Latest Contributions by BrianBaldwin

At the Education Summit this year, @MichaelGould and I hosted a session titled ‘Demystifying Digital Twins’. The goal of the session was to discuss what digital twins are from a geospatial perspective, hear what the interests from the community have been, and to discuss the availability of resources for teaching about digital twins.   Some of the hottest topics of conversation at the session were: “What the heck is a digital twin?”, “What makes it different from a model?”, “Does it include real-time data?”, “Is it just a buzzword?” For some great articles that start to dive into this discussion/definition – please see: ASU – A Specialist Meeting on Digital Twins Workshop – Final Report: https://sgsup.asu.edu/node/9358 Geospatial Digital Twins Offer Unmatched Clarity for Complex Systems: https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/blog/geospatial-digital-twin-enhances-understanding/ Digital Twins at Scale: https://www.forbes.com/sites/esri/2023/03/13/digital-twins-at-scale/ From the ASU meeting listed above, the participants found little disagreement with the following definition: A digital twin is a virtual representation of the real world, including physical objects, processes, relationships, and behaviors (Esri) As was also the case at the ASU workshop, a big part of the discussion at the Education Summit was simply that a digital twin could be a lot of different things. A digital twin for Syracuse NY will differ a great deal from one for Singapore. The question for us was: For any city or location… what is the technology that students can learn about that supports the vision for building a digital twin? The goal of this post is not to dive into the definition of a digital twin – but to help those that are interested in teaching about digital twins – understand where they can get started. Not to replicate work that has already been done – here is a great summary of the technology that can be used to support various aspects of a digital twin: Esri Digital Twin Technology and Resources: https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/media/brochures/digital-twin-technology-resource.pdf The aim of the following resources is to provide a list of lessons, training, and labs. All of this content is broken down into a digital twin framework and linked to in the appropriate ‘bucket’. Data Capture: the creation of an accurate geospatial model or foundation Integration: combining information from multiple data sources and sensor networks Real time & Visualization: presenting information visually Analysis & prediction: using traditional statistics, spatial statistics, and GeoAI to interrogate the data Sharing & collaboration: building applications and tools to operationalize the resulting information Data Capture Extract 3D buildings from Lidar: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/extract-3d-buildings-from-lidar-data/ This lesson starts with lidar and building footprints (both data sets are pretty easy to come by for most locales) Construct realistic buildings with multipatch editing: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/construct-realistic-buildings-with-multipatch-editing/ This lesson walks through a process of building multi-patch/3D buildings. This is a more manual workflow – but provides some good tips/tricks if students want to ‘skin’ buildings Reality mapping with ArcGIS: https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/5ee00f8fefb9bc0b7003ae36/reality-mapping-using-arcgis/ Includes getting started lessons for SiteScan and Drone2Map Integration Create a data pipeline: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/data-pipelines/latest/get-started/create-a-pipeline.htm Data Pipelines is a new functionality that just landed in ArcGIS Online (spring 2023). It provides a great way to teach about static or real-time data ingestion ArcGIS Arcade Fundamentals: https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/60353c60303e2a7692f9da01/arcgis-arcade-fundamentals/ Arcade provides a really nice way to ‘merge/join’ data from multiple datasets Real time & Visualization Living Atlas: https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/ I like this because it provides a pretty ‘low bar’ for getting started with some basic real-time feeds. Students can easily search for data of interest and add it into a map/etc. Advanced formatting: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-advanced-formatting-in-arcgis-dashboards/ This is a good one as well – a bit more involved – but shows some of the power of real-time alerting and also combines power outage data (very relevant) Analysis & prediction Climate proof a neighborhood: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/climate-proof-a-neighborhood-with-arcgis-urban/ This has a nice lesson that takes you through getting a model setup in ArcGIS Urban. This could hopefully show students what the data needs are for building a local dataset. Performing Sales Data Analysis with ArcGIS Insights Online: https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/6448298a821bdb2fe8bc3385/performing-sales-data-analysis-with-arcgis-insights-online/ This lesson could have also been added to the ‘sharing’ section – but the emphasis on explorational data analysis is what encouraged me to include it here. Sharing & collaboration Make a dashboard to monitor wildfires: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/make-a-dashboard-to-monitor-wildfires/ This lesson is only 20 min. long – and I think it’s a great one. It could easily be expanded upon with other data feeds, etc. Share decision-ready data: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/share-decision-ready-data/ This lessons explores the use of ArcGIS Hub to share data and work with a local community Conclusion I am sure I missed a lot. If there are additional lessons or resources that you are using to teach about digital twins, please let us know! Please provide additional resources in the comments below. ... View more

The latest update of ArcGIS Online just went live last week and there are many blogs related to the update. If you want to read about all of the details, I highly recommend the ‘What’s New’ blog by Bernie. The help documentation also includes a full list of the new functionality that can be found here: What’s New - ArcGIS Online Help  The goal of this short blog is to dive into a couple of the updates that I found to be the most relevant for the education community. The topics I am going to review include: Administration – delete users, review storage, and accessibility improvements Data Pipelines – new data ‘magic wand’ tool for ArcGIS Online Raster Analysis – raster functions in MapViewer Administration The latest release includes a couple of enhancements that should help out administrators, specifically related to deleting users, reviewing storage, and accessibility. Related to user deletion, there are now tools built into the member administration panel that allow for transferring content and managing group membership, which were two of the sticking points that would prevent user deletion. Also, if a user has licenses, they will simply be removed when they are deleted (the licenses will be freed up).     Each ArcGIS Online organization comes with a Standard Feature Data Store by default. This storage is capped at 500GB and some very active organizations are starting to fill up that space. Under the Overview page, the % of storage used is now displayed, and you have the ability to click on ‘Feature Data Store’ to generate an item report.     Lastly, a number of accessibility enhancements were added to Instant Apps and ArcGIS Dashboards to better support screen readers and keyboard shortcuts. Data Pipelines As I have mentioned many times – a modern GIS is about data as services. While this might be true, the ability to work directly with services and create real-time/synced data feeds still requires an ability to work with APIs and scripts. The alternative is to download snapshots of data from an open data website and then republish it. For making this workflow so much more accessible, this is the update that I am the most excited about. Basically, Data Pipelines is a magic wand that helps you pull 3rd party data into ArcGIS Online. The full details can be found on the blog here: Introducing Data Pipelines The short video that I included here, shows how I used an API from the NYC Open Data website, to generate a feature layer of 311 calls. After generating the feature, I could then create a separate Data Pipeline to provide updates to the service. Users can also share their Data Pipeline items with other users, modify them, etc. Raster analysis in the map viewer Lastly, this latest update of ArcGIS Online brings raster functions to the map viewer, in addition to the existing 24 analysis tools. There are 155 raster functions to choose from, and even more when using the raster function templates.   Additionally, there is a new workflow available to work with the raster function editor to create raster function templates as an item in ArcGIS Online.  A new dimension slider tool has also been included for those working with multidimensional data, allowing for improved visualization and animation capabilities. To learn more about these updates, visit the blog post What’s New in ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online. Close As always - if you have any questions or thoughts on the updates, please let us know! I for one would love to see some new 'Data Pipeline' items start appearing in ArcGIS Online. ... View more