ArcGIS Online Terms of Service, Notes

With the plethora of cloud services being offered these days for hosting and analyzing geospatial data, it is important to know what we're agreeing to.  Unfortunately "the fine print" is still relatively dense.    With ArcGIS.com (ArcGIS Online) opening up their "subscription" service level to their higher ed site license clients, and more of our clients interested in hosting their research, I decided it was time to take another look at the fine print.

Here are some of the main points I took from the License Agreement (E204 06/24/2012) ... you'll want to focus on Addendum 3 (E300-3) which covers Online Services.  These notes should not be taken as legal advice.  I would recommend you check out the license agreement yourself at http://www.esri.com/legal/software-license

Good Stuff

1. Intellectual property -- it looks like Esri doesn't take ownership of any content.  It remains property of the licensee, the university in this case, and Esri only accesses for purposes of providing the service.
2. Common sense: If you share your data or grant others access to edit it, they might use it or might alter your service.  You may want to adopt your own use restrictions, published alongside your data.
3. After the license is terminated (e.g., if the university decided to stop our relationship with Esri, which would be a big deal) the licensee is granted a period of 30 days to retrieve their content -- after which Esri has no further obligations.

Bad Not Good Stuff

1. The licensee (the university) has a limited amount of service credits.  Many of the functions of the subscription (e.g., tile caching and hosting) cost "service credits".  Once we approach 75% of credits consumed we will be notified.  Once our credits are used our subscription services will be suspended until we renew our credits.  For that reason the administrator (me) will be extra careful about who I grant access to use functions that consume credits.
2. If you are using an evaluation subscription you must make sure to export your content before the evaluation ends, or it will be permanently lost.

pgAgent Stumbling Blocks

In addition to doing scheduled backups from Postgres, we've also needed to load nightly dumps sent via scp to our database server's filesystem.  I finally got pgAgent working, but it wasn't without much consternation.  If you need to do this sort of thing on Windows, I'd recommend using Task Scheduler and a batch file if pgdump will work (though it likely won't if the file is coming from Oracle), or Task Scheduler with pgsql if it won't.  If you need to use pgAgent, here are some stumbling blocks that I found:

good support doc here: http://www.pgadmin.org/docs/1.8/pgagent-install.html

• add pgpass.conf to C:\Users\postgres\AppData\Roaming\postgresql
• should be localhost:5432:*:postgres:PASSWORD 
• (note, this is not under the default user, it's the "postgres" user on your system) 
• may also need the following in C:\Program Files (x86)\PostgreSQL\9.0\data\pg_hba.conf (but don't think so) 
• local all all trust
• host all all XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/32 trust 
• reload configuration *running as admin* 
• install pgAgent via application/stackbuilder (*run as admin*) 
• make your steps ignore error, for some reason they error even if they complete successfully and stall subsequent steps

NOAA/NCDC CLIMAPS

National Climatic Data Center's Climate Maps of the United States database offers polygon data for many popular climate variables.  We would like to use this data for preliminary visualizations on bridge decay research -- the primary benefit to this data being its simplicity (it's already averaged by day/year over a 40 year period), national continuity, and file format (shapefile).

However we encountered two issues with the data.

Issue #1: it's based on a funky datum "GCS_NAD_1927_CGQ77", which addresses some issues in Quebec with NAD 1927.

We were able to side-step this issue by just re-defining the projection as something more common ... in our case we just went right to WGS 1984, since we wanted to view in Google Earth, and since a rough visualization was our immediate purpose.  I suppose NAD 1927 would have been fine, since we weren't doing anything with Quebec.  BTW, there are no readily available transformations of the  GCS_NAD_1927_CGQ77 datum.

Issue #2: the data is not continuous or even numerical

Values are expressed as "0 - 5 in", so we have no way of redefining what values are grouped in what colors, and since it's polygon data we also lose the ability to redefine spatial grouping based on new intervals.  That's not a big problem for this first rough visualization, but we will need to find more fine-grained data for subsequent analysis.  We'll probably end up taking point data from other NCDC sources and doing our own interpolation and temporal reduction.

ArcReader 9/ArcGIS 10 Conflict

I've seen a few folks who've had trouble installing ArcGIS 10 because they've been unable to uninstall ArcReader (usually version 9.x).

The best way I've found to do this is to download the ArcReader installer from here.  Run the installer and try to uninstall.

If you're unable to do that (sometimes you'll need to force quit and restart) you may need to run an install, but uncheck the ArcReader feature.  This gets rid of some hanging installer memory.

Then try to run a repair (restart if necessary) and start the downloaded ArcReader installer ... select repair when prompted.

After you've repaired you should be able to uninstall correctly.

If that doesn't work, you're stuck deleting all ArcReader files and ArcReader (and ArcGIS/Esri) references in the registry using regedit.

Delaware GIS 2012

The Delaware 2012 GIS conference was held yesterday.  It was a great opportunity to meet and learn from our colleagues in Delaware and the region.  I presented on Geospatial Data in Cloud and High Performance Environments, which you can access here: http://udel.academia.edu/BenjaminMearns/Talks/81729/Geospatial_Data_in_Cloud_and_High_Performance_Computing_Environments

Lewes Wind Turbine

I took a trip to the UD Lewes Wind Turbine on Thurdsday ... I posted a few paragraphs and a VIDEO to Doug White's Blog

ENVI/IDL and ArcGIS/Python integration

I occasionally answer questions on ENVI/IDL and ArcGIS/Python integration.

ENVI functions are available as "tools" through the ArcGIS GUI toolbox:

"With ENVI 4.8, ENVI’s scientifically proven image analysis capabilities will be available as discrete tools in the ArcGIS toolbox and accessible directly from ArcGIS desktop and server environments. Upon installation of ENVI products, a selection of powerful image processing and analysis tools will be available within ArcGIS."

A list of those tools is here (in the context of licensing, but just ignore that): http://www.ittvis.com/ProductsServices/ENVI/ToolsLicensing.aspx 




IDL can also be accessed for extension of ENVI/IDL functionality:

"developing customized ENVI tools can be done using simple IDL scripting and wrappers that facilitate the integration of ENVI tools with the ArcGIS platform."

Here's a whitepaper: http://www.ittvis.com/portals/0/whitepapers/ENVI_Tools_ArcGIS_Server_WP_Tutorial.pdf