Day 2 - ESRI User Conference Day ‘GIS – Mapping Common Ground’

Jul 12, 2022

Day 2 of the ESRI User Conference was filled with many technical workshops and time speakeing with the lead developers of the tools that IGIS utilize on almost a daily basis.  In this post I will highlight some of the technical session I attended and what I saw and learned in the exhibition hall.  It was a busy day and i am looking forward to what I learn tomorrow... Now to the highlights...

In the technical sessions I attended the following:

ArcGIS Insights: An Introduction
Before this session I did not know of the capabilities of this app.  With app you can take tabular and spatial data and analyze the data in really intuitive ways and share the output and models with your colleagues and the public.  For more information about ArcGIS Insights go to the following link.

Cartography Cutting Edge
This session highlighted some of the new symbology and vector tile formatting that can be used with the new map viewer.  The methods used included layer special effects, layer blending, and the vector tile base map editor.  Using the techniques in this session you could design a nice webmap, but that webmap could not be opened in ArcGIS Pro without pro stripping much of the formatting that you used in the session.

ArcGIS Pro Tasks: An Introduction
For the past several years, I keep thinking that IGIS should use Tasks to teach workshop workflow.  This session walk through creating and configuring a basic editing task.  I still see how this tool could and should be used in some of the IGIS Workshops.

ArcGIS Pro: Tips and Tricks
This was a nice technical sessionthat highlighted many tips and tricks.  As part of this workshop the presenters shared a storymap they created to highlight their tips and tricks.  Here is the storymap that they shared with the attendees, enjoy.

ArcGIS Field Maps: An Introduction and What's New
ArcGIS Field Maps continues to improve.  Field Maps is ESRI effort to combine 5 separate apps (Collector, Survey 123, Explorer, Workforce, and Navigator) into one.  To date they have added the functionality of the first three apps.  They have integrated many new features into the app since last year.  There is not enough room to discuss the new features. I will say that I am excited to integrate the new features into the IGIS Field Maps training.

Discussions with the Product Developers:

How to optimize multidimensional datasets for faster queries and rasters?
I have been having an issue querying merged netcdf and mosaic datasets of the yearly netcdf data.  Both methods have been quite slow.  The recommended way to optimize the querying of these data is to create a cloud raster format dataset from the mosaic dataset and that should drastically speed up the queryng of the multidimensional data.

ArcGIS Insights vs Dashboards?
I will have to play with the functionality of insights and see if it could replace dashboards in some of the IGIS use cases.

Sunsetting of Drone2Map?
In the past few months I have heard that ArcGIS Drone2Map is going to be phased out.  I asked the developers of the app and they stated that there are no plans to phose out Drone2Map and they are continuing to develop and release new versions.  The most recent version is Drone2map 2022.1.


By Shane Feirer
Author - Geographic Information Systems - Supervisor II