Archive for the ‘Mobile ArcGIS’ Category
Tuesday, March 11th, 2014
Palm Springs in spring is just fantastic. Beautiful weather, a great downtown and so many super places to run.
The Esri Partner Conference back to back with the Developer Conference has swelled the numbers in town this week. For WebMapSolutions, this years partner conference was a little different. We were honored to be part of the plenary. The hard work required to prepare was well worth the time. More on the plenary in a future post.
While fresh in our minds, some reflections on the partner conference we thought were worth sharing in this blog post.
Focus on the ArcGIS Platform
Esri are very much focused on the ArcGIS platform. What constitutes the platform? Every piece of the Esri universe: desktop, ArcGIS Online, portal, mobile etc. Portal and ArcGIS Online are essentially the glue which hold all together. ArcGIS Server sits in the background quietly of both Online and Portal. Now publishing, sharing and controlling access to data is easy.
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Monday, March 3rd, 2014
As a mobile GIS development company we have had many fascinating conversations with clients, and built some very cool apps. We thought it might be interesting to look back at our experiences and list 4 popular uses of Mobile GIS.
Disaster Management and Assessment
Time is of the essence when managing disasters. Both providing relief to affected communities quickly, then following up with assessment and help with rebuilding. Mobile GIS has become a very important tool used by NGO’s and public safety departments.
We wrote last year about work we were doing with Monroe County. They were looking into improving their pen, paper and spreadsheet based approach to disaster assessment. Providing iPad’s to non-GIS trained Red Cross volunteers, loaded with a simple to use GIS app, was the goal of the work. The mobile GIS app built by WebMapSolutions allowed these volunteers to view interactive maps, collect data, share and collaborate while on site. The data resulting from the field reporting was quickly provided to state officials as an interactive Web map which was easy to understand, showed damage information at a parcel level, and helped with discerning patterns. This Web map approach has dramatically helped the decision making process, allowing for fast turnaround of relief funds.
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Tags: ArcGIS Online, ESRI, mobile, smartphone, tablet
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Wednesday, February 19th, 2014
We have spent a chunk of time focused on mobile data collection. Much of our work has leveraged Esri’s ArcGIS Online. In this post we thought it worth providing our thoughts on tablet and smartphone field data collection, based on our experiences.
Tablet and SmartPhone Field Data Collection
Esri’s mobile Collector we like. The two area which were problematic for us were the built in GIS workflows; the folks who are collecting the data are not GIS savvy and lack of disconnected or offline functionality. We ended up developing our own offline editing app. (more…)
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Sunday, February 9th, 2014
GIS is now being applied in many new areas. With the popularity of mobile and cloud technology opportunities have opened to apply GIS in new ways and to serve a new audience. In this post we will discuss 3 exciting applications of GIS for non-GIS users.
GIS for Non-GIS Users
Every home, business, road, park exists at a specific location, and can be represented as a point, line or polygon. People move from location to location, as do vehicles. In its simplest form, GIS is a system designed to visualize and analyse anything and everything which has a location or locations. Where are my best performing retail outlets, find me the closest park to my current location which has a playground, send text messages to shoppers as they enter your store about today’s specials.
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Tags: application development, arcgis onine, business GIS, consumer GIS, Esri Maps for SAP BusinessObjects, GeoEnrichment service, public GIS
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Tuesday, February 4th, 2014
Mobile applications require networking. Not any more: here we discuss 5 breakthrough offline use cases available now!
How often do you find yourself without mobile Wi-Fi connectivity? More often than you would like. Maybe you are in a remote area; working, possibly hiking, boating or fishing. Maybe you do not want to exhaust your mobile data plan. Its quite possible your mobile device has no outdoor Internet connectivity. Lower cost tablets only provide direct home or office based network connectivity and have no 3G/4G providing mobile data capabilities. Even if you have a tablet with networking service built-in from the telephone carriers, the service is inconsistent at best and sometimes it doesn’t exist.
This is a huge disappointment because tablets and smart devices have a great deal to offer businesses and consumers of all types, especially those that marshal resources to the field with the dreaded pen and paper. But until we can solve how we collect data of all types, integrate it into our workflow seamlessly, and do that in an occasionally connected world, we are going to remain in the stone age with pen and paper use by field staff.
The wait is over
Since we are mobile map and GIS experts, in this post we will describe 5 cool uses of mobile offline maps.
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Tags: data collection, disconnected, editing, fishing, GIS, mobile, offline
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Monday, February 3rd, 2014
Have you ever opened a Web page on your smartphone and found it to be unusable?
Text is too small, images too large, button clicks and navigation impossible. This is a problem we have all experienced. Indeed, we are often asked:
‘One Web GIS App for Desktop and Mobile: is it Possible?’
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Thursday, January 23rd, 2014
In this post we discuss 5 powerful new ways mobile GIS can help your organization.
No more Pen and Paper
A better title here might have been ‘replacing outmoded inefficient work practices’. Still much work done in the field relies on pen and paper; notes, paper maps, forms and documents. Today we can use smartphone and tablets to store all information in one place in a digital format. Digital format I hear you say? A format which allows us to push all your data into a central computer system. No more pulling together notes made in the field and generating spreadsheets, or requiring data entry folk to take your paper documents and transpose that data into the central data system. Cut out the middle man, upload all your field recorded data directly into the system yourself via your smartphone or iPad.
Do I hear you say more efficient?
If the data has a location component, which is most of the time, we can record current GPS location, maybe do reverse geo-coding to convert a GPS point to an address. Tying GIS into this system then provides the spatial analysis and visualization component. Our recent blog post talks more about replacing pen and paper with mobile technology
Tags: geoenrichment, GIS application development, GPS and GIS, mobile GIS, pen and paper
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Tuesday, January 14th, 2014
The low cost and popularity of Apple and Android mobile devices has opened many new ways to apply GIS. Many applications GIS development companies like us are building are in part or fully mobile enabled. Mobile presents many new and exciting possibilities. In many ways we have only just begun to scratch the surface of the many opportunities to apply GIS and location service.
One area in which we have received many client requests is the replacement of pen and paper with mobile GIS. Many field based staff still rely on paper maps and note taking. Mobile technology coupled with GIS and location services has the potential to dramatically improve how people work in the field. Eliminating pen and paper will be a huge step forward in terms of efficiency. (more…)
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Monday, December 30th, 2013
Through the WebMapSolutions youtube channel we received a very interesting question. I thought it worth posting in our blog with our reply on the mobile GIS challenges and opportunities in 2014.
“I am a Geography student from the UK doing a module on Geospatial technology. As part of this module, I am attempting to gain an overview of the research challenges that face mobile geospatial computing. Since there isn’t a huge amount of approved literature on the subject, I have been using your videos as a source of information, and have found them very useful and informative.
I was basically wondering what you feel are the few challenges most relevant and problematic to functionality and development to apps such as mobile GIS, as well as location-based geospatial computing tools. Many of the tools you talk about in the videos require an online server to exploit some of the tools of ArcGIS. Do you know of any other mobile software that does not require any online server but provides all of the perks of programmes such as ArcGIS.”
Maturity of the Technology
In 2013 we saw a rapid acceleration in the evolution of GIS technology. Cloud and mobile computing were key drivers, and in 2013 GIS reached a tipping point. As a company WebMapSolutions recognised back in 2011 the potential impact these technologies could have on GIS. At that time, we began talking about location services rather than GIS. Cheap mobile devices with built in GPS, and cloud platforms we believed would transform our industry. It has taken nearly 3 years, but our prediction is proving correct. Now we have low cost GIS available at any time and place on any device. But the technology is still maturing. ArcGIS Online was released in early 2013, and continues to evolve; new services being rolled out gradually. New companies like GISCloud offer low priced cloud based GIS but remain limited. That will change.
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