John Selkirk - GIS Development » GIS

Exporting from ESRI GDB to CAD

John Selkirk — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:41:21 +0000

I am implementing a project that needs to export from the ESRI GDB into DXF format. There are many ways to do this but one of the main requirements is that we should not had to the list of royalties required to deploy the system. The application will use an ArcGIS Engine Runtime license so that is that I have to run within.

After some investigation I found a component online which is completely .NET based with royalty free distribution. The component is Cablib by WoutWare. The API is simple and easy to use but provides all the power that is needed for this project.

10 Years in Mobile GIS

John Selkirk — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:11:13 +0000

Well there you have it. 10 years have gone by and I hardly even noticed it. I have been developing, consulting and a whole host of other tasks in the Mobile GIS world now for 10 years!

Back on January 5th 1998 when I joined Conic Systems Ltd. little did I know that I would be still in this industry.

Times have changed in the GIS industry over the past 10 years. I started developing in VB3 and C++ (can’t even remember what rev number!) using an in-house graphics/GIS engine which still to this day has some great ideas in it. It was the precursor to MapObjects and still has users.

Smallworld was dominant in the utility market at that time and the link between Smallworld and Conic took up the most of my time.

That was working life until, in very quick succession, Tadpole bought Conic and we moved from a proprietary engine to using ArcObjects. I never delved into Avenue programming and have only seen ArcView 3.x about 3 times in my whole life!

Now we are in an age of server based GIS with mobile devices syncing when they can.

I happened upon the GIS industry and am glad that I did.

GEOPRESS_LOCATION(Home)

So I moved my blog

John Selkirk — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:19:35 +0000

Fairly obvious I know but I moved my blog from wordpress hosting to being hosted on the same ISP as out family blog.

I did this for 2 reasons:

We have a huge amount of space and I wanted the blog under my control
I wanted to take advantage of GeoPress to show my location when writing the blog

GeoPress is something that Ed Parsons has been using for a long time now and to be honest I did not care about using it for the longest time as I like using Live Writer and GeoPress only really was useful for the web-based writing client. That has all changed now and you can tell GeoPress where you are in the world by embedding some meta-data in the post itself which will be interpreted and processed by the GeoPress plugin.

There are a few options:

GEOPRESS _ LOCATION(Location to be Geocoded)

GEOPRESS _ LOCATION(Pre-defined location – defined on the web version)

GEOPRESS _ LOCATION([lat,lon])

I have not decided which one to use as yet but I am thinking of writing a quick plugin to Live Writer that will allow me to search on (using Google), place a push-pin where I am and get a lat, lon back for it.

My other option is to use the GPS built into my phone (AT&T Tilt – great phone!) using a bluetooth connection and get the GPS coords from that. This is less likely as there is no way I will have enough satellites in the buildings where I am likely to be writing a blog entry!

Anyway, that’s really why I switched …. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://john.selkirks.net/?feed=rss2…. I am such a GIS geek it is unbelievable!

GEOPRESS_LOCATION(Home)

Interesting means of getting imagery

John Selkirk — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:52:32 +0000

Ed Parsons has just posted a blog about the user of a Nokia N95 and some simple hardware to collect very nice looking overhead imagery. The cost is pretty small (N95 has comms, GPS and a 5MP camera all built in) so it would be really cool to try this out. I wonder how reliable the flight is? Perhaps some predefined flight plan to make the images easier?