Maplet - Adding Web Mapping Services to ArcMap

Another Maplet for my blogpost today. This one is about using Web Mapping Services. A Web Mapping Service, or WMS, is a method for sharing imagery across the web. It's a great option for being able to share and make GIS data available for others without having to transfer files. It's pretty easy to use as well.  A WMS is purely raster, so imagery is the best use, although I've seen people publish GIS data this way as it forces a specific appearance on the data - the drawback to that is the data is not available to the user to query against.
  WMS in an open standard and is managed through the Open Geospatial Consortium. The standards are available here.
  Here's the Maplet:

Maplet - Splitting Datasets by Attribute

Today's blog is another Maplet for ArcGIS 10. A coworker was wanting to know how to split a dataset into parts based on an attribute, so here is a short video with a couple of ways. For just a few elements, it can be just as quick to do a definition query for each of the fields and then do a data export. You can do the same just by selecting an attribute, and exporting, but you have to remember to only export the selected features.
  I also showed a neat little tool developed by Tim Fox of the USGS that automates the process. This can be a real time saver when there are more than a few attributes you want to use. Here is the link to the USGS tool.

Now, the video.

Time to get blogging again - I posted a new Maplet

Time goes by, and I periodically remind myself that I need to get back to my blogging. Well, no time like now. I'm starting with the announcement of a new Maplet - one of my GIS tips. This one is for ArcGIS 10 (specifically 10.2.2 but should work in all the 10s). I've had a few clients ask about this technique, so I thought I'd post it online as a reference.

The technique is for clipping imagery to a boundary. Specifically this is an issue where you may have a large photomosaic set in an ECW or similar file format that requires a rectangular dataset, but your imagery is made up of a non-rectangular tiles combined. The area not covered by images becomes a blank white area. That doesn't work too well when you're overlaying different datasets, particularly if you are overlaying different imagery sets at different scales.

Most of the time, this white border, or collar as it is sometimes called, can be removed by assigning the color value of the collar as a background color and set to not display, but in this case, the border is a range of color values. In this case, the trick is to have a boundary around the actual image area and use that boundary as a clipping edge.

The tricky part is finding where to do this. It is found in the Image Analysis from the Windows pull-down.

  Check out the video for details: