Cloud are very insightful, well worth the time to watch regardless of what mapping framework you may use.

here’s the link to his videos and here’s a blog post that describes the myWorld demo.

Ubisense myWorld demo from Peter Batty on Vimeo

From an Arc2Earth perspective, Peter has been instrumental in helping us open up A2E Clouds so that any GIS platform (apart from ArcGIS, which is already supported) can upload datasources, tilesets and viewers. The Datasource and Tileset APIs already allow you to do this but we’ve also updated the Command Line tools to make it really easy (it handles security and the uploads automatically). Let us know if you’d like try some of these new tools on your own data!

And as a bonus, we’ve already implemented the majority of the new ESRI GeoServices REST Specification , so your uploaded data is compatible with ArcGIS.com and the latest ESRI web clients as well.

New Build Released – ArcGIS 10.0 and Google Features

bFlood — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:52:33 +0000

We released another build of Arc2Earth V3 today. It has a lot of bug fixes but it also has some larger feature additions that a lot of users have been waiting on. Below are the major feature additions. The complete list can be found here

Download our Free Community Edition and try out the new features here

ArcGIS 10.0 Support

We’ve updated the installer and made sure all of A2E’s features work in ArcGIS 10.0. Please report any problems you find!

Google Maps Layer (for Google Premium/Enterprise users)

We’ve created a special toolbar for displaying Google Street and Satellite data directly in your map. It’s a lot like our standard Map Tile Layer except it uses’s Google API directly instead of downloading tiles individually. This is the only way that Google allows access to its data for its licenced users. The layer refreshes automatically as you move around your map so its really easy to use. Here are some caveats:

This is only for users who have a valid Google Premier or Enterprise license.
The map frame must be in the Sperical Mercator projection (it will be changed automatically)
No data is cached so unlike the Map Tile Layer, you can’t pre-seed and then disconnect from the network

Google Maps Data API Uploads (beta)

You can upload and vector layer to Google Maps Data API directly from ArcMap. Currently its just uploads but it will eventually work with Cloud Layers for live edits and synchronization as well. We also have some great plans for future use of the Google’s apis!

New Map Tile Creation Tools

bFlood — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:23:03 +0000

ArcGIS Server Cache Format We added support for creating tile caches that use the ArcGIS Cache Format so you can copy an A2E caches directly to an AGS cache location. (more information)

Automatic Change Detection Our new Automatic Change Detection can dramatically reduce the time it takes to maintain Map Tile Caches when subsequent edits to the underlying data are frequent and in unknown areas. (more information)