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"

Internet GIS: Dedicate or Integrate?

The Internet plays an increasing role in GIS. Be it for publishing maps or for exchanging data. New GIS applications are Internet enabled. The current websites containing geographic information are often dedicated to one subject, while integration of different data sources opens up new possibilities.

My last project at ESRI Nederland consisted of creating a web site where professionals can find statistical water related monitoring data (http://www.waterstat.nl). The developed application allowed for geographical selection and for this purpose a so-called map service was created. In a presentation I gave at our annual user conference in the Netherlands, I used this map service to demonstrate the possibilities of one of the ESRI (http://www.esri.com/) products to use Internet data sources in addition to local data.

During my presentation, I realized that the map service was not created as a data source for a GIS conference. It was dedicated to serving an Internet application. This led me to visit other web sites that serve maps and there one can see a similar phenomenon. Interesting maps are being used within these applications. The available Internet maps could be used in many different projects. But this is certainly not common practice. This is a bit sad. After all, how many of us have convinced our customers that GIS is the means of integrating different data sources!

Internet is widely available to organizations, modern GIS products are able to access data sources over the Internet, and maps can be served through the Internet. These ingredients can be combined into applications that give us access to information from local and national governments, combined with commercial data and data created with a project. Multiorganization projects can use a common dataset where each party contributes by supplying a dataset dedicated to one aspect of the project.

Although technical requirements may have been fulfilled to a large extent, there still are some hurdles to be taken. Currently organizations are used to prepare datasets that are only used by the organization itself. The possibility of others using their data requires not only the willingness to share information. It also requires the notion that a dedicated dataset might be used in a broader perspective than the project the dataset resulted from.

For a dataset to be suitable to be integrated with other datasets, one has to know something about its content, its quality, its purpose and so on. Initiatives such as the Geography Network (http://www.geographynetwork.com) implement metadata standards that allow for the search for that missing peace of data. However, being able to find different dedicated datasets and put them on the same map is only the beginning of integration. Content standardization is just as important.

A good example is the development of a nationwide data standard in the Netherlands, used by water authorities (http://www.idsw.nl/standaarden/model/entiteit_relatie/). The good thing of this standard is that it is a result of an initiative from water authorities themselves. Different competing GIS vendors participate in this standard by building applications and extending the standard with new data models. These vendors are all members of the Open GIS Consortium. This means that both with respect to content and with respect to the technical side of things standards are available and in use. Dutch water authorities are now implementing Intranet applications based on this common data standard and some of them are even publishing their maps on the Internet. The step towards being able to use each other’s data is not a big one.

We will have to dedicate ourselves to integrating data. So be a publisher and give us access to your information. It will help us make better decisions and that is beneficial for you too!

Appeared in GeoInformatics Magazine (www.geoinformatics.com) in November 2001

Greetings from Santa Kurara, Kariforunia

Hello from the Unicode Conference in Santa Clara, California, where the Maps Transliteration team is giving a talk about ICU-based transliteration. Transliterating this originally Spanish city name to Japanese, we get サンタ・クララ, which (when morphed back to the Latin writing system) becomes “Santa Kurara.”

Machine Transliteration is an active area of research (slides), which means it can be rather challenging in general. Typically, transliteration emulates the pronunciation, but sometimes it also preserves some aspects of the original written spelling. We created transliteration modules with the open-source ICU library for languages that have highly regular spelling; if you’re using Google Maps in Japanese, Russian or Chinese, you can see how we use it to display labels in both the local language and your own:




Today, we’re announcing the contribution of our ICU transliteration rules for Czech, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak and Spanish to the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository. (For languages with very irregular spelling, like English, we supplement ICU with some more advanced techniques.) If you would like to try writing rules for your own language, have a look at the instructions in the ICU user guide.

アスタ・ラ・ビスタ — “Asuta ra bisuta,” from sunny “Kariforunia!”