Subtitled: Why error messages are good. Came up with another error while running TopoToRaster but this time ArcGIS gave an error message that led to a solution. Turned out all my contour lines had an elevation of 16 which TopoToRaster did not like. I had intended to increase the elevation and inadvertently set them all to sixteen. I had saved the previous values before editing so it turned out to be a simple fix and I didn’t have to spend a day trying figure out what was wrong.

In running an automated process, I had a TopoToRaster repeatedly fail on me. The only input theme was a contour theme. The process ran fine when I used the envelope of the contour theme as the output extent but when I changed it to the envelope of a polygon theme, it would bomb. The polygon’s envelope was smaller than the contour theme. ArcCatalog would bomb out without presenting any sort of useful message.

Stumbled across ArcBruTile, an ArcMap application that allows you to display map tile services–such as OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Bing, Spatial Cloud, and Tile Map Service (TMS)–in your ArcMap documents. It works pretty well from my preliminary testing of it. I have found that at times that the graphical tiles are distorted but I am guessing it is because they are optimized for display in a specific projection, at specific scales and, in ArcMap, you can use any projection/scale combination you want.

I have been working on updating some data that was published using Arc/Info Workstation Export (.e00) files, converting them to shapefiles, or in the case of annotation, to a geodatabase feature class. While converting some INFO tables, I have received this error: It turns out that Workstation can create export files that contain values that did not fit within their field–I’m guessing that somehow you are actually able to enter invalid values into those fields but I did not confirm that.

The Utah Geological Survey has a good supply of Maps and data available online and some online maps. They also have an online Blog. The GIS data is a fairly complete package–the sample I downloaded included .pdfs, shapefiles, layer files, images and ArcMap project (.MXD) files used to generate the .pdfs. File sizes are larger because of the completeness. Feature classes have a moderate level of attribution. The highlight, however, are the sample Keyhole Markup (KMZ) files of the of the St.

The Create Geologic Cross Sections–eXacto Section v. 2.0, ArcMap 9.3 written by Jennifer Carrell of the Illinois State Geological Survey is a handy tool for creating cross sections. It requires ArcGIS and a 3D Analyst Extension license. You can create profiles against multiple DEMs at once, define the vertical exaggeration, and have it include contact points. It is well documented and comes with sample data to use with the tutorial.

As someone who lives in the boon-docks whose street (both my current and previous one) does not appear in the data for either NAVTEQ or TeleAtlas and someone who used both of those data sets extensively in his previous job, I’ve watched OpenStreetMap for awhile, although have not contributed. Marten Hogeweg, ArcGIS Server Geoportal Extension Product Manager, ESRI announce in his blogs an ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap. Sounds like a great idea, giving GIS professionals–some whom have the source materials the ability to easily contribute should only help the project.

While I am pretty experienced in editing data in previous generations of ESRI’s software, I have not done a lot in ArcGIS. So in my new position where I am supporting a group of geologists who do a lot of data creation in ArcMap, I am learning some of the intricacies of the ArcGIS platform. One of the potential gotchas that a coworker informed me about that I was vaguely aware of was the issue of sticky move tolerances.

Came across a new ArcMap bug today. A staff member was trying to join an Excel 2007 file (.xlsx) to a point shapefile in ArcMap and it did not appear to be working. She only had Office 2003 on her machine so I tried it on my spanking new machine that has 2007 installed. Same result–the fields get appended but they are all blank. I discovered, however, that when I had the table open, if I switched form showing ALL records to only the selected, Poof!