Is It Monday Already?

Wait, what happened to 3 day weekends.  I guess you get one and then you expect them all the time.  Oh well…

Some interesting reading for a Monday morning:

ArcGISEditor for OSM – Randal looks at the ArcGIS Editor for OSM and concludes it is complicated, but powerful.  I all Esri tools (they are “scientific” mind you) nothing is ever simple, but if you can get your hands around it, powerful results happen.

FOSS4G 2010 Final Answer – Apparently there was a Geospatial conference going on somewhere.  They all kind of start blending in to each other, don’t they?

Making a Data Portal With WordPress – Content management is content management, right?  (bless his heart for trying to do this with WordPress)  Just goes to show that if you can hack your way around code, there isn’t anything you can’t accomplish (assuming your billable time isn’t an issue).

Gearing up for GIS in the Rockies – Time for the fall conference season to kick into high gear.  Front Range GIS is a unique community who do some really great things with both proprietary and open source tools (usually in combination).  Bummed I can’t go.

Why not GeoJSON? – Looks like France was good to Sean.  He’s got a great post up on ESRI’s use of JSON in their RESTful API.

Oh and way to represent SEC!

Building your own ArcGIS.com client

ArcGIS.com provides a great collection of resources and, as Jack explains below, allows other people to discover the work ESRI users are doing.

ArcGIS.com includes a cool website, but as we learned when developing the Geoportal Extension, it also provides a RESTful interface. This meant we could offer users of the Geoportal Extension access to the information others are sharing through ArcGIS.com.

In the Geoportal Extension we allow distributed searches to go to ArcGIS.com. We implemented this early on in our contribution to the Group on Earth Observation

Realizing that many organizations aren’t waiting for yet another portal, we developed a simple mechanism to integrate a search widget into any web page that would allow searching Geoportals. This has resulted in an HTML widget that can be embedded with 2 simple lines of HTML. By default this widget searches the Geoportal it is part of. But hold on, there’s more!

The Geoportal can search external catalogs, including ones that implement the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalog Service for the Web (CS-W), but since 9.3.1 it can also search… ArcGIS.com! Try it at the GEO Portal by going to the search page and selecting ArcGIS.com from the ‘search in’ dialog. You’ll notice it searches ArcGIS.com with the keywords you give. This means any Geoportal 9.3.1+ is a client to ArcGIS.com.

But back to the widget.

Directing the searches from the widget to ArcGIS.com is possible by adding a parameter that instructs the Geoportal to direct the searches to the identified remote site. And thus here is a widget that searches ArcGIS.com. All it took was a minimal HTML like this:

<html>
<body>
<p>Search widget for ArcGIS.com >
<script type="text/javascript"