The roundup of geospatial news over the past week includes several software and data announcements from Esri, an image of the week from ESA covering the volcanic island of Guadalupe, and the winners of the 2011 Thacher Environmental Research Contest. SuperGeo, Topcon, TC Technology, OGC, Bluesky, eSpatial, IDV Solutions, gvSIG, and Safe Software also have released announcements.
Esri
The latest release of ArcGIS Online supports the addition of data from a .csv or .txt file directly to the map viewer. Users can also add GPS Exchange Form (.gpx) files; Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), Web Map Service (WMS) layers; and KML layers and gives users control over how features from .csv, .txt, or .gpx files are displayed. Users can configure pop-up windows and customize the appearance of features drawn on the web map by changing symbols and colors. Once information is added to the web map, it can easily be shared with others. Group users on ArcGIS Online can now add or remove any content within their groups. Group owners also have the ability to unshare items shared with the group by other group members.
The Esri Aeronautical Solution—Airports GIS Package is now available as a free download for Esri Aeronautical Solution users. This software configuration suite was specifically developed to help US airports comply with the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Airports GIS data management and submission requirements.
Government agencies, civic organizations, and policy makers can access vast amounts of data and instant reports and maps through Esri Community Analyst, a cloud-based GIS application. This new tool includes demographic, health, economic, education, and business data variables to help users develop informed strategies for policy creation and critical resource allocation. Decisions such as matching health care clinics to areas with the greatest need or allocating infrastructure funding for maximum community impact can now be made and supported using customizable reports and maps.
Esri has releasedthe new version of ArcGIS Data Appliance, an enterprise scalable solution that plugs right into an organization’s internal network and serves terabytes of worldwide map data including imagery, street, and topography. ArcGIS Data Appliance 4.0 includes many new imagery and basemap datasets, as well as data updates for tasks.
ESA
This Envisat image shows the volcanic island of Guadalupe peeking through the clouds. The island lies in the Pacific Ocean around 250 km off the west coast of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. Home to fewer than 30 people, this rugged little island measures 35 km north to south and just less than 10 km east to west. The island is made up of oceanic shield volcanoes that formed on a now-extinct mid-ocean ridge. It is dominated by a chain of high mountain ridges that rise to almost 1300 m. The swirling clouds to the south of the island are the result of a meteorological phenomenon known as a ‘von Karman vortex’. As wind-driven clouds encounter Guadalupe, they flow around the high volcanic outcrop to form the large spinning eddies that can clearly be seen in the image.
The Baja California peninsula in northwest Mexico can be seen in the top right of the image. At a length of 1200 km, the peninsula separates the Pacific Ocean from the Gulf of California. The rugged coastline is home to many species of mammal, including sea lions and various species of whale that breed in the region’s waters, while Guadalupe is considered to be one of the best places in the world to spot the Great White Shark.
This image was acquired on 15 June by Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer at a resolution of 300 m.
Snowflake Software
Snowflake Software, a participating organization in the Annex II & III data specification testing, announced its support for testing at the INSPIRE Conference in Edinburgh.
OGC
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC “GeoSPARQL: A Geographic Query Language for RDF Data” Standard. The candidate OGC GeoSPARQL standard defines spatial extensions to the W3C’s SPARQL protocol and RDF query language.
