Surveying, Mapping and GIS

This is one of hopefully many installments of notes:

ESRI International User Conference 2007

Plenary Session, 6/18/2007

The theme of the conference was The Geographic Approach, with emphasis on GIS as the Medium. For a battle-scarred veteran like myself, this is Mastery of the Obvious, and preaching to the choir, but again always good for reinforcing place-based approaches and toward refining the elevator speech for the less-initiated. My own mindset is of actually making GIS transparent, to the point of making it intuitive and invisible, to allow users to focus on the underlying field - such as environmental science and environmental protection - be it tracking where the a contaminant originated, where it's going and who it's impacting, or transportation networks, and the like.

ArcGIS 9.3

With regard to the roadmap for ArcGIS, there are anticipated to be several service packs prior to 9.3: ArcGIS 9.2 SP3 and 9.2 SP4 to serve as incremental releases. With 9.3, a number of other issues will be addressed, which may then also be released as hotfixes for 9.2.

What's new in 9.3? A sampling of features:

• Geographically-weighted regression


• Gaussian simulation


• Proximity analysis


• Routing with time windows


• Scatter plots


• New contouring styles


• Improved scripting and model building


• Improved cartographic mapping and labeling


• WYSIWYG editing for cartographic representation (as opposed to wireframes)


• Additional options for street numbering


• Geological strike/dip symbology


• Multiple view windows


• Enhancements for 3D surfaces and analysis


• Realtime tracking enhancements


• Schematic diagrams - support for additional types of diagrams


• Improved support for cadastral needs

Survey Analyst

Clint Brown introduced of some of the enhancements to Survey Analyst - Survey Analyst is better supported through workflow functionalities, and greater emphasis was placed on maintaining the integrity of survey measurements within the context of the "parcel fabric".

Christine Leslie ran through a demo of integrating a CAD subdivision plan into an existing cadastral framework. The CAD plan in question was based on a local coordinate system, developed using COGO, and was copied and pasted into the cadastral layer. This brought the corners, along with any other relevant points, such as curve radius points, PCs and PTs in as point features, and brought in linework tied to these point features. Using the autojoin function, reference points in the CAD plan were matched up to the corresponding points in the cadastral base, and the autojoin function topologically integrated the CAD plan into the cadastral base. Next, a least squares adjustment was performed, with a report of residuals available. This of course still leaves me with some unease, however it's still suggested that all of the underlying data will remain with full integrity. Further, the same adjustment can then be applied to other layers, such as utilities or other features tied to the parcel.

"Easy to bring in from CAD"

With this Cadastral Fabric notion, the data model evidently still holds all of the original data, and incremental improvements are made. As long as the "Cadastral Fabric" is not purely rubber...

Evidently the underlying functionality is based on technology from GeoCadastre software, by Geodata Information Systems of Australia a

This piece will come to the market through ArcGIS 9.2 SP3's Survey Analyst.

Other ArcGIS 9.3 Functionality...

With ArcGIS Server 9.3, added improvesments come in terms of:

• Image Services


• Security


• APIs and support for REST and JavaScript - these geared toward mashups.

Support is to be added for:

• PostgreSQL


• Oracle Express


• DB2 in z/OS environments

As a general observation, they seem to be pushing ST_Geometry for PostgreSQL environments, as opposed to SDEBINARY.

SDE 9.2 brings GeoDatabase replication. This continues to evolve and mature in 9.3. The Replication Service can work via robust transaction messaging, update-o-grams. My curiosity is in how well this is supported in heterogenous environments - more on this later.

(to be continued...)