geographic information systems' Journal (original) (raw)

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16th July 2010

gis_novice @ 3:24pm: Near tool and Model Builder

I'm currently working on creating a model that will select the name of a species in one point shapefile, the name of the same species in another point shapefile, and then perform a near analysis to get a distance from one point to another, and do this until all of the species have been selected. I figured the Near tool would work okay for this, and on a test run it did work just fine. (I attempted to use the Point Distance tool as well, but had no way to clear my selection with that for some reason.)

However, now the Near tool seems to be broken. ArcMap generates a 9999 error and says the near fuction could not be executed. So I closed and restarted my project. Nothing. I then restarted my computer. Still nothing. I then recreated the model again and tried to run it, but it still gave me the same error. I can't find anything pertinent on ESRI's support site (how can anyone, now?), so I thought I would try here. Does anyone have any ideas why this would suddenly stop working and what I could possible do to get it working again? I'm quite new to Model Builder (and the Near tool, actually), so I'm wondering if it could just be human error. Thanks in advance!

12th March 2009

isotachthoughts @ 8:55pm: Hi all,

I know this is a longshot, and is becoming very common at this time, but it doesn't hurt to ask!
I just got let go from my job due to budget cuts. I had been working with aerial photography and orthorectification, mainly remote sensing stuff. I have a degree in both Meteorology and GIS, and graduate in Dec. of '07. If anyone knows of any good sites to look for jobs in either field, please please let me know. I know of USAjobs, and the gis jobs clearinghouse, but that is about it.

Again thanks for any help/advice/job leads that anyone can give. Oh and i am willing to travel to most anywhere in the U.S. I currently live in Texas, and will be moving back to Michigan soon if i don't find anything in a few months. But i will go most other places if an opportunity arises.

~Meghan

9th March 2009

alpinemaps @ 3:04pm: Regional GIS Manager for USMC Job Posting Please note the following specific job opportunity within the United States Marine Corps:

East Coast Regional GIS Manager

MAJOR DUTIES:
The incumbent serves as the East Coast regional Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) Manager and is directly responsible for execution and technical oversight of GIS systems, data, and services provided to all Marine Corps Installations on the East Coast, including Marine Corps Base, Camp Lejeune. The incumbent evaluates and determines geospatial data requirements for the East Coast installations, and is directly responsible for the deign and implementation of the database design schema (data model) housing the data collected. The incumbent serves as the Imagery Acquisition Officer for East Coast Installations, evaluating the requirements for resolution, scale, spectral signatures, coverage extents, and refresh cycles for imagery captures. The incumbent establishes geospatial data management policies and procedures for East Coast Marine Corps installations in accordance with the HQMC GEOFidelis Program Standards. The incumbent directly supervises the GIS data services workforce and oversees planning and management of the GIS staff, including assigning and reviewing the work.

Please review the link above for full details including details on applying. This position would be located at MCB Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

23rd February 2009

19th January 2009

emiwenis @ 4:19pm: beginner here... Hi,
my boss is busy and i'm bored and he threw ArcGIS in my lap and told me to teach myself how to use it.
I'm a geologist btw and i've never used GIS in my life (it was a completely optional geography not geology course i could have elected to take).
I'm supposed to import aerial photos we purchased from terraserve, with their respective .jgw or .bpw or .gfw world files... georef them and get them converted into state plane coordinates so i can input gps coordinates and draw lines between them.
Anybody care to help me do this? I can't figure out what the heck to do with the world files.
I'm sure I sound like I'm dumb as a doornail, but I promise I'm not, i just have absolutely NO teaching in this.
I have ArcMAP, ArcGlobe, ArcCatalog, etc.

8th December 2008

phoebebeast @ 10:27pm: ArcScene problem - any advice out there? Hi, I'm having some trouble visualizing something in ArcScene and was wondering if any of you more experienced users had some advice (I'm an MSc student and this is for my thesis). Basically, I have some points for which I've set base heights according to the frequency for which certain places were visited. I'm trying to drape a polygon over these points, I'm following the instructions in the help index but I can't seem to do it. Sorry if it sounds dumb - but I have all of the extensions, when I did the installation I had all the codes, but it doesn't appear that I'm able to make this happen. Is there some other extension that I would need in order to do this? Is there another way of doing this? I'm kind of in a rush to submit, but I really want to have something slightly sophisticated to show the frequency. If this isn't an option in ArcScene, are there any suggestions for doing something in ArcMap to highlight this? Thanks, any advice happily received!

29th November 2008

geonetworx_adm @ 3:28am: Welcome to GeoNetworx!

Dear Colleagues,

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We invite all Geo-professionals of every and any expertise and career level to actively participate in our project.

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1st August 2008

basking_lizard @ 6:05pm: georeferencing query I have some airphotos that I've been georeferencing. Now that the images are georeferenced and have been rotated accordingly, I have a lot of blank white space around the perimeters of the map layer that I don't need, or want, really, as it's overlapping and getting in the way of other layers on my map.

Is there any way I can get rid of this extra white space?

I'm using Mapinfo 9.0.2 with Discover.

thanks for any suggestions!

eta: Fixed! \o/ Thanks everyone.

13th July 2008

basking_lizard @ 5:08pm: MapInfo? hey everyone,

I've browsed through the posts a little, and I'm curious if anyone here is a MapInfo user. It's the program of choice for my employer and I've taken a 4-day intensive training course in it, but occasionally I run into snags and I thought I would see if anyone was having similar experiences. (Most of my previous experience in GIS is with ESRI programs, for the record.)

I know about (and am a member of) the MapInfo-L on Google groups, and I've asked a couple of questions there too. But more potential sources of info are always good. :)

Glad to find this comm!

8th July 2008

gueny @ 1:30pm: Filling in holes This is probably a dumb question but...

I'm trying to find a way to automate the process of getting the boundary of a feature class, so that I can use the bounding polygon as a contiguous feature with no holes. I though there was a command for this, but I can't seen to find anything. The best I can find is the xy boundaries (rectangular) of individual features.

Anybody have any ideas?

Thanks in advance

7th July 2008

17th April 2008

gis_novice @ 2:16am: Distributed Geodatabase I'm currently contracted to maintain parcel changes for a county geodatabase that is in another state. They just recently migrated to an enterprise GDB, and I'm trying to figure out the best way that I can make the changes remotely on a flash drive, then send that flash drive back to them so they can synchronize the changes (they will also be making some changes to the same data on their end).

I originally considered a two-way replica, but then got some advice that that might be more complicated than it's worth. Then I conisdered simple versioning or check-in/check out because I'm completely disconnected from their server. The data that I'll be editing is basically just a feature dataset within the enterprise GDB (consisting of maybe 4 feature classes).

So, what's the best way to distribute this geodatabase? Two-way replica, check-in/check-out, or versioning?

If versioning, how do I go about doing that? I've had absolutely NO experience with any of these, so any instructions would be appreciated.

Thanks!

25th March 2008

stephab @ 1:05pm: Arc Extensions I am looking for an ArcMap extension that will connect lat/long points sequentially. I have a bunch of lat/long points with associated ID numbers. I want to make polygons by connecting each set of points. (i.e. all points with ID # 12345 will connect to form a polygon, and all points with ID # 98765 will form another polygon, and so on.) I assume I will have to add another column to indicate the order in which the points should connect.

Does anyone know of an extension that will do this? I have searched around a bit but was hoping someone could point me in the right direction.

Thanks.

21st February 2008

gueny @ 4:03pm: clipping selected features Maybe this is a dumb question, but...

Anyone know how to clip selected features within ArcMap without writing a script? It seems like something that would be common, but I can't seen to find anything in the help or on arconline support.

Thanks

17th February 2008

10th January 2008

gis_novice @ 3:50pm: Joining issues Okay, I'm having this problem that seems like it should have an easy answer, but I'm just not getting it.

I have two shapefiles, one of which is a E911_road layer for the county that I work for that we created, the other is a tiger file of the same county but it has address ranges included with it. What I'm trying to do is join the address ranges from the tiger file to the E911_road file. However, it's not as simple as that, because both shapefiles have their roads split into segments at each intersection, so one road may have many segments. Each segment is supposed to have different address ranges.

I saved the tiger attribute table as a standalone table for editing purposes, and after joining them based on the road name (which is the only common field I have between the two shapefiles) it joins okay, but I'm getting duplicate values for address ranges. For instance, I have a road that's segmented into 15 parts on the E911_road layer, and the tiger attribute table has the same amount of segments, but only two segments have address ranges. In the join however, all of the segments are getting the same set of address ranges.

The result of the join: What the tiger attribute table looks like:

Adair Drive 101 199 100 198 Adair Drive 101 199 100 198
Adair Drive 101 199 100 198 Adair Drive 0 0 0 0
Adair Drive 101 199 100 198 Adair Drive 0 0 0 0
Adair Drive 101 199 100 198 Adair Drive 0 0 142 148

So it seems like the join operation is just taking the first row it comes to and ignoring all the other address ranges.

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong or a potential fix for this? I've tried a spatial join, since they are both shapefiles, but in that instance the address ranges are blank.

Thanks in advance.

8th August 2007

denveromelet @ 1:43am: open source I don't have the money for ARCgis and the trial from my gis class over a year ago expired.

does anybody recommend an open source version that has similar features that I can find with ARC?

28th July 2007

goldkiwi @ 11:30pm: Looking to start a career in GIS I've been on the job hunt for a few months now, and while I've a few interviews for different positions (including one at ESRI), they all seem to end the same way- that I don't quite meet their criteria/needs, as they require someone with "more experience."

This is incredibly frustrating to me, as it's that whole vicious cycle of not getting any experience until you have a job, and not getting a job until you have experience. I graduated from a GIS advanced diploma program this year, so I'm not looking to further my education at this point. For part of that program I had an industry project, and last summer I was working as a research assistant to one of the geography professors at my university doing some photogrammetry and spatial analysis, but evidently this is not enough.

I've applied to virtually every job posting I've seen come my way (although obviously I'm not applying for management positions at this point) but only one out of every 4 or 5 leads to an interview. I don't know if this is because there are a lot of GIS people relative to the number of openings where I live, but I'm just not cutting it and I don't know what to do. I live in Canada, and there's definitely fewer openings than there are in the United States, but short of receiving some kind of work visa sponsorship from an American company, it's unlikely that I will be finding employment in the States.

For those of you working in GIS, how did you get your start? Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do? Thanks in advance...

25th July 2007

gueny @ 10:45am: Path names in Model builder Hi all,

I'm hoping someone can help me with this. I checked the forums but I can't seem to find anything there.

Basically, what I'm trying to do, is run a model on another machine that was created on mine. It fails due to hard coded path names that are visible in the model. When I attempt to change these path name on the new machine, they are grayed out within the text box. I checked, and I have not set any parameters for paths, and I have the model parameter for relative path set. I don't know where the model is reading these paths from or how to get rid of them.

Anybody run in to this problem before and able to fix it?

Thanks

23rd July 2007

angeltabris @ 1:03pm: Does anyone know where I could find data on marine freight shipping routes with additional information about tanker vs dry bulk, and also if possible showing what types of products are being shipped from/to (iron ore, lumber, grain, steel, coal, crude oil, etc...)?

Thanks for any help.

19th July 2007

talonsilverhawk @ 1:21pm: Faster Hard Drives? I'm looking at getting a new notebook computer sometime fairly soon (I'm a student, so portability is a must) and have the option of getting either a 5400rpm drive or a 7200rpm drive (both are 160GB in size and I'll order the machine with it pre-installed; don't trust myself to do it!). Is the faster drive better for GIS work? I couldn't find any straight answers on the net. Given some of the larger files and heavy duty analysis that GIS is built for, I would think a faster hard drive would be helpful. On the flip side, I'm concerned about the 7200rpm drive hurting battery life. Any thoughts on this from people who have dealt with this would be appreciated.

9th July 2007

backformystuff @ 3:44pm: USGS geology maps. Has the USGS placed its geology maps/data online? Specifically, I am looking for geology maps (ideally georeferenced quads or vector data) for Northern California. Thanks.

6th July 2007

talonsilverhawk @ 10:49am: ArcGIS Explorer & Video RAM I've been looking at ArcGIS Explorer on ESRI's website and it looks really cool. Is this something that is impacted by the amount of video RAM on a computer or is that really an issue? I'm looking at upgrading computers fairly soon, and VRAM is something I'm still going back and forth on. ESRI's system requirements don't look too bad, but I was curious what people out in the field thought. From what I've been reading and seeing lately, 3D is becoming a big part of GIS, and I'd like to learn as much as I can.

21st June 2007

gis_novice @ 1:01pm: Georeferencing problem I'm having a couple of issues georeferencing a scanned map of land lots to an accurate road layer.

First off, when I place links in some places to correctly warp the scanned map into the right position, it moves barely, if at all, and no matter how many links I place, I can't get the thing to move.

Secondly, georeferencing is severely distorting my image. Is there any way to fix this or make it less distorted?

I have screenshots, but for some reason they won't show up here.

I'm using ArcEditor 9.2, and I don't know if this is just a limitation of the software or if it's a bug or what. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

14th June 2007

peruano @ 10:15pm: User Conference Just wondering... anyone going to the ESRI User Conference next week? Anything you are looking out for?