Geospatial World

I just realized I neglected to mention a very important key item in my original post on ArcGIS Query Layers . 2 words… READ-ONLY Yes, unfortunately, these Query Layers are read-only, and I don’t just mean the geometries are read-only, even the attribute data is read-only. Maybe in ArcGIS 11 these will be fully accessible and editable? One can hope! Until next time, Take care Warren M

I just thought of something… My recent post is reason #149 to make the move to an enterprise spatial database (or at least a geodatabase) if you’re working heavily in the ESRI world… Until next time, Take care Warren M

Last week the GISCI had a press release announcing: GISCI Invites Comment on Proposed Examination Requirement From the GISCI website: “After much consideration and deliberation, the GIS Certification Institute (GISCI) invites you to review a proposal to update requirements for GIS Professional (GISP) certification.  Key among the proposed updates is the addition of a required examination.” This press release is inviting people to comment on the proposal to update the GISP requirements to include a required examination. Now, anyone that is already a GISP, or has considered becoming a GISP, or has followed the GISP saga, is probably well aware of the numerous debates on the many social networking sites with respect to ‘what’ being a GISP really means.  I have contributed to many of those discussions, and don’t intend to re-start or re-hash the details here.  All I’m going to say is, if you have an opinion on this topic, don’t sit back, go make your voice hea...

Lifelong learning is something I have tried to practice my entire life.  Over the years, this learning has occurred on many different levels and taken many different forms.  Whether it was the formal college/technical school education in my earlier years, or the years I’ve spent in the software industry keeping up with all the latest a greatest technologies, or my recent experiences with online education through SAIT Polytechnic , it has been a fantastic experience. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I was not a great student in High School…  I struggled quite a bit for a variety of reasons including: too many distractions, poor study habits, and a lack of focus ( I was going to be a rock star!  ).  I guess I would consider myself a late bloomer, because it wasn’t until I was a little older (and assumedly more mature, although that is debatable…) that I started to enjoy the ‘learning experience’. This might seem like an odd/off topic compared to my usual ...

Oh those pesky long paths and filenames... It seems I had a brain lock and had forgotten how picky ArcGIS can be with paths and filenames.  I must have been having a bad day, because I can usually sleuth these things out, but alas, it was my IT department that was successful in resolving the problems I was having.  So needless to say, I was a little embarrassed that I missed this obvious one. What were the problems you ask? Well, I found that I could not preview some GRID data in ArcCatalog.  I didn't think that was a big deal as I’ve come across this on occasion and haven’t thought much about it.     That was until I went to add this raster GRID to a map and ArcMap reported 'Invalid raster dataset'  Huh?  What's going on? To make a long story short, the path was too long...  If you create a mapped location to a shorter path and voila!  The preview works and I was able to add the GRID to a map. Now, besides being extremely f...

Over the last couple of years, spatial database technologies have become easier to acquire, implement and configure.  Whether it's Microsoft's foray into spatial databases with the release of SQL Server 2008 , the numerous Open Source spatial database options, or Oracle , organizations are starting to see the value applying a geographic context to their corporate data. To make things even easier and more appealing to get into a spatial database, are the ‘free’ of the Open Source communities and the following offerings by Microsoft & Oracle: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express Oracle Express Both of these RDBMS are “Free to develop, deploy, and distribute”.   This means that anybody can download, and start building a ‘GIS’ warehouse with very minimal costs. Obviously, there are some limitations with these free offerings and they are not going to provide base for a large enterprise solution, but they are a great way to get into the technology. ESRI has been...

Well, it has certainly been a while... Between work, family, and extracurricular commitments, as well as trying to complete the final course for my GIS degree, let's just say there aren't many hours (minutes) left in the day. But, that's no excuse, and I'm going to try hard to maintain at least a bi-weekly post. So it's been a few months now at my new position with SRK Consulting and it's been going really well. I've learned a great deal about the mining industry, and there is much more to learn, and all-in-all this has been an exciting time. The mining industry uses many different, niche, applications for very specific tasks, and I'm looking forward to learning more about these applications. In my new role I'm working closer with the Arc* family of products and having spent a good portion of my career on the Autodesk side of things, it's nice to dive a little deeper into the Arc products. Specifically, I've been working with the ArcSDE...