Latest Contributions by MikeWilburn

On Wednesday, November 29th, the Portland, Oregon R&D Center hosted another GeoDev Meetup, welcoming some 25 members from the local geographic developer community. This wasn't the first event of this type hosted at Esri's downtown office location (a previous meetup was held in June), nor will it be the last. On the Esri side, there was a strong showing of staff from both our Redlands headquarters and local office alike, representing technologies far across the board like our Developers Site, Runtime SDKs, and Example Apps groups. Before the night kicked off with talks, the first hour was devoted to mingling, pizza, and drinks. The event drew an audience that had a near 50/50 split to it - there were about equally as many people for whom this was their first GeoDev Meetup as there were seasoned veterans. Given the convenient mix of staff and non-staff attendees, this time offered many great opportunities to ask questions and get answers from both sides of fence! I, along with co-host Justin Colville, emceed the event. We gave an intro that included an overview of the many developer resources on the ArcGIS platform: GeoNet, DevLabs, open GitHub projects, ArcGIS Code Sharing, as well as demos of what's new on both our native and web development platforms. Mara Stoica wrapped up the opening session by showing a neat AR/VR demo developed on .NET with a private beta coming from our 3D team. Christopher Moravec engaged us with a 20min keynote talk about how he leveraged the ArcGIS Runtime to build a linear referencing and mapping app for the oil and gas industry. In the manner completely new to the domain, the app is adept at performing pipeline risk assessments and presenting the results visually. After coming back from a short break, we geared up for three Lightning Talks: 1. Baofeng Dong - Building an on-the-fly web map with Python and Leaflet Bao was the first to go and took us through an intriguing web app he built for the City of Portland's Trimet to study data patterns. It interrogated transit data to visualize where users who boarded at a particular transit stop were most likely to then disembark.  2. Paul Platosh - Facilities GIS Paul volunteered early in the night to be added to our list of talks, and we were sure glad he did. Paul showed the work he's been doing for the State of Oregon to design and develop a GIS which accommodates and manages CAD assets, including some in a unique 3D view. 3. Shad Campbell - Widgets? Shad, having driven some three hours to make the event was also a late addition as a lightning talk. He nonetheless gave an insightful overview of the way Deschutes County is using Web AppBuilder to produce their own, custom web apps for jobs like address geocoding. Before more socializing and networking to round out the evening, Al Laframboise raffled off some prizes, one of which included a registration to the 2018 DevSummit in Palm Springs! Stay tuned for future events like this one. Whether you're new to development or just to the ArcGIS platform, both, or a pro when it comes to each, our GeoDev Meetup series is sure to provide a casual and enjoyable atmosphere to network, learn, exchange ideas, and have fun! ... View more

I recently took to ArcGIS Pro to visualize and analyze the EMU clusters. Having spent most of my Desktop analysis experience in ArcMap, I was both surprised and quite pleased with what I discovered. Here are a few handy tricks I learned which can greatly aid in understanding this vast dataset a little better! As you probably already know, the EMU points are a multidimensional dataset that can be sliced in many ways, each of them offering a unique and valuable perspective on the data. One such way - and probably the most obvious - is to slice the data by depth, looking at all the EMUs that occupy the world's oceans between two depth intervals. If we do this iteratively, we can give ourselves 100 different views of the data. Doing so allows us to visualize how the prevalence of each EMU grows or shrinks as we descend deeper into the water column! ArcGIS Pro has a neat capability which allows exactly this. It's called the range slider. The range slider acts in a way that's very similar to a definition query. The main distinction? It allows its users to sidestep the multiple button clicks required to do an incremental step up or down in the result returned by the query. To enable a range for a particular dataset, first, double click on a layer from the Contents pane to expand its layer properties. Once there, click 'Range' to go to the respective pane and specify the field on which you want to enable the capability. (Note: the range slider only works on numeric fields, so if you're working with categorical data and wish to try ranges out on it, you'll first have to create a new field and assign numeric values to them.) Now, when you click on your layer which is range-enabled, the following tab appears on the ribbon interface. This allows you to further customize properties such as how many steps within the range to visualize at once, how quickly you'd like to step through the range span, and whether you'd like to view it on repeat or switch directions.  Alternatively, you can also use the vertical range slider that will appear on the right side of the map pane to achieve the same effect. Once you have this all set up, simply click the 'Play All Steps' button to animate to your heart's content!  For more on the range slider and its full capabilities, see the help topic here: Get started with the range slider—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop  To get started working with the full suite of EMU data yourself, check out the EMU open data portal here: http://esri.maps.arcgis.com/home/group.html?id=6c78a5125d3244f38d1bc732ef0ee743  And, finally, I wouldn't leave you without first sharing a simple visualization of what I've just described. Enjoy! The animation above shows the range slider and EMU data in full action and was created by using a third party application for capturing GIFs. Beginning at surface level (0m), the animation illustrates 100 distinct variations in the EMUs as they change with depth, all the way down to 5500m below the surface. ... View more