Geocloud: ESRI ArcGIS Online Reviewed

This is the third part in a series of articles from Georelated providing a summary of some of the major cloud mapping services, their capabilities and key differentiators. This article will examine ESRI ArcGIS Online. Previous articles in this review series:

1. Part 1 - Google Maps
   
2. Part 2 - Bing Maps
3. Part 3 - ESRI ArcGIS Online  

The articles are aimed at a technical audience of architects or developers. 

ArcGIS Online is a large collection of GIS capability and data. ArcGIS Online provides "Hosted" and "Content" web services, mobile and web application programming interfaces, web mapping explorer application for sharing and collaboration, ArcGIS integration and Excel integration. It offers broad range of capability with ESRI product suite wide integration and support for a wide range of development technologies.

Development: Web Mapping Enabling Technology - Are Flash and Silverlight dead?

This is the 4th post in the Web Mapping series examining the technology that will change the boundaries of what is possible for geospatial applications. In this post we will take a look at Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight as technology enablers for Web Mapping. The post will illustrate concerns over the future of these technologies, examine their adoption for GIS and Web Mapping and review the direction of the key technology vendors.

Technology: The rise of Globe in Web Mapping

In the last post "The Fall of the Tiled Map Image" Georelated.com provided some background on why we believe web mapping is on the cusp of a new generation moving away from the image tile map to vector mapping. In this post we will examine the potential of HTML 5 Globe Web Mapping and the changes in technology that make this possible.

Development: The Fall of the Tiled Map Image

Pregenerated tiled map images as used by Google Maps, Microsoft Bing and many GIS focused vendors has been the dominant solution GIS web mapping for solutions for many years. Pregenerated tile maps were a clever and highly successful solution to the technology limitations of the time (circa 2004) however, these limitations no longer exist. Is it time for a change of approach?

Technology: PostGIS v2.0 a game changer?

PostGIS for PostGres

For many years there has been a limited choice of geodatabases when looking for a single solution for all geodata models. Only Oracle Spatial and ESRI offered comprehensive coverage of spatial models. Oracle Spatial provided database models and algs for vector, network, raster and topology in addition to the usual database refinements and in database geocoding. ESRI offered ArcGIS Server with comprehensive support for Vector, Network and Raster models but left topology to the clients and had no offering for geocoding.Competitors such as PostGIS, MapInfo Spatialware, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL only offered support for vectors.

It seems the status quo may be about to change....