ESRI Certified ArcGIS Desktop Professional

So we have been using ESRI products for years and know them inside out, but how do we prove this to our employers and clients, like other IT professionals can do with their MCSE or CCNA certifications?

Geostatistics: which interpolation method should you use?

You have a number of observations in space, e.g. noise level, CO2 measurements, socioeconomic data by administrative units with missing data for some units, etcetera. Now you want to interpolate these measurements into a continuous surface.

Ordnance Survey background map – streamed into ArcMap

You can see your own data in ArcMap, now wouldn’t it be good to automatically have an OS map in the background,

ArcGIS issues: “The computer you chose is not a valid license server or is running an older version of the License Manager”

How to resolve this error

Ubuntu server USB backup

A geeky post: We have a small development server sitting in a corner of an office, now we need a backup solution for this server.

ESRI UK Productivity Suite and the .NET 2 framework

In this post we troubleshoot the installation of Productivity Suite 1.3.1 for ArcGIS 9.2. 

PostGIS is here!

We now have a PostgreSQL/PostGIS server! 

A quick animated map

This post shows you how to make a simple animated map using ArcGIS and Corel Photopaint (click on the map to show):

Manchester’s population in 3-d

This is a 3-D flythrough animation showing population density in Manchester. Click on the image to see the video. ( Very low-res, I don’t have space for a high-res version.)

I made this on behalf of Martin Dodge, Geographer at the University of Manchester, who submitted it to the exhibition ‘ Mapping Manchester: Cartographic Stories of the City’. The Exhibition is on at Manchester’s John Rylands Library on Deansgate until January 17 2010.

I used ArcGIS 9.2, census data and a couple of days time to create the animation. ArcGIS does a decent job for the occasional simple flythrough. If you want to do professional 3D animation, like the guys from Arup did for Manchester, you need much better resources in terms of software, data and time. (Envy!)

OS OpenSpace – OS maps in your web application

UK Ordnance Survey has excellent data, and they offer a free service that allows you to embed Ordnance Survey maps, covering the whole of Great Britain, into your web applications.

I did a quick example (click it):

So how does it compare to Google Maps?

• OS OpenSpace is a lot more detailed – it basically contains every footpath in Britain. Most useful for any outdoor activity. Compare for yourself [1]
  
• Licensing: Ordnance Survey claims ownership of any derived data you create using OpenSpace [2]. This has caused a lot of controversy, however, Google has a similar clause [3].

[1] http://wtp2.appspot.com/wheresthepath.htm
[2]http://openspace.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/openspace/developeragreement.html, clause 5.4
[3] www.google.com/accounts/TOS, clause 11