Author Archives: socalgovgis - Michael Carson

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About socalgovgis - Michael Carson

Michael Carson, GIS Manager (retired) for the City of Burbank and President of Southern California Government GIS User Group. Currently teaching GIS at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita.

OpenStreetMap Mapathon

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Hi SoCalGIS group,

We’re reaching out to you and your organization about an upcoming mapathon Saturday April 2nd (http://meetu.ps/2Wjm0m) at the LA Times in downtown LA to get people together to edit OpenStreetMap and import all the buildings in the City of Los Angeles!

This is part of a larger effort to import all 3 million buildings in Los Angeles County using open data from the LARIAC (Los Angeles Region Imagery Acquisition Consortium) Program and the L.A. County Assessor. The import will improve Southern California’s maps by adding building shapes and data on heights, elevation, general use, year built, and the number of residential units. Continue reading →

USGS Crowd-Sourced Structures Data Webinar

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This is a reminder that U.S. Geological Survey is hosting a webinar next week on our Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) program. VGI provides an editing environment that allows interested persons to add, delete, and modify certain structures in the USGS structures database. The online VGI editor is based on the popular Open Street Map interface and anyone who is interested can sign up for an account to help us update structures and improve the quality of our data for future release to the public.

Structure types available for editing include schools, colleges/universities, fire/EMS stations, police stations, correctional facilities, state capitol buildings, hospitals, ambulance services, cemeteries, and post offices. Continue reading →

Find Your Shamrock Shake

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St. Patrick’s Day marks the peak of a seasonal event celebrated with cult-like intensity by its followers: the appearance of the McDonald’s Shamrock Shake.

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The Shamrock Shake is available in the US, Canada, and Ireland from February to mid or late March. It is up to the franchise owner if they want to offer the beverage. This turns the US (and parts of Canada, and Ireland) into a frosty green patchwork of have and have-nots. Continue reading →

ArcGIS Pro Licensing: Back to the Future

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Remember Arc/Info and coverages?  Coverages were just features stored as files in a directory.  Then along came ArcView with data stored in shapefiles, which was different.  Then later ArcMap with the ability to store GIS data in Microsoft Access or an Enterprise Database like Oracle or SQL Server.  Then came the File based Geodatabase, which was … dejavu … features stored as files in a directory.

Remember ArcView 1, 2, and 3.x?  You saved your data view and multiple layouts to a project file (.APR file).  Then later with ArcMap you saved your data view and one layout to an .MXD file.  Then came ArcGIS Pro with … you guessed it … a .APRX project file to store all your work.

What’s next?  When ArcGIS Pro first was released, you had to have a named user account in ArcGIS Online tied to an ArcPro license to use it.  At version 1.2, ArcGIS Pro licensing now has more options.  ESRI added licenseing the “old way”, with concurrent use and single use licensing options.  For concurrent use licensing, you will need the 10.4 version of the License Manager running on a server like you do right now for your concurrent use ArcGIS Desktop licenses.

For more info on this, click here and a short video here.