“Climate change is expected to hit developing countries the hardest. Its effects—higher temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, rising sea levels, and more frequent weather-related disasters—pose risks for agriculture, food, and water supplies” (World Bank, 2012, http://climatechange.worldbank.org/climatechange/).

“Despite projected increases in demand for water, there are still nearly one billion people without such access, and this number is growing in cities. Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of all water use, with countries increasingly tapping underground water resources that show the extraction has tripled in the last 50 years. With a corresponding 70 percent increase in the demand for food by 2050 due to population increases, the demand will lead to a 19 percent increase in the demand for agricultural water use.” (The United Nations World Water Development Report, 2012, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/water/wwap/wwdr/).

With all the increased demand, new initiatives are needed worldwide to better plan and manage water use, with technologies and investments applied to better operations. The “Save the Rain” app leverages the latest web based technologies to deliver an easy to use rainwater collection calculator. At the same time, “Save the Rain” raises the level awareness with regards to the impacts saving rainfall can make.

The “Save the Rain” app is designed with ease of use and simplicity in mind. Following a three step process, rainfall savings can be determined for any location in the world. The third step includes a summary showing the potential amounts of food that can be grown using the saved rain.

For more information, watch the Save the Rain presentation video and the How to Use Save – the – Rain video:

Here are my results:

1. New York, New York – Pop. 8,175,133 http://gis.nyc.gov/doitt/nycitymap/ (MapServer, Dojo ToolKit)

2. Los Angeles, California – Pop.3,792,621 http://lageoquest.lacity.org/Geocortex/Essentials/Viewer.aspx?Site=LAGeoQuest (ESRI WebADF)

3. Chicago, Illinois – Pop. 2,695,598 https://gisapps.cityofchicago.org/mapchicago/viewer.htm (ESRI ArcIMS)

4. Houston, Texas – Pop. 2,099,451 http://www.gims.houstontx.gov/portalWS/R.aspx?M.aspx&app=GIMS (ArcGIS Server, Silverlight)

5. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – Pop. 1,526,006 http://citymaps.phila.gov/map/default.aspx (ESRI WebADF)

6. Phoenix, Arizona – Pop. 1,445,632 http://maps.phoenix.gov/WebPMO/MapService/WebPMO.aspx (ESRI ArcIMS)

7. San Antonio, Texas- Pop. 1,327,407 https://gis.sanantonio.gov/ITSD/browsesa/index.html (ESRI ArcGIS Server, Flash)

8. San Diego, California – Pop. 1,307,402 http://files.sangis.org/interactive/viewer/viewer.asp (ESRI ArcIMS)

9. Dallas, Texas – Pop. 1,197,816 http://goo.gl/vcwSE (Unsure)

10. San Jose, California- Pop. 945,942 https://cpms.sanjoseca.gov/emap/zoom.cfm?panel=129&showWater=0 (GeoPDF)

Hmmm… It appears the US web mapping sites have the same issues as our Canadian counterpart;  cumbersome, slow and definitely lacking in functionality (for the most part).  Would you agree?  If you were responsible for delivering “mapping” technology to your tax paying citizens, realtors, and land developers, what would you chose to deliver?

Toronto Ontario -pop.  5,113,149  http://map.toronto.ca/imapit/iMapIt.jsp?app=TOMaps

Montreal, Quebec – pop. 3,635,571  http://www.navurb.com/nu_inter/index.html

Vancouver, British Columbia – pop. 2,116,581 http://vanmapp.vancouver.ca/pubvanmap_net/default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Ottawa, Ontario – pop. 1,130,761 http://apps104.ottawa.ca/emap/

Calgary, Alberta – pop. 1,079,310 http://calgary.ca/fsmap/

Edmonton, Alberta – pop. 1,034,945 http://www.edmonton.ca/for_residents/neighbourhoods/neighbourhood-maps.aspx

Quebec City, Quebec – pop. 715,515 http://carte.ville.quebec.qc.ca/carteinteractive/

Winnipeg, Manitoba – pop. 694,668 http://map2.winnipeg.ca/iMaps/Main.aspx

Hamilton, Ontario – pop. 692,911 http://map.hamilton.ca/interactivemaps/framesetup.asp

London, Ontario – pop. 457,720 http://goo.gl/XVAWD

Hmmm… I agree.  Cumbersome, slow and definitely lacking in functionality (for the most part).  Would you agree?  If you were responsible for delivering “mapping” technology to your tax paying citizens, realtors, and land developers, what would you chose to deliver?

Day 1

To tell you the truth, the highlight of  Day 1 at the ESRI 2011 DevSummit was the Fat Tire Beer dispensed by Dave Bouwman and the crew from DTS Agile.  OK, well seriously, I was impressed by the polished release of the ArcGIS Viewer for Microsoft Silverlight. You’re probably thinking, oh great, yet another ESRI web gis viewer. Well, this version is refined, and, unlike previous versions, this viewer comes with a Silverlight based app builder (a web based app to completely author and configure the viewer). The first thing I did when getting back to the office is installed the beta version of this viewer. Within about 15 minutes, I had a great looking, easy to use, Silverlight map consuming my own ArcGIS services (which, by the way was very cool, as all my services are UTM based, and align with ESRI’s Base Maps). Once again though, ESRI will be cutting into their business partners markets by releasing viewers with app builders.

Day 2

Perhaps the most exciting leading edge developments were announced by the ArcGIS Server Product Manager Ismael Chivite. Ismael states “ArcGIS Server 10.1 is a better 10.0.” Well, I suppose that is a valid statement. ArcGIS Server 10.1 appears to be a complete re and re. New server architecture (native 64bit, all http, no SOM/SOC) boasts 30% performance gains for dynamic map services, not to mention speedy geoprocessing services and queries. ESRI’s good ‘ol web based drive time demo was incredible using ArcGIS Server 10.1. The drive time polygons were rendered in almost real time, as a user moved to different locations on the map. Quite impressive indeed.  I am personally looking forward to simplifying our 12 server SOM/SOC/WebADF GIS architecture!

On a fun note (there were definitely a few of these at the conference), ESRI’s Silverlight guru Morten Neilson gave a fantastic minority report type Kinect/ArcGIS demo.  Much more polished than his original Kinect hacks.

One other interesting development was the concept of publishing your data (cache/dynamic) to be hosted by ESRI’s ArcGIS Server cloud. Not sure of the costs for this as of yet, however, I am hoping this development will make web GIS hosting affordable for the small guys out there that cannot necessarily afford the architecture needed.

Oh, and for you command line SDE adminstrators out there, you will now be able to execute those wonderfule commands via ArcCatalog (no more -o!).

Day 3

Day 3 kicked off with an informative Keynote on everything mobile. The Keynote was delivered by Michael King from Gartner Research. In a nutshell, “70% of interaction with family/world/office will be over a mobile device in three years”, and ” by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PC’s”, and “always add this when creating a mobile app – button that takes you home”, and on the HTML5 front “…you will still need thick client apps because the standards boards move too slowly.”

Speaking of HTML5, I sat in on the Advanced Development with ArcGIS API for JavaScript. The session was well hosted by Jeremy Bartley and Kelly Hutchins. What was interesting was, that this session was primarily focused on the mobile capabilities of the JavaScript API. The various JavaScript mobile frameworks (Dojox.mobile, jquery mobile, Sencha) were discussed, and, some demoed. Jeremy was sure to emphasize “performance of the JavaScript API on mobile devices would not be a problem.” HTML5 features demoed included:

The drag and drop concept was shown by simply dragging a spreadsheet, GeoRSS feed URL, and image file right on to the map canvas. The map then automatically rendered the data. A few cheers were initiated by this demo. !!Update!! Source code now available here

Another session that never promises to disappoint was the Latest innovations from the Esri Applications Prototype Lab. Some great tech was demoed including everything from dynamic downloads of OpenStreetMap data to brilliant emergency evacuation response maps to iPhone Flick and Wave to switch base maps to Augmented reality via a web browser and web camera.

By the way, the user presentations this year were great as well. Sat in on:

The Making Apps that Don’t Suck: UX Basics for GeoNerds was a well delivered session that I would reccomend taking in here.

All in all, ESRI delivered yet another great developer summit. The event was very well managed; everything from the food to the party was top notch. If you haven’t attended one before, I definitely recommend doing so!

The Apps for Development Competition aims to bring together the best ideas from both the software developer and the development practitioner communities to create innovative apps using World Bank data.

Apps are judged on the following criteria:

Quality of the Idea – Including creativity and originality
Implementation of the Idea – Including user experience, design, and performance
Potential Impact on the Competition Objectives – Which are 1) raising awareness of, or 2) making progress toward achieving at least one MDG

Take a look at my entry here:

Rainfall Saving Calculator

Don’t forget to give it a vote!

ArcCatalog is a great tool for taking a quick look at the health of your ArcGIS Server however, one annoying feature is that every time the server restarts, the statistics are reset. So, I whipped up a little C# ArcObjects based app to go through and poll my map services every couple of minutes. The results are written to an Oracle table. This allows me to use any reporting tool to analyze the results. I actually use Windows Task Scheduler to just run the exe every couple of minutes indefinitely.

Here is a snippet of the few lines of code used to perform this logging:


string[] sServer = new string[4] { "server1", "server2", "server3", "server4" }; //add all of your SOM's here
tring sType = "MapServer";
string[] sService = new string[21] {"mapservice1", "mapservice2", "mapservice3"}; //add all of your map services here

GISServerConnection pGISServerConnection = null;
pGISServerConnection = new GISServerConnectionClass();

It’s not pretty, but it works…Give it a try. I’m sure you will be surprised by the results!

I got to thinking, the resulting cache files are just plain old jpg files, so why not just edit them in place. In comes Irfanview. For those of you who don’t know, Irfanview is a fabulous image viewer/editor/convertor/etc. And, Irfanview runs well in batch mode.

The first thing I needed to do was, get a text file representing the list of images I wanted to manipulate. I used the good old Bill Gates DOS prompt (cmd.exe) to output the directory and file structure of the ArcGIS cache to a text file: dir /s /b >filelist.txt.

I then used Irfanview’s batch mode to load the text file I created.

I decided to re-save all of the images to the original locations and overwrite the originals.  I set the JPG compression rate and let ‘er rip.  The process completed 48 hours later, and my new ArcGIS Server cache was only 30GB, on fifth the original size.  Smaller images means faster maps.

This whole exercise got me to thinking.  Why not use the same process to lighten up/sharpen/add an annoying watermark/etc. to the map cache without having to regenerate the cache.  Thanks to Irfanview, this is possible.

Capture rain from rooftop

I have just created another fun mashup that uses Google Maps API and the ArcGIS Server JavaScript API to dynamically calculate how much water you could capture from the rain on your rooftop.  Google Maps is used to draw a polygon, then the centroid is fed into ArcGIS Server to retrieve the mean annual rainfall for your area.  The rest is history…

Check it out here: Capture Rainfall