GIS Courses outside India

After I have written a post on GIS Courses India , there were many inquires about courses , colleges and private institues on GIS/RS in abroad. I am overwhelmed with such responses through blog comments and offline emails. I’m glad that many people want of information about colleges/Universities offering course in Ge0-information.

I have recieved decent number of queries on the universities in abroad (outside India) which offeres degress at master’s level. I would like to compile them and post. Though the information contained in the blog is not full fledged one. I request you to visit respective university web sites for additional information.

I’m going to list down couple of universities which I aware of

1. The one and only exclusive university in the field of Geo-Informatics in ITC Netherlands.  The world best university for perusing your masters in the field of GIS/RS. Morethan 50 years of in the field of GIS.  Wide variety of degree/diplomo and research programmes on various levels. If you are from any background say agriculture to computer science you can  persue your masters. Funding and aid is not difficult one if you are potential canditate.   They have partnership with several other academic institues and industry. ITC has tie-up with IIRS India.  I strongly recommend this university if you are keen in persuing your master degree in core Geospatial and earth science.  Visit their official web site for further details  http://www.itc.nl/default.asp . Netherland is good country to live in.
2. University of Glamorgan -http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/gis/start/welcome.htm
3. University of Nottinham – Centre for Geospatial Science
4. University of Redlands- http://www.institute.redlands.edu/msgis/
5. Leeds University- Department of Geography -http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/odl/
6.  University of Salzburg, Germany
7. University of Zurich, Switzerland-http://www.geo.uzh.ch/en/units/gis/

If you Google you can find n number of universities and colleges offering degree and diplomo in GIS.  The list of universities available in this link http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/education/links/other.html.

If you are indian student aspire to persue your higher studies ( M.S/PhD)  in abroad (other than India) universities, here is my few points. 

Most of the foreign universities will intake student with minimum qualification of undergraduate in Science or Geospatial Engineering.  If you are graduate in M.Sc  or M.Tech in Earth Science or allied branches (Environmental/Civil/Agriculture/Computer Science) then you can apply for higher studies. Admission procedure for US, UK and other European countries are different and varies from university to university.

 For example, if you desired to pursue your MS/PhD in US then you need to prepare one year before the academic year. Most universities in the U.S. accept applications only two times in a calendar year for the Fall [between August and September and ends in late December or early January] and the Spring [starts in January and ends in May] semesters of the academic year. Please beware, some universities only entertain applications for the Fall semester. 

Mostly almost all top colleges/Universities require good GRE and TOEFL scores. You should have good academic records, suitable research work/thesis should be carried out in your curriculum, need good recommendation from professors/scientist and finally you need to show the financial background in case if you have not gained aid/scholarship. Mostly all universities will provide you scholarship and waive off tuition fees (some % or fully) to potential candidate, who is high profile having experience in research work with International Publications in Journal etc.

 How to apply: 

1. First list down the list of universities country wise which is offering degree in Geospatial and rank them based on their profile, reputation etc. There are several web sites to guide for current ranking. 

Key : Eg. Web sites www.FindaPhd.com is site where you can find list of vacancies. While doing search always use key word as “Studentship”, this will return good results. 

2. Browse the each university web site and get the list of Professors, who were working on area which interests to you. Some one might interested in Remote sensing, Photogrammetry and other choice might be application of GIS in Environmental/Agriculture etc. So narrow down the list of professors who working on your field of interest. 

3. Write a succinct email to the identified professor(s) with CV attached. Note, your email should indicate your expression of interest in field of research and why you have chosen the particular university and prof along with brief description of the carrier records. Do not expect the response in a day or two, every one in the world is busy and occupied with their work. Mostly 70-80% chance of getting reply with acknowledgement. If the concerned professor shows interest in your candidature, try to get more details regarding research work which they work upon, chance of getting admission , aid and procedure to apply etc. Contacting professor will be an added advantage during selection process. 

4. Prepare of qualification exams like GRE/TOFEL etc during your final year/semester of the graduation. I have many students who have good academic records and research background but their inadequate scores in these exams becomes major pain point in admission. Note: The good/high scores is MUST for getting aid/scholarship.

 5. Regarding funding, I always strongly advise to NOT to accept the admission unless your scholarship is FULLY granted with waive of tuition fees. This is particular for US, it will be difficult to survive there with own cost unless you were rich enough to pay for yourself.  

6. Not only good university rank or professor is factor in admission, you need to consider Climate of the country, language and other factors are VERY crucial on the deciding factor. 

7. Try to learn their language in advance before you land in country other than US.

These are points which came in my mind while writing this post. I will try to update with more information. I hope this post might little help to you.

Flex API – Some Tips and Tracks

I have been working with ESRI Flex API for almost around one year. I would like to share some  basics of Flex API along with tips and tracks.  If you are beginner then I’m sure this post will helps you lot.

Here is link to see the list of Web Sites developed using ESRI Flex API.  If you are coming from  Web ADF,  Flex API  is really damn cool.  We can develop light-weight to medium level application using the Flex/SL/JS API.  You cannot do editing functionality. Flex API V 1.2 comes up with integration of MS Virtual Earth.

Start with Flex Viewer sample. This is the ideal place to begin with, where you start widget based programming model. The help document comes with Flex viewer clearly explains and search on Google for design patterns. There are lot of heated discussions about frameworks and patterns. I leave to reader for making his/her own choice.

1. When you start developing the application(non Flex viewer), one of the must requirement is TOC control. By default there is no in-built TOC control.  You can develop your own custom TOC otherwise you can download this sample from ESRI ArcScripts site and make use of it.
2. Here is sample for Overview Map . Click here
3. Sometimes we may want to design a Map control with rounded corners than rectangular one.  Here is sample code

Here’s a way to use a mask to create rounded corners:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx=”http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml”
xmlns:esri=”http://www.esri.com/2008/ags”>
<mx:Canvas width=”100%” height=”100%”>
<esri:Map level=”1″ mask=”{maskCanvas}” cacheAsBitmap=”true”>
<esri:ArcGISTiledMapServiceLayer
url=”http://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/ESRI_StreetMap_World_2D/MapServer”/>
</esri:Map>
<mx:Canvas id=”maskCanvas” width=”100%” height=”100%” cacheAsBitmap=”true”
backgroundColor=”#FF0000″ borderStyle=”solid” cornerRadius=”15″/>
</mx:Canvas>
</mx:Application>

1. If you are working with 9.2, still you can use Flex : While 9.2 isn’t supported by the Flex and JavaScript APIs out-of-the-box, you can create the map tiles in 9.2 and subsequently use the tiles in the Flex and JavaScript APIs by extending the TiledMapServiceLayer  to be able to connect to your specific service.  Here is link to study more. if you want do some geoprocessing and querying you have to use 9.3 version.

1. You may want to some specific geoprocessing in Asynchronous mode, so that user can browse the application. Once processing is done, you can  work with results in asynchronous mode. Here is sample to start with
2. Some times you may want functionality to save the map at client side.  File reference object is not available in Flash 9.x version. If you update with Flash 10.x you can do this pretty easily.                                                                Note1 : Do change the “Require Flash Player version” to 10 0 0 under the Flex Compiler section of your project properties and check your Flex SDK version it should be 3.2 and above
3. We may require to zoom to set features extent after performing query.  This can easily done rather than looping through the record set and computing minx and max x

// zoom to extent of all features
var unionedExtent:Extent;
var multipoint:Multipoint = new Multipoint();

for (var j:Number = 1; j < resultCount; j++)
{
multipoint.addPoint(MapPoint(event.findResults[j].feature.geometry));
}
unionedExtent = multipoint.extent;
map.extent = unionedExtent.expand(1.1); // zoom out a little

4.  When you are querying using REST API and returning JSON response there may be chance that Error:  Unexpected I encountered.  First  check your data (i.e. value from the record). if it contains any special character like double quotes  then REST API throws error . ESRI  REST team is aware of this issue and they will be fixing it soon. One workaround would be to remove all double-quotes from your data (if possible). Another option may be to escape the quotes in your data.

5.  For parsing JSON response you need to download as3corelib.  You can use the JSON decoder from:
http://code.google.com/p/as3corelib/ to turn the JSON string into a Object.
e.g. var obj1:Object = JSON.decode(result);

6.  Another combining Dynamic and Tiled Services [Multi-layer cache] in LiveMap Widget for flex viewer sample

From the REST documentation:
“Note that multi-layer caches are only accessible in REST via export, and these requests are treated as a dynamic map service. Tile access is not supported in REST for multi-layer caches.”

http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisserver/apis/rest/index.html?mapserver.html

7.  If you want add Identify Results into data-grid here is code snippet

var graphic:Graphic;
var myAtts:Object;
var myAc:ArrayCollection = New ArrayCollection();

for each (var result:IdentifyResult in event.identifyResults){
  myAtts=result.feature.attributes;
  myAc.addItem(myAtts);
}
dg.dataProvider = myAc;
Since its already getting late, I will post rest of the tips/tracks as second part, please bear with
me. Please write your queries/comments/suggestion.

Have a great day!

Flex API 1.2 Released

ESRI has released Flex version 1.2 on few days back. Here is link to download the latest API.

# New features:

* Routing using ArcGIS Server (requires ArcGIS Server 9.3.1).
* Microsoft Virtual Earth mapping
* Microsoft Virtual Earth geocoding
* Renderers [Class break, Unique and Simple]
* GraphicUtil.getGraphicsExtent() from Util returns the extent for an array of graphics. [ No need of
looping and get the extent]
* WebMercatorUtil projects coordinates between 4326 (lat/long returned by Virtual Earth geocoding)
and 102113 (Web Mercator – used by Virtual Earth tiled layer).- Straight punch
* Text wrap function and some bug fixes.

This is really great news that ESRI heading towards Microsoft Virtual Earth. Download and enjoy the new flavour.

ExecuteSQL Command For ArcMap

During the Implementing Enterprise Applications with the Geodatabase presentation at the 2009 ESRI Developer Summit a couple weeks ago, ESRI talked about a handy tool that can be added to ArcMap to send SQL to the connected database. This tool uses the IWorkspace.ExecuteSQL method and it can be very useful in starting and stopping a DBMS trace directly from ArcMap when profiling an operation.

The tool can be downloaded from the ESRI ArcGIS Resource Center for developers in the ArcGIS Desktop .NET Code Gallery. Click here to go directly to the tool.

GIS Opening

There is an urgent Opening for   “VB+ARCGIS+SQLSERVER” Developer in India. If any one looking for change,

please drop me an email with resume to ID given in the contact section.

As of now, I do not have any other details to share with you.

Thanks

ESRI Developer Summit News-1

Hi All

I’m going to list down the plenary sessions key points from Dev Summit, Palm Springs.  I am going to summaries based on James Fee and other developers.

1. There are over 1,100 developers at the DevSummit this year from 41 countries .  Tech Sessions will be recorded and placed on the ESRI Resource Centers, where technical sessions will be put much later.
2. Jim talks about the road from 9.3 to 9.4.  9.3.1 ships “May”.  9.4 will go beta around the 2009 UC.
3. Demo on how 9.3.1 adds functionality to tune map services automatically.  No longer  you have to figure out what layers are slowing down your maps.  Run the analyze tool and get errors and warnings to show what is slowing your services down.  [NOTE: We have separate ESRI tool available to find the performance of mxd. It generates pretty nice XML with nice stats and times for different scale levels]
4. Flex Demo-   Demo shows importing data (xls file) directly into the client side application (Really??. I have not seen so far ).  Adobe is here Dev Summit and is having a get together.  Quite a change from the past.  Flex API has matured a lot and provides all basic functionalities.
5. Others….

ESRI Microsoft Silver Light API Beta

I have been chatting with my friend who works for Microsoft India. We discussed lot about security and domain and finally I asked about Virtual Earth.  He said there is team working on this  in his office.  ESRI also released The ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight™/WPF™ beta release on March 20th. Here is the link for more details on their API and samples to get start with.

I believe that all core MS fans will be very happy to work Silver light API  from now on. ESRI has announced long back but before their dev summit they have released this . I’, m  indeed happy on looking at their API.  When I writing this post, am downloading Silverlight on my lappy. Hence  I have to wait for couple of mintues to have look in and start play with.

These days I primarily work with Flex API. But am very eager to know on the SL API. Many of colleagues where keep watching on this.   Let us cheer ESRI for another flavour of their API to their clients/developers. Kudos!

I’m waiting for Monday on Developer summit and videos to catch up the action. I remember Jim mentioned that this ESRI will upload their session videos in one hour after the session is over. This is very glad news for people like me and working late night to see action.

ESRI Promotional Offer

ESRI India Special Software Promotional Offer for Universities/Academics Institutions. This offer is valid till 25^th March 2009. If you are studying in a university or academics institutes here is the promotional offer from ESRI India on various packages.

• Getting Started with GIS

ArcView – Desktop GIS for Mapping, Data Integration and Analysis for everyone to use geographic data to make better decisions. ArcGIS Spatial Analyst – provides a broad range of advance & powerful spatial modeling and analysis tool.

• Academic Value Pack

ArcInfo Lab Kit – ArcInfo is the most complete desktop GIS. It includes functionalities to create, edit, and analyze Spatial & Non-Spatial data and include advanced Geo-processing tools for performing extensive spatial analysis, data manipulation and high-end cartography.

Available in Single user pack and Multi-user Pack (5 or 10)

• GIS Developers Pack

ArcGIS Engine – A standard framework for developers to create custom GIS and mapping applications. Cross-platform components compatible with multiple programming languages that enable developers to build GIS Solutions

ArcGIS Server – A complete and integrated server based GIS. It’s a out-of-the-box Web mapping applications and delivers Web services that support spatial data management, spatial analysis and 2D & 3D visualization.

For further information: (Link not working )

http://www.esriindia.com/ESRI%20Education%20Flier%208.pdf

I suggest ESRI to publish the course fee for their courses and do lot more advertisement to bring awareness to many GIS professional/others, who is willing to do GIS course.

Windows Authentication due to cross domain

Another interesting way to hide the Windows Authentication every time when the user trying to use ArcGIS Server services. First go through the cross domain.xml in given link below

This article explains it better than I could:
http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisserver/apis/flex/help/content/references/using_crossdomain_xml.htm

If you place cross domain.xml is your web server , it asks windows authentication everytime, this really irritates the user. Here is the solution to fix the windows authentication form to disappear when maps try access to services.

1) On the server machine, go to C:\inetpub\wwwroot.
2) Right click on your crossdomain.xml file to modify its Properties.
3) Go to Security Tab.
4) Check to see if you have Internet Guest User as one of the ‘Group or user names’. This was missing from the crossdomain.xml file.
5) Click on the Add button to add a new user. Enter \IUSR_ (e.g., vamsi\IUSR_vamsi; this is the same user that you will see is being used for anonymous access in the IIS).
6) Give it Read & Execute or Read permissions.

ESRI Logo Visible

Here is another work around for keeping ESRI logo visible to false using ESRI Flex API.  When you add service and set logovisible equals to visble it wont work. This is an API restriction.

“Turning off the logo is only possible if you connect to your own ArcGIS Server (not counting ArcGIS Online).”
http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisserver/apis/flex/apiref/com/esri/ags/Map.html#logoVisible

Connecting to your own ArcGIS Server means using ArcGISTiledMapServiceLayer or ArcGISDynamicMapServiceLayer. We have multiple server licenses but have some networks where we run directly with pre-cached tiles/embedded data. There were ‘n’ number of ways to get the data, this restriction is pain.

Here is code to Hide ESRI Logo from ESRI Forum Courtesy: Guilhem Vellut

function reallyHideESRILogo(map : Map) : void {
  for(var i : int = 0 ; i < map.numChildren ; i++){
    var component : UIComponent = map.getChildAt(i) as UIComponent;
    if(component.className == "StaticLayer")
       for(var j : int = 0 ; j < component.numChildren ; j++){
         var stComponent : UIComponent = component.getChildAt(j) as UIComponent;
         if(stComponent.className == "Image"){
           stComponent.visible = false;
           return;
         }
      }
  }
}

It seems pretty good alternative, but whenever layer gets loaded this function needs to be called.