Baaack in the arcgis.com

[rhymes with: Baaack in the USSR] After a brief hiatus trying my hand outside ESRI, I'm baaack... posting maps on arcgis.com. Daniel Schobler from ESRI(DE) Schools Program kindly reposted and time-enabled my Global sailings, captains ships logs 1750 - 1850 into his Explorations and voyages 1662-1855 (time-enabled)

Watch this space: originally created to test file geodatabases with a subset stripped of weather data, Bob Booth reminded me that the full record is worth exploring through time-enabled maps, to show other changes over 200 year span nearly 2 centuries ago.

I have now posted Time Slider: NOAA Oil Spill Model and VLIZ Maritime Boundaries. This explores the transfer of an Oil Spill Model from publicly available NOAA software and ROPME data into ESRI ArcMap. It is packaged such that is can be read by anyone - including non-ESRI users - via free ArcGIS Explorer or directly on the mnemonic explorer.arcgis.com.

What this means is that file data can be posted to arcgis.com - in addition to being served up via ArcGIS server - and then mashed up with other data on your desktop or arcgis.com. The distinction is this:

1. file data are static and thus appropriate for relatively static data
2. dynamic data can be managed on the server as it is updated or upgraded

But whether users get live data in (2), or static snapshots in (1), both are considered cloud computing. Those of you who followed my blog or others' in my blog-roll will remember some confusion around this as various platforms - many of which I tried in my blog - jockey into position as technologies shift.

Furthering horse-racing lingo, let us not forget the horses-for-courses approach that technologies give us if applied well - as each horse races best on a particular turf, each desktop or web GIS or mapping solution will work best for particular end-user needs.

PS: my house in Cambridge UK is right near the Point-to-Point village race course.