Some GIS Spatial data sources

Across the years, I've been occasionally in need for geospatial data, whether a World Map, or a Satellite backdrop to a small map for a city, a free satellite image or shapefile was very important.
Luckily, many data sources exist in the Internet that have been published by many Space and satellite-owning agencies across the world, and many derived data that can enhance any map.

Some of my more important sources:
Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF)
http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/
A great source for many satellite imagery products and datasets, it can be accessed through ftp and provide wealth of file formats and resolutions, must check it.

NASA LandSat GeoCover data set
https://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/mrsid.pl
It provides access to LandSat Mosaics that has been created for most of the globe in 2 time eras (1990 and 2000), it delivers MrSID compressed mosaics with 15m pixel size.

StatSilk List of downloadable free shapefiles
http://www.statsilk.com/maps/download-free-shapefile-maps
Provides a list of downloadable shapefiles that contains many datasets.

Global Administrative Areas
http://www.gadm.org/
Provides shapefiles for administrative boundaries for the countries.

Blue Marble Next Generation
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/
(Direct download) ftp://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/bluemarble/bmng/bmng_arcview/
The Blue Marble is a gorgeous dataset, it provides 500m imagery for the whole world that is color processed and provides a great basemap backdrop for World Maps.

True Marble (by Unearthed Outdoors)
http://www.unearthedoutdoors.net/global_data/true_marble/download
Another global dataset that is created from LandSat imagery, this time the data has been color and band processed to provide a more natural color and appearance of the imagery, but the full resolution 15m imagery are available for purchase only, in the link you can download the the 250m images.

Global Land Cover 2000 (by the EU JRC)
http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/glc2000/glc2000.php
The Global Land Cover objective is to become a harmonized land cover database over the whole globe, it provides Land Cover maps for the whole world and can be utilized in many analysis functions (mostly on the national level).

Symbolizing Trees Realistically with ArcMap

A simple guide about how to symbolize trees in a campus map in ArcMap, it creates very visually-appealing detailed gardens/landscape/campus maps.
http://www.esri.com/news/arcwatch/0911/tip.html

ArcGIS 10 Transforms the Way People Use GIS

ESRI has just released ArcGIS 10 ... the biggest large scale upgrade in the ArcGIS line since 2002 when it released the first ArcGIS Desktop product.

"ArcGIS is a complete system that enables you to solve your most challenging issues," said Damian Spangrud, ArcGIS product manager. "This release provides greater ease of use, more powerful analysis tools, additional Web GIS applications, and new mobile platforms. It also promotes collaboration via an online system for using, sharing, and organizing geographic content."

Read more at http://www.esri.com/news/releases/10_2qtr/arcgis10-download.html

Depreciation plans for ArcGIS 9.3.1 and 9.4 (2)

In the last post I published a list depreciated features in ArcGIS 9.3.1 and 9.4, a shorter list is here:

• ArcGIS Desktop will not support Windows 2000, Visual Basic 6, Visio, Visual Studio 2005 in 9.4 and later will not support Visual Basic for Applications in 9.5
• ArcGIS Engine and ArcReader will not support Sun Solaris in 9.5 (keeping only Windows and Linux)
• ArcInfo Workstation will not support IBM AIX in 9.4 and later will not support Sun Solaris in 9.5, which will be the last release of the product
• ArcSDE will not support Informix 32-bit, SQL Server 2000, PostgreSQL on Red Hat 4, HP-UX on PA-RISC (keeping HP-UX on Itanium), Oracle 9i, Server-side geocoding in 9.4 and later will be the only component in ArcGIS to support Sun Solaris in 9.5
• ArcIMS will not support ArcMap Server, ArcIMS Route Server, IBM AIX, HP-UX in 9.4 and will later not support ArcIMS Metadata Server and Sun Solaris (keeping only Microsoft Windows and Linux) in 9.5, which will be the last release of the product
• ArcGIS Server will not support Enterprise Application Developer Framework (EADF) for Java in 9.4

Depreciation plans for ArcGIS 9.3.1 and 9.4

From the James Fee GIS Blog, a great source to GIS & ESRI info and news, any serious GIS user should check it out.

ESRI released a roadmap of its technologies and platforms to abandon in the next releases of ESRI ArcGIS platform, it includes:

The ArcGIS 9.3.1 Platform (all of the ArcGIS products) is the last version to support:

• Microsoft Windows 2000
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (it is very simple to move from VS2005 to VS2008 and to VS2010)
• Internet Explorer 6 (while it is still used ... it should be phased out of support lifecycles)

ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 is the last version to support:

• Crystal Report Wizard, a new reporting engine is used that should be more robust and have better features and performance.
• The Survey Editor Component and Survey Dataset within the Survey Analyst (I don't know what's left from the Survey Analyst)
• CASE tools and the Import Schema Wizard (that means goodbye for Microsoft Visio)
• Microsoft Visual Basic 6 (time to leave such ancient platform)
• Sun Solaris 9 for ArcReader and ArcGIS Engine (This keeps only Solaris 10/Linux/Microsoft Windows Platform)

ArcInfo Workstation 9.3.1 is the last version to support:

• IBM AIX (the only remaining platforms are Microsoft Windows and Sun Solaris)

ArcIMS 9.3.1 is the last version to support:

• ArcMap Server Extension to ArcIMS
• ArcIMS Route server extension
• IBM AIX
• HP-UX (the only remaining platforms are Microsoft Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris)

ArcSDE 9.3.1 (part of ArcGIS Server) is the last version to support:

• 32-bit Informix on the AIX and Solaris platforms
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000
• HP-UX on the PA-RISC processor (support for ArcSDE technology on HP-UX on the Itanium processor is continued)
• PostgreSQL on Red Hat 4 (support for newer version of Red Hat Linux is continued)
• Oracle 9i
• Server-side geocoding in ArcSDE (ArcGIS Server geocode services have replaced the server-side geocoding functionality in ArcSDE)

ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 is the last version to support:

• Enterprise Application Developer Framework (EADF) for ArcGIS Server Enterprise Java release (EADF provided out-of-the box Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) that were ready to use and deploy across supported J2EE 1.4 application servers. Users can still take advantage of EJBs by following patterns highlighting the ArcGIS Java Web Services Toolkit (AgsJWS) and EJB3)
• Sun Solaris 9 (with the exception of the ArcSDE technology component)

ArcGIS Mobile 9.3.1 is the last version to support:

• Windows CE .NET platform (including Windows CE .NET 4.2 and 5.0)

The ArcGIS 9.4 Platform (all of the ArcGIS products) is the last version to support:

• Sun Solaris (with the exception of the ArcSDE technology component)

ArcGIS Desktop 9.4 will be the last version to support:

• Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) (as Microsoft no longer promotes or updates VBA)

ArcInfo Workstation 9.4:

• ArcInfo Workstation will be decoupled from ArcGIS Desktop 9.4
• Windows 7 as the last expected Windows platform upgrade
• Support for connecting to ArcSDE

ArcIMS 9.4 is the last version to support:

• ArcIMS Metadata Server (replacing it with search technology in the ArcGIS Geoportal Extension 9.3.1, and in ArcGIS Server 9.4)

For the next major release after ArcGIS 9.4 (maybe 9.5 or 10.0):

• The last planned release for ArcInfo Workstation on Windows (which will be the last supported platforms)
• The last planned release for ArcIMS on Windows and Linux (which will be the last supported platforms)

Holes in ArcGIS Polygons from AutoCAD

It remained a mystery to me how Polygons can be exported from CAD to ArcGIS with holes (or donuts, if you prefer to call it so) until recently.

I read in the GIS CAD Interoperability blog that when ArcGIS encouters a block, it considers all the objects inside it to create a multipart object (that is multipart polygon, multipart polyline or multipoint) which is exactly how ArcGIS stores its polygons with holes. 

That means that to create a polygon with hole in AutoCAD you only need to select the polygons creating the polygon and its holes and make a block, this will tell the ArcGIS when importing CAD data that it is a single object with multipart geometry.