Last week I attended the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) Annual User Conference in San Diego, California. This year’s conference on The Science of Where started out with a keynote address titled “GIS – Inspiring What’s Next” given by Jack Dangermond, the president of Esri. Here are five things I learned at this year’s user conference.

1. ArcMap: While Esri is transitioning their ArcGIS Desktop software focus from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro, ArcMap will continue to be supported for many years to come! This news at the plenary session was met with a round of applause, mine included. It’s important for us at NYU to embrace the future of GIS technology in ArcGIS Pro, but it’s equally important for us to be comfortable with some of the older GIS technology which is still widely used.
2. ArcGIS Hub: Billed as a new way to transform community engagement and collaboration, the ArcGIS Hub allows for two-way engagement with an ArcGIS Organization and the community it serves. WIth ArcGIS Hub you can create maps and data visualizations that can be easily shared or collaborated on with members in the community. Plus, this platform was worked on in part by an NYU alumni!
3. Living Atlas of the World: The ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World is a collection of geographic data and is constantly changing and growing, with more than 7,000 items currently. It is composed of Esri content, Esri partner content, and User content and contains data layers, pre-made maps, and applications that you can use to build up your own web maps and applications. Check the Living Atlas Blog (yes, this is a thing!) for more useful content and information.
4. Esri Vector Basemaps: So it’s not completely “new” news that Esri has offered users Vector Basemaps, but it’s worth mentioning how this change in basemap offerings can affect your maps. Vector basemaps use vector tiles that render on the client side rather than the Esri server side, unlike raster tiles. This change in rendering speeds up the process and makes the basemap image more clear. Additionally, you can create your own vector tile layers and customize map styles for use in your ArcGIS Online maps and apps. Vector Basemaps are currently on Version 2.
5. OpenStreetMap Vector Basemap: And last, but certainly not least, Esri has announced that this summer it will release a beta version of OpenStreetMap Vector Basemap. You may be familiar with the raster OpenStreetMap basemap that is currently available on ArcGIS Online, but the new vector basemap option will be updated with the latest OSM data and Esri will continue to update this vector basemap frequently. Best yet, in keeping with the open data model, the Esri OpenStreetMap Vector Basemap will be freely available to any user, so this basemap will not be limited to ArcGIS Organization members!

1. Open source development projects are egalitarian in many interesting and complex ways. Several sessions emerged on the idea of governance within the GeoBlacklight community. How do we reach consensus on design needs and priorities? Which voices tend to influence the direction of software development? How do people who don’t have a deep skill set in developing and coding contribute? Should there be a standard of conduct, at least, to which the community ascribes? These are questions that just about every open source project deals with. At Geo4Lib, we discussed these questions and more in several sessions. Jack Reed shared a few resources, including Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community, and the “Request for Change” process that the ember.js project uses to push ideas and work forward. He also shared some critical philosophical concepts of the Blacklight project that are helpful, such as the idea of semantic versioning and developing without pushing breaking changes. I was on an information panel that also shared some basics of contributing to the community, but I plan on blogging about this in more depth on my personal GitHub pages later. Generally speaking, the GeoBlacklight project has a fairly well-established set of norms for apportioning work and developing, but these can continue to be crystallized moving forward so that even more people contribute work and ideas.
2. The community continues to develop support for index map discovery interfaces that are intuitive and visually compelling. Over the 2018 Winter Community Sprint, Jack Reed, Eric Larson, and others worked to further bolster OpenIndexMaps, a GeoJSON-based specification that allows for fluid integration with IIIF and offers seamless discovery of individual maps within a series. Stanford has already released a prototype, and other institutions plan to follow suit in their own instances of GeoBlacklight. At NYU, we recently added several index maps for large sets (see example) into our discovery interface, and we will make it a project this spring to convert these view to the new specification. It’s on the to-do list.
3. You can use GIS software and tools to generate operable GeoBlacklight metadata. And I’m not talking about ArcCatalog, or other traditional metadata editors. Tom Brittenacher at UC Santa Barbara presented some great strategies for using the fishnet tool in ArcMap to overlay vector gridlines that can be used for metadata creation. Kudos to Tom for modeling this method for making metadata authoring more efficient.
4. San Francisco is a city that has been mapped and contested vis-a-vis the construction of maps for hundreds of years. This was the main idea of David Rumsey’s plenary talk on the second day of the conference. David Rumsey had given an earlier version of this excellent synthesis at the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art’s Public Knowledge series. Rumsey showed numerous examples from his map collection of ways in which ideas about space, access, and communal identity have been drawn onto maps of San Francisco over time.
5. Darren Hardy planned a great conference, and he will be missed by colleagues at Stanford University and beyond. Although we didn’t technically learn this at Geo4Lib Camp, Darren Hardy has recently announced that he is leaving Stanford to take another position in the private sector in Colorado. Darren is one of the original developers on the GeoBlacklight project, and his work in organizing the conference for the past three years and on software development within the community has been significant. We hope that Darren will remain in contact with our project!

Here are five things we learned at PLOTCON:

1. Good Viz Works.
2. We can try to illustrate uncertainty in the data using animation.
3. We should use perceptually uniform colormaps.
4. When to use what visualization, with examples.
5. “Tip of the iceberg” of HIPAA violations: we know about a lot less than is actually happening.

(Links are to the actual talks, highly recommended to watch at 1.5 speed: Settings –> Speed)

The complete list of talks can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/user/plotlygraph

The slides will be available on Slideshare early next week.

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Bonus takeaways from PLOTCON:

Data Management:

• How to build a modern Data Catalog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFC3k1Y95f4
  • A data catalog provides context to help data scientists and other data consumers find a relevant dataset, determine if it can be trusted, understand what it means, and utilize it to make better products and better decisions.
• A way to keep data and code together with your publication via Authorea https://youtu.be/xJLE7Mruiqg?t=1608

GIS

• MAPD: incredibly fast interactive visualizations of billions of data points in real-time via GPUs: https://youtu.be/9z-nHmEm5JE?t=898
• Visualizing the racial divide: https://youtu.be/MmdPSgzfR5Y?t=1179
  • http://vallandingham.me/racial_divide/

R

• Excellent talk about wrangling data into shape for visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MfUCX_KpdE
• Amazing talk by Hadley Wickham (Chief Scientist at RStudio) on conceptualizing data manipulation for analysis and visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU0-NrUxRw4
• Animation within R with gganimate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y7Y1s4-VdA
• Mosaic Plots with ggmosaic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWr2JuILX74

HPC

• An interesting way to visualize performance of a program via a flame graph: https://youtu.be/0ODOZ4-U1VE?t=924 and skipping to python implementation: https://youtu.be/0ODOZ4-U1VE?t=1679

Other useful things:

• A demo of really nice features of Plotly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pjh1ThQoUs
• There’s way to put Tableau and Plotly together, although a little brute-force for now:
  • Example: http://public.tableau.com/profile/ben.jones#!/vizhome/TableauPlotlyPeaks/Globe
  • How to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyHrHxl4VbE

Here are five things we learned at the NYS Geospatial Summit:

1. From Laura Bliss, we learned that there is a long, often-hidden, history of women involved in cartography and social/political map making.
2. As Joseph Hlady noted, the advent of automated vehicles, equipped with a variety of sensors, provides a significant source of data for measuring and appraising public infrastructure.
3. Creating algorithms which are fair, accountable, and transparent is a big topic of discussion these days, as Arnaud Sahuguet argued, including within GIS communities.
4. Tomorrow’s GIS maps, particularly those related to travel and transportation, will be updated at a rate many times greater than today’s maps, with real-time collected data from sources such as vehicle-mounted lidar making for extremely detailed portraits of geospatial conditions.
5. Big data has transformed GIS just as surely as it has transformed other fields.
]]> https://data-services.hosting.nyu.edu/register-now-for-gis-day-2016-at-data-services/ Wed, 02 Nov 2016 16:40:22 +0000 http://data-services.hosting.nyu.edu/?p=663 Continue reading "Register Now for GIS Day 2016 at Data Services"]]> World GIS Day takes place on Wednesday, November 16th, and Data Services will be celebrating with a range of exciting mapping displays, our famous Augmented Reality Sandbox, and our annual mapping competition. Dust off your most cherished StoryMap, ArcGIS, QGIS, and Carto maps and get them entered in the competition so you can compete for fabulous prizes. Attend our speaker series to find out about the latest in GIS related technology and research, and browse map displays from your fellow researchers and those active in the NYC spatial research community.

GIS Day at NYU’s Data Services takes place between 12 and 5 pm in the Bobst 5th Floor Data Services/Digital Studio common area. Come join us!

To register, click here. For full details, check out the official GIS Day 2016 Data Services Site.

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