Landsat Data for the World

It’s longer than I care to admit since I learned about Landsat as an undergraduate Oceanographer. Although I didn’t use satellite imagery in my subsequent research posts I did keep coming up against the challenge of accessing detailed data in a digital form. The growth in directly accessible digital data has seen a marked jump in the UK in the last couple of years. This can only help us to further our understanding of our world and our societies.

US Geological Survey (USGS) has been working to make Landsat imagery more readily available as a global resource. Their new LandsatLook Viewer platform provides visualization and simple image processing services that cover the whole world. Open access allows anyone to browse through over 3 million+ Landsat scenes using an ArcGIS for Server application to choose location, time and image enhancement. In some locations there are over 1000 overlapping scenes available going all the way back to 1972, allowing it to be used to explore how our world is changing through time. LandsatLook also allows users to perform basic manipulations, analyse scenes, and gain a basic understanding of the value of satellite remote sensing. The same site can also be used by the GIS and science communities to quickly locate suitable scenes, obtain detailed metadata and then download scenes for detailed analysis. 

Alongside this, Esri have produced a similar website, esri.com/landsat. This site supports many Landsat image services that are free to anyone who needs to use Landsat. The services make multi-temporal and multi-spectral Landsat data accessible from within almost every computing platform, device and applications. Recent enhancements released within the ArcGIS Online Landsat Community group include better radiometric corrections and on-the-fly functions such as Tasseled Cap transform and de-striping to reduce the influence of the scanline corrector errors. For a remote sensing lay-man the description of the Tassled Cap transform was an interesting mental challenge, but I like the derivation of the name.

Esri developed these services collaboratively with the Department of Interior with the goal of making it easier for people to use Landsat data for understanding earth changes for the past 40 years. This site requires no software and processes the Landsat data dynamically in the cloud. There are some striking examples for: deforestation in Paraguay, wildfires in the Grand Canyon or urban growth on the Change Matters site with a tour function to illustrate the interpretation of the change.

 

Once I’d looked for where I live on a Landsat image, I wanted to find a UK illustration of land-use change. In contrast to the examples above, mine shows a “greening” of post-industrial land for the site of the Ravenscraig steelworks (which closed in 1992). The map panels are centred on the site with the left and centre panels showing it in 1990 when it was still operational and in 2010. The right hand panel highlights the change with the site showing as the large green area in the centre.

It would nice if the land had been reclaimed as an area of park or woodland but a quick look on ArcGIS Online shows that it languishes as a post-industrial wasteland.

It has now been earmarked for the development as a new town (http://www.ravenscraig.co.uk/index.asp.) so in a couple of decades the Landsat images will show the vegetation/land-use pattern turning full circle.

The Esri Landsat services are showing a steady growth in usage and are being incorporated directly into projects for earth monitoring. Sometimes we increase our understanding when existing data is re-examined from the perspective of a different discipline. Perhaps the wider availability of Landsat imagery will be such a catalyst for insight.

Using LocalView Fusion and ArcGIS Online Integration for Better Management of Abandoned Vehicles

Following the launch of LocalView Fusion 4.0 in the summer, I was itching to try out the new integration options between LocalView Fusion (LVF) and ArcGIS Online (AGOL). I decided to focus on a service that many councils provide on their website, that of enabling the public to report abandoned vehicles online. Up until now, it’s not been that easy for non-developers to set up a complete workflow such that any reported problems are immediately visible to the public or available for operations staff in the field to deal with. Here I want to show you this is no longer the case!

I wanted to do this without using a local install of ArcGIS for Server, so apart from my copy of ArcGIS for Desktop 10.1, everything was done online using an AGOL subscription account and our LVF 4.0 demo portal running on Amazon.

I started off by creating a new feature class for my abandoned vehicles in ArcMap. When adding fields, I made sure they matched the fields that I was using to capture details in the abandoned vehicle survey I had already set up in LVF. It’s definitely worth spending some time defining attribute domains for the fields.

As you can see below, I defined three domains in the geodatabase and specified that my fields in the abandoned vehicles feature class would adhere to them. Having a finite list of possible values for the vehicle type (car, 4x4 etc.) and yes/no/don’t know pick-lists for whether the vehicle is taxed or vandalised can make editing a lot simpler; particularly if this data is being used on a handheld device by a warden out around town in the wind and rain with thick gloves on! Using domains also removes the chance of typos or invalid values being entered.

Next, I signed into my AGOL account from within ArcMap, as shown below, and published my map as a feature service. I enabled all the editing options so I’d have full access to the data.

I then went to arcgis.com and signed into the same account. My new feature service is there and ready for use in a webmap or LVF application. All I did here was enable the ability to store attachments such as photos – you just click enable attachments, which I’d already done when I took this screenshot.

Conveniently, I already had a Report an Abandoned Vehicle survey set up in LVF. When someone reports a problem vehicle and submits their survey, they and the council receive an email with all the details reported along with a unique ID (there’s also the option to run a geoprocessing task to automate integration with CRMs etc. but I’m not using that here).

With the new integration between AGOL and LVF, I added another Survey Action to write the details collected in the survey directly into my AGOL abandoned vehicle feature service. I just needed to map the correct survey answers to the feature service fields as you can see in the screenshot below, and tick the box to also include any uploaded photos as attachments.

So with this set up, a member of the public can report an abandoned vehicle and get immediate feedback via an email, like the one you see here.

They can also view the location of it on either an AGOL web map or an LVF application as shown here.

This new integration functionality has several advantages. The likelihood of duplicate reporting is reduced since other people can immediately see the council has already been informed. Also, an abandoned vehicles officer or clean up team out in the field can easily view new problems assigned to them using the ArcGIS App for Smartphones and Tablets and can update the status of the vehicle once it has been dealt with.

I think this workflow is relevant for all sorts of reporting operations where you want to keep residents better informed whilst encouraging greater public participation in dealing with local problems. I hope my simple example has given you some ideas that you can try within your own organisation and that I’ve shown it’s quite straightforward to set up!

Using Yahoo pipes with ArcGIS Online

I recently read a blog post about using Yahoo pipes on ArcGIS online to map out Flickr photos. That was the first time I’d heard about Yahoo pipes. This got me curious about what pipes actually were. So I did a little bit of digging around, and found that they were actually a very useful set of tools. Pipes essentially enable you to ‘mash up’ and create new content dynamically over the web, akin to ArcGIS online, except with any content (including non-geographic). This is not a new concept – speak to any web developer, and they’ll tell you how they’ve been doing this for years. However, the crucial advantage that Yahoo Pipes gives us is the relatively user friendly interface that allows the user to build up these ‘pipes’. I think it’s quite comparable to the model builder interface on ArcGIS desktop, where a user can drag and drop tools to put together a single geoprocessing task.

The end products of these pipes are web services, containing simple csv files or KML/RSS feeds. These urls are dynamic, which means the contents are constantly updated. A lot of pipes are not related to any mapping content – they are merely a mash up of various RSS feeds, or an updated listing of TV programs from various websites. However, pipes can also contribute to some really good, dynamic content for ArcGIS online. In this blog post, I’ll take you through how I created a useful pipe for News feeds from the BBC website.

There are a lot of good news feeds served up by the BBC as RSS feeds, and one such feed is the World news one. This feed has all the top headlines from around the world in an RSS feed. One of the drawbacks of having this data as an RSS feed is that we can’t put it on a map. However, we can use Yahoo pipes to do that clever bit of processing to convert it into a GeoRSS feed so that we can use it on ArcGIS online. The first step is to import our feed into the Pipe:

      

We use the text input to get the URL as text; We then supply the url to the news feed in the ‘default’ field. This gives us a link to the BBC news feed so that it can be passed into the pipe.

We then need to pass this url through a geocoder that uses the place name in the RSS feed to give it a lat and long. In this example, I use the geonames service, which is a free Global city level geocoder. In order to use that service, I just need to add a bit of text at the beginning of the url – I can use the url builder module to create my url, which then sends the information to geonames and receives a lat and long against each record.

 

We can then use the fetch feed module to bring that feed back into Yahoo Pipes, and finally use the output to generate a dynamic link to my brand new GeoRSS feed!

 

On the Yahoo pipes run page, I can see a yahoo map with my geocoded news articles:

 

To use this in ArcGIS online, all we need to do is grab the link from the ‘more options’ menu, and Right click on Get as KML, and copy the link location. If we then switch over to ArcGIS online, we can use the ‘Add layer from Web’ option to add this dynamic KML layer. If you need control of the symbology, then we can add it as a csv file. All we need to do is change the url from ‘=kml’ to ‘=csv’:

 

 

Once we hit add layer, voila! We have a dynamic GeoRSS feed on ArcGIS online (with some nice symbology to boot!):

Once it is on ArcGIS online, we can add other content (either from ArcGIS online or from your own geographic data) to add more intelligence to this webmap. This webmap will only work as long as it can establish a connection to the Yahoo Pipes service.

Related Content:

Help documentation for Yahoo Pipes - http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/docs

Tutorials - http://pipes.tigit.co.uk/

FAQ and further information - http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/docs?doc=overview

Has the LocatorHub toolbar vanished in Productivity Suite 3.0?

You may be aware that Esri UK have recently released Productivity Suite v3.0 and Crime Analyst v2.3 for ArcGIS 10.1 for Desktop.  

Productivity Suite 3.0 contains a number of bug fixes and stability improvements, and has also been streamlined based on customer feedback. As part of this streamlining, the LocatorHub toolbar has been removed along with various other features and functions that have either been superceded by core ArcGIS for Desktop capabilities, or are no longer needed (please refer to the release notes for full details).

Customers wishing to connect to their local LocatorHub services in ArcGIS 10.1 for Desktop should therefore use the Esri UK Online Services toolbar.

NB It’s important to note that you must have a full license of LocatorHub to connect in the way described below (the runtime licenses of LocatorHub included in applications like LocalView Fusion don’t allow connection via the Esri UK Online Services toolbar).

To connect to a LocatorHub service you should now use the following workflow:

•  Download the Esri UK Online Services toolbar

 

• Unpack the contents of the ZIP file to the desired location
• Double-click the add-in (ESRIUK.Services.ArcGIS.esriAddIn) to install it

• (Optional step) Login to the online services with your account details selecting Services > Account (Register for an account here: https://www.esriuk.com/products/data/online/register)

• Select Services > Configure Locators
• Select Add
• Select Local Server entering the URL of your service (e.g. http:///locatorhub/locatorhub.svc)
• Select Connect (having entered any Authentication information as required)
• Select the required Locator from the dropdown list

• Click OK
• You should now be able to use the Locator service from the Esri UK Online Services toolbar

Related Articles

http://www.esriuk.com/products/data/online/free-services

http://www.esriuk.com/products/data/online/premium-services

http://www.esriuk.com/products/data/online/more-information/faqs 

How to: Install Productivity Suite v2.0 to the All Users Profile

Here in Technical Support, a common query we often get is about Productivity Suite 2.0 and the way the software has been installed. Users may comment that they are unable to use a specific tool within the extension, whilst another user, on the same machine, can use the tool without a problem. This is because the software has only been installed to a specific User Profile, and not the All Users Profile.

This issue may be easily identified by receiving an error message that lists many .dll files as not available, e.g.:

Directory path: C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\bin
- 3dAnalystUtil.dll Version not available
- 3DSymbols.dll Version not available
- 3DSymbolsLib.dll Version not available

Etc…

The following procedure describes how to install Productivity Suite 2.0 to the All Users Profile (NB You will need to be logged in as an administrator with full admin rights to the machine):

1. Uninstall the current installation of Productivity Suite
2. Open Command Prompt and change to the directory containing the .msi installer

3.  cd C:\Temp  
   

4. Enter the following command to install Productivity Suite 2.0 to the All Users Profile:

 MSIEXEC /i ProductivitySuiteVersion.msi ALLUSERS=1 /qb  

The application should be successfully installed to the All Users Profile. Once successfully installed, the latest Service Pack should be applied, which can be downloaded from:

http://www.esriuk.com/software/arcgis/productivitysuite/download

NB This issue affects only Productivity Suite 2.0. The Productivity Suite 2.1 installer now has an option to install to either the Current User or All Users of the machine.

Related Articles

http://geoxchange.esriuk.com/journal/2012/7/13/how-to-access-the-esri-uk-product-licence-manager-for-produc.html