This week Esri launched ArcGIS Marketplace; a one stop shop for ArcGIS focused applications. Finally users can discover mobile, Web and desktop GIS applications simply and easily. Esri have made the site intuitive, with excellent search capabilities and categories. Want a GIS application targeted at your industry or sector, ArcGIS Marketplace simplifies the discovery process.
Mobile GIS & LBS
Archive for the ‘Mobile ArcGIS’ Category
ArcGIS MarketPlace: A Big Hit
Friday, September 20th, 2013New GIS Solutions for Disaster Management
Monday, August 26th, 2013One of WebMapSolutions areas of focus is building systems which help to improve the management of disasters. As the frequency and impact of disasters increases, due to phenomena such as global warming, the need for improved tools and systems becomes ever greater. New technologies now available are greatly helping software companies such as WebMapSolutions develop mobile, centralized systems which are improving both disaster relief efforts and disaster recovery. Let’s look at some of the new GIS solutions for disaster management.
Disaster Relief
This is a coordinated multi-agency response to reduce the impact of a disaster and its long-term results. Relief activities include rescue, relocation, service repair, providing temporary shelter and emergency health care. Time is of the essence in this phase. Disaster agencies are both trying to understand the situation on the ground, and provide immediate assistance and relief to those in the affected area.
(more…)
The Future of GIS is here Today: Mobile Enabled GIS Cloud Technology
Thursday, July 25th, 2013As we have discussed before in this blog, mobile enabled GIS cloud technology is are changing how and who uses GIS. As we suggest in the title of this blog the future of GIS is here today. Let’s take a step back and look at the current landscape.
Today’s GIS Requirements and Mobile Enabled GIS Cloud Technology
There are a range of core elements required by our clients which are now provided by leveraging the new technological advances. These include:
1) Centralised data – away from a stove pipe approach to data.
2) Privacy – protecting data remains important
3) Data access from any device – PC, laptop, smartphone and tablet accessibility.
4) Simple targeted applications – no more complex workflows and ‘swiss army knife’ type apps.
So what solutions are now available which leverage cloud technology and target location based data?
Hosted Feature Layers in ArcGIS Online
Wednesday, November 28th, 2012
One of the many nice things about ArcGIS Online, is the ability to host Web App templates on your own server. We thought is worth walking through he steps of how this is done.
Step 1 – Log into your ArcGIS Online account and publish a web map
Esri’s Water Utility Mobile Map for iOS & Android
Monday, November 19th, 2012
We mentioned in a previous blog post that we have started work on building a version of Esri’s Water Utility Mobile Map but targeting iOS and Android. We thought it might be interesting to share where we are in the development process. The video below shows the first phase of the work.
Let us just point out, we are not using Esri’s Water Utility Mobile Map layers at the moment. We are building a mobile app against the requirements we listed in our original functional spec article, using layers and services we have available. These we will switch when we have the core application completed.
Mobile ArcGIS Online App
Our goal is to make the mobile ArcGIS Online app clean looking and simple to use. It loads on startup a configuration file which sets UI elements. This is a file users can edit themselves. We’ve tried to avoid a cluttered interface, so maximum real estate is devoted to the map. Workflows we will make intuitive. The video shows how we have incorporated online and offline modes. So maps and layers are loaded either from the web, or from sources stored on the devices itself.
Mobile App for ArcGIS Online Next Phase
We will keep moving forward with the mobile app. Next we will be adding online and offline editing capabilities. That will form the centre piece of the next demo.
ArcGIS Online offers many possibilities for building mobile and Web based mapping applications. Applications targeted at GIS professionals and non-GIS users. As a GIS development company, we have focused much of our energy on building this next generation of applications targeted at, and integrated, with ArcGIS Online.
ArcGIS Online: Its Time to get Excited
Tuesday, November 6th, 2012We’ve spent nearly a year working with ArcGIS Online. Our view is that it is a major step forward. We’ve been asked why we take this view. In short because this is a mapping platform like no other.
Mapping Platforms
Let’s start with what is a mapping platform. Put simply:
“A web mapping platform is a toolkit that helps you build a web mapping application.”
There are many such platforms available in the open source world, more details available at this link:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Choosing_a_Web_Mapping_Platform
ArcGIS Online is Exciting
GIS has been a niche. From desktop to Web, it has been a technology and acronym that few understand. We have long hoped the use of the technology would broaden and that the acronym would be less used. Many GIS-focused organisations, including ESRI, have begun to change the language their externally facing folk now speak. This is in part due to ArcGIS Online. Web maps, which are the raw material of ArcGIS Online, have a very broad appeal. We can talk, and will in later posts, about intelligent maps, story maps. Maps and geo-data targeted at non-GIS users.
So yes, we see ArcGIS Online as very exciting.
Offline/Online Editing Demo in Mobile ArcGIS Online
Wednesday, October 24th, 2012We have been developing mobile ArcGIS online maps for some time. Editing has been at the forefront of our recent work. Many of our clients are looking for tools which allow mobile workers to edit features (add, edit, delete) while in the field. Disconnected mode, where the mobile user has no wi-fi connectivity, is an additional area of interest. To date there are no robust offline solutions in place. ESRI have plans for native targeted releases next year. Our key interest is in cross platform, or a single code base which runs on multiple devices – iOS, Android etc. We turned to the much maligned Mobile Flex for a solution. Actually I should say, the now less appreciated Mobile Flex – but we still love it!
The next two sections are a very rough starter for developers trying to do what we show in the video; online offline editing in ArcGIS online. More hints than a step by step guide. But hey, it would be less fun if we gave the game away. Actually you would not understand it as well if we held your hand completely. For those just wondering about online offline editing in ArcGIS online jump to the video.
Mobile ArcGIS Online
Monday, October 8th, 2012
Stepping into Mobile Development
In early 2011 we began to turn our attention seriously from development for the PC Web to mobile. Blackberry released their excellent, but not well received, Playbook. As a first step into mobile GIS development we built and launched a mobile ArcGIS viewer to the Blackberry App World. Accompanying this release we wrote a paper for ESRI’s ArcUser publication on the development process, available at this link.
http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0112/files/arcuser56/pageflip.html
Topics in Mobile GIS
Thursday, October 4th, 2012
We came across the following table recently, listing mobile GIS topics:
Interesting. Obviously only a subset of the potential uses of mobile GIS. But worth reprinting. From the mobile app development work we are doing, key mobile requests from clients are:
Feature Editing in Mobile ArcGIS Online
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012
So we’ve been spending quite some time with the very cool editing capabilities of the ArcGIS FeatureLayer. We are most interested in services published to ArcGIS Online. Editing will be a key advantage mobile brings to the world of ArcGIS. Avoiding the details (maybe in a future post), but not all ArcGIS FeatureLayers are the same. We wanted to put together a demo of the editing of a Featurelayer which contains a featureCollection, from the ESRI docs:
“The featureCollection is used when you want to initialize the FeatureLayer with features from outside of ArcGIS Server.”
This lends itself well to offline editing.
ArcGIS Mobile Editing
In the demo below we are online and accessing the app via a mobile browser (note, this demo needs Flash and thus wont run on an iOS device):
