@COSPNWGuy Unfortunately, there is nothing planned for this year's UC (2024). We hope to have something specific planned for next Esri UC 2025. We will mention upcoming changes during our technical workshop about coordinate systems and transformations. Look for What You Need to Know About Coordinate Systems and Transformations session on Tuesday, Jul 16, at 1PM in Room 10 (SDCC).
Meanwhile, if you want to talk about NSRS 2022 in detail, you are very much welcome to stop by the Coordinate Systems kiosk at ArcGIS Pro area in Esri Showcase. There may also be someone from the National Geodetic Survey at the NOAA kiosk at the Federal Agency area in Esri Showcase.
I especially appreciated the sentiments expressed at the end of the article about publishing data online in it's appropriate coordinate system rather than letting it get converted to WGS84 web aux.
Consider also adding at the end of the article a set of links to the AGOL and ArcGIS Pro support articles that detail the things a person needs to do to preserve their coordinate system when sharing layers, including presetting potential transformations. Also show where a viewer can identify the published layer's coordinate system and any preset transformations.
The article puts a lot of emphasis on documenting and displaying this kind of information, but once inside the AGOL system it gets pretty buried, forcing a user to dig into REST links, click admin, click JSON, squint at the tiny code and try to dig out the details. This experience could be vastly improved!
While we are on the subject, online maps having their spatial reference controlled by the basemap layer needs to die already. Your users want to publish and maintain maps in their preferred coordinate system AND use your fantastic AGOL basemap collection. And they should be able to. Easily. Just do it already (pretty please <3)
"The article puts a lot of emphasis on documenting and displaying this kind of information, but once inside the AGOL system it gets pretty buried, forcing a user to dig into REST links, click admin, click JSON, squint at the tiny code and try to dig out the details. This experience could be vastly improved!
While we are on the subject, online maps having their spatial reference controlled by the basemap layer needs to die already. Your users want to publish and maintain maps in their preferred coordinate system AND use your fantastic AGOL basemap collection. And they should be able to. Easily. Just do it already (pretty please <3)"
This belongs on IDEAS, re: AGOL burying PCS/GCS and the mere fact that basemap controls spatial reference. This has to go away. There is no reason that augmented or autonomous data fed into a hosted feature layer has to be shifted or not twice up and down thru the cycle just because the controlling nature of basemap PCS definition. Currently this is crushing persons who think Survey123/QuickCapture handles GCS like FieldMaps. Datum handling needs to be fixed BEFORE 2025 or there is not a hope in heaven that folks can even do the right thing when NAD83/NAVD88 is abandoned.
One thing a GIS professional can do is to set control at their location using OPUS Share. Only then can one fight the datum shifts (shi&6) that is found throughout our industry. If a person submits that measurement not only can one determine shifts today, but after 2025 that coordinate will move and one can verify the future.
Projections are easy. Datums are hard - and it will get worse before it gets better (Part of the quote from Michael Dennis, NGS Geodesist).
Preparing for 2025. The latest I have heard, and please if anyone has more information on this topic of release correct me, is this time next year (2025.5) we should start seeing a release of 2022, and by 2026.5, we may be using the new datums.
As a GIS person, I focus more on the field procedures, and transformations on middleware (Trimble Mobile Manager, Leica Zeno Connect, EOS Pro Utility) to manage GNSS coordinate systems providing NMEA coordinates that are consumed in the big 3 (Field Maps, Quick Capture, Survey 123). We have folks evaluating Galileo HAS in Alaska and are finding this to be a game changer due to the limitation in ESRI mobile software to handle post-processing (PPK) and therefore beholden to high precision augmentation from space and UHF radio broadcast. Only one vendor, EOS has taken the bold move in providing access to this signal (over Galileo/GPS constellation), but as Dave Doyle (retired chief Geodesist) has predicted the coming of 5cm in the field with certain hardware is coming (as of now its 20cm). So as precisions continue to increase to "see" what we anticipate changes in a 5 year cycle of geocentric datum changes, I hope we can continue to keep channels open (like this BLOG) in preparing for this change.
What keeps me up at night is not how PRO will handle such changes (thanks to Melita and her teams attention to these matters), but from a field perspective. I'm also confident the big Geospatial product players (Blue Marble, Trimble, Leica, Topcon, EOS) can handle their desktop Post Processing transformers, for example when submitting data to NGS (CORS) and returning a 2022 reference frame coordinate. I'm looking at how can a small organization (e.g a National Park with a GIS specialist) can keep up with creating basemaps and storing basemaps to use in 5 year cycles to keep "up" with models of tectonic movement and the ease someone consuming AGOL services can see said CS of online data. Spatial reference information with online storage of web layers is maddengly difficult to find (begs the pun "Where is the Where of my data"). Coordinate systems rule GIS, and are frequently given short change in this recognition, but 2022 will, I hope bubble up this conversation to the top of threads. Like to see better exposure of CS online, and a concerted movement away from the basemap controlling the CS of GNSS data.
My 2c.
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Bojan is a Senior Software Development Engineer on the Esri Projection Engine team, where he works with map projections, coordinate systems and transformations. He is the co-author of several map projections for world maps and an enthusiastic lover of the math behind maps.
