ESRI Address Management Tool

I happened to stumble a recently (August 25th) posted ESRI Address Management Tool. I haven't tried it out, but I have scanned the documentation. The documentation states "The Address Management tool (AMT) is intended to simplify common user tasks for managing address data in a normalized data model within an ArcGIS Geodatabase." You can use your own address geodatabase model, and it supports both centerlines and address points. Below is image from the documentation. It looks like it has ability to draw a line (purple) from the location of the address point, to the corresponding location on the centerline. If you deal with addresses a lot, you should probably check this out.

ArcGIS 9.2 Rollout Seminars Announced

If you haven't heard, ESRI is having a nearly day-long free seminar about ArcGIS 9.2. Here's where to go to register for the seminar in Madison on October 11th. BTW - it's at the same hotel we had EWUG at in 2004.

EWUG 2006 Conference Presentations

The (preliminary) list of presentations for the 2006 EWUG Conference on Nov 1 & 2nd has been posted on the EWUG website. As usual, there is a very good mix of user, ESRI and vendor presentations on a wide variety of subjects. Please consider attending. This is a great value for a two-day food-included conference for around $75 (preliminary price).

If you're unfamiliar with EWUG, this is our 8th Annual Conference. We typically have between 200 and 250 in attendance, primary from Wisconsin, but also persons from Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois (out-of-state attendance is encouraged! - it's good to hear from about what others are doing). For more information, browse our past conference agendas. This will give a good representation of what the conference has to offer (and helps to fill out those GISP credits if you've attended before).

GIS-unstructured

I recently read All Points Blog's entry on top web searches via AOL. To sum it up, he estimates (a bit optimistic but not too far fetched) that just over half of all web searches have a geographic component. I think that is pretty amazing that most web searches are related to geography . People not only want to 'find' something, they also want to 'locate' it too. And they often use place names to find it it.

After reading this post, I also recalled how ESRI and MetaCarta recently put out a press release announcing their expanded relationship. MetaCarta is involved in the business of locating 'unstructured' geographic references. Unstructured data is just that - data that is not in any organized structure such as databases or XML (even Excel spreadsheets). Think of unstructured data as generic text. Just like a web search. Any MS Word document or web page is a piece of unstructured data. Yet unstructured data contains huge amounts of geographic references and is often highly dependent on the context of the document itself.

A next-big-thing in GIS is likely to be the technology involved in processing geographical locations in unstructured documents, such as what MetaCarta is involved in. For example, there are huge amounts of geographic data that exists in the stacks of public meeting minutes. In just this one area, it would be very beneficial (and fascinating too) to be able to 'geocode' those minutes based on all the geographic references within them. Then you could search those minutes based location of events that they describe. (Find all minutes that describe events within 1000 feet of 123 Main St). You would be able to quickly determine (via a geo-search of the all the historical minutes) the recorded history of a neighborhood. This history would prove to be invaluable for most decision making processes.

Some of this is starting to take place. I think this one of the reasons Google Map became popular. How else can you type in cheese near Milwaukee and get a map with a potential of 1,400 locations? Or you can see a map of the CNN webpage. The ESRI - MetaCarta relationship should become something to watch over the years.

URISA Salary Survey

URISA is conducting their latest salary survey of GIS professionals. Please consider filling it out.

ArcView 1.0 Part 2

If you didn't read Part 1, you should. If you did and don't remember, here's the summary of it: there's been a couple of posts about ArcView 1.0. I ran across some floppys - I decided to try an experiment - It failed - I had an another idea - try the same on an older computer - and here's the story.

With a little time on my hands, I decided to take the harddrive that I had installed Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and ArcView 1.0 on and move it from my Athlon 1.4GHz to the young kid's Pentium Pro 180mHz/6MB (which they have even abandoned because nothing runs on it anymore). I then booted it up. I found it shocking that I did not have any 'installing new drivers' boxes come up, but then again this is 'old' technology. I immediately tried AV1. It worked!

Here's a screen photo of one of the tutorials-

Here's the 'About' screen (I like the 'dismiss' button - who is Michael & Jeff?)
As far as usability goes -- it was really lacking. It's very different from ArcView 2/3, and goes without saying completely foreign to an ArcGIS 8/9 user. For example, none of the icons on the tool bars are 'standard'. Its hard to describe - but the Zoom tool is a fixed zoom in tool, the zoom by rectangle tool looks like a select by rectangle tool, etc. One of the things I did find surprising was that there were measure tools for a line, rectangle, and circle - only the line tool exists as a standard tool nowdays. I wonder why?
The speed of the software was very quick - keep in mind its running on a 180mHz PC. However, the general usability still made it hard to use. The various menus, 'layer property' pages, etc. all were far inferior to ArcView 2 & 3.x let alone 8 & 9.x . It would be difficult to produce a publication quality map in AV1 or conduct any type of spatial analysis. And last, it just uses coverages, no shapefiles.

The difference between AV1 and AV2 is much greater than the difference between AV3 and AV8. I cannot believe that AV1 was GIS for the masses, I wasn't that friendly. 15 years latter, I think its still up for grabs on what GIS for the masses is.

ArcGIS 9.2 Improvements @ ESRI-UC

The James Fee Blog provides a great summary of various ArcGIS 9.2 improvements displayed at the ESRI User Conference.

My take on the improvements (Italics from James' blog, mine are plain text) - Why shouldn't some of the improvments have happened long ago (my comments are tongue-and-cheek of course).

• Better mouse roller wheel support - How long has the wheel (er, mouse) been around?
  
• Customize Map Scale list (1"” to 200'’, etc) - If it's not on the engineer's scale, what's the point
  
• Copy and paste right out of identify window - Copy/Paste out of a window, great idea!
  
• Right click and calculate areas or length - But there have been ArcScripts to do this for years.
  
• New graph support (Much easier to make 'Excel Quality'” graphs from inside ArcMap) - what will I do with my copy of Harvard Graphics?
  
• Native support of Excel (add Excel spreadsheets can be added right to the layers list of ArcMap) - nobody uses Excel, I need native Quatro Pro support, besides I keep my mail lists in Word.
  

Others are new & nifty features that I took note of (really):

• Flicker capability (rapidly turn layers on and off to toggle back and forth between datasets) - This has a lot of potential as long as it's not the 'temporal' function ESRI's been hyping. No really, this could be nifty.
  
• Export to PDF now includes named layers (layers tab in Acrobat can now turn on and off the layers right inside the PDF - Just a very nifty feature. I think it could be extremely useful in the real world
  

ESRI Question & Answers

If you're not going to the ESRI-UC, you may not have seen this. ESRI posts a ESRI Q & A page. this page provides a lot of "what's next" type information in a FAQ style document. I tend to think of this as the list of important points that ESRI wants to make at the User Conference and over the course of the next year. Sample questions include:

• When will ArcGIS 9.2 be released?
• What new developments are planned after ArcGIS 9.2?
• When will ESRI support multiple layouts in an MXD?
• How will ESRI improve technical support over the next year?
• What improvements can I expect in ArcIMS 9.2?
• Can you make the ArcGIS Server product more affordable to smaller customers?
• Can you explain the differences between ArcGIS Explorer and Google Earth’s geobrowser?
• Will ESRI's technology work with Google?
• How will ESRI’s management evolve into the future?

If you haven't seen it yet, you should check it out.