2018 ESRI User Conference

The 2018 ESRI User Conference is here!  For those of you that will be attending this week, I found a few sessions in the agenda that might be interesting:

ArcGIS Urban: An Introduction
8:30-9:30am Tues Room 16A | 1-2pm Thurs Room 17A
“Around the world, organizations use GIS to visualize the built environment, make smarter plans, engage stakeholders, and foster vibrant communities. Government leaders, partners, and citizens increasingly expect engaging online maps of their community that convey planning information in an easy to understand way. Attend this session for an overview of ArcGIS Urban, an upcoming initiative to transform how we orchestrate city development through web-based and desktop tools to make planning more creative and more productive.”

ArcGIS Indoors: An Introduction
8:30-9:30am Tues Room 14A | 4-5pm Tues Room 16B | 8:30-9:30am Wed Room 5A
“ArcGIS Indoors is Esri’s latest product offering and is a complete system that brings The Science of Where to indoor spaces. Join the ArcGIS Indoors team for an overview of how you can take the geographic approach to problem solving inside your buildings. We’ll cover how to assemble indoor data, add business value, and share it with web and mobile clients to support a wide range of workflows. This will be followed by a brief discussion on indoor positioning, complete with context of where it can and should add value.”

ArcGIS Monitor: An Introduction
10-11am Tues Room 14A | 4-5pm Tues Room 31B
“ArcGIS Enterprise administrators require effective monitoring solutions to meet the growing demand for feature-rich, highly available and performing ArcGIS solutions. In this session, learn how to configure the newly released ArcGIS Monitor product to diagnose the root causes of typical cases, e.g. performance, uptime and infrastructure problems.”

Arcade: An Introduction
10-11am Tues Room 5B | 4-5pm Tues Room 5B
“The ArcGIS platform is learning to express itself! GIS analysts use expressions all the time to calculate field values and define content for popups and labels, but until now, ArcGIS for Desktop has spoken a different expression language than other parts of the platform, such as ArcGIS Online. Introducing Arcade — a new way to write expressions that work across the ArcGIS Platform. In this session we will investigate what Arcade is (and what it isn’t), why it was created, and how to get started putting it to use in your projects.”

Drone2Map In Action
2:30-3:30pm Wed Room 29B
“Implementing a strategy for capturing aerial imagery from drones can transform the way organizations assess, plan, and manage their land holdings or project areas. This session presents two examples of how organizations developed drone usage policies, workflows, and processes for capturing imagery; and for products, such as image mosaics and Digital Surface Models, with Esri Drone2Map software.”

ArcGIS Pro: Authoring Content to ArcGIS Enterprise
2:30-3:30pm Tues Room 17B
“Transitioning from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro includes changing your authoring workflow. This session will cover how to move from publishing GIS services from ArcMap to sharing content as layers from ArcGIS Pro. We will take a deep dive into the architecture that supports sharing and cover key concepts that differentiate authoring content in a modern GIS.”

See you at the conference!

Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas

The term “phantom island” refers to an island that appeared on historical maps (sometimes for many years) even though it doesn’t exist.  Most phantom islands emerged from the era of European sea exploration and colonization.  Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas is a project that pairs original sound recordings with 27 phantom islands.  Each of these islands are placed according to their coordinates on historical maps.  Visitors can explore these individual islands by either taking a “cruise” or by navigating with their cursor.  As one visits each island, they will hear a unique soundscape and can read about the island’s history, including the date of the island’s first and last appearance in print.  Check it out!

phantomatlas

Eruptions, Earthquakes, and Emissions

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has an interactive map for you to view a time-lapse animation of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes since 1960, and sulfer dioxide emissions from vulcanic eruptions since 1978.  As you watch the animation, you can click on the symbols to view more information about specific earthquakes or volcanic explosions. If you are interested in further exploring this data you can download the datasets in a CSV or GeoJSON file.  Check it out!

smithsonianvolcanism

The Phantom Atlas

Looking for a gift for someone who loves maps?  Take a look at The Phantom Atlas.  Long before satellites and Google, cartographers traced out maps of the world, some with errors that persisted for hundreds of years.  The Phantom Atlas compiles the greatest “myths, lies and blunders” on maps, from honest mistakes to deliberate lies.  Check out this interview with the author:

Hardcover and Kindle versions available on Amazon:

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