Arches 5.1 – ESRI ArcGIS data and DISCO

[David Osborne]

I have been away from the Arches arena for almost a year, after finishing the implementation for Jersey Heritage, while I concentrated on my research.

I'm now looking at using Arches for my research data, so I was wondering what the current state of play is for using ArcGIS info. I have some geochemistry data I would like to install as a map overlay (the file extensions are .cpg, .dbf, .prj, .sbn, .sbx, .shp, .shp.xml and .shx). Is there a how-to anywhere to describe how to import this?

I will also be generating some scientific analysis data I would like to incorporate and the DISCO package might be a good way to do that – is it available to use yet?

I've just set up Arches 5.1 in an Ubuntu 18.04 VM.

Thanks for any words of wisdom!

David

David Osborne BA MSc
AHRC Midlands4Cities PhD researcher
Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Nottingham
https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/student_profile/david-osborne/

[Dennis Wuthrich]

Hi David,

There are several ways that you can register GIS data (including shapefiles) as a map overlay in Arches.  Note that this is different than importing the data into Arches.

You'll need to set up a way to serve your shapefile data to Arches via a service.  Luckily, there are several options including using GeoServer, ArcGIS Online, and others.  If you want to serve your shapefile data as vector tiles, I would suggest the following approach:

1. Load your shapefile into PostGIS (there are lots of tutorials on this on the web).

2. Use pg_tileserv (https://github.com/CrunchyData/pg_tileserv) as your vector tile server.

3. Define the styling of your shapefile content using the Mapbox specification.  Lots of ways to do this, but one great tool is Maputnik (https://github.com/maputnik/editor)

4. Register your map source and layer with Arches 

As for DISCO, we're currently working on the package and its not quite done yet.  You can follow along with our progress at https://github.com/archesproject/arches-for-science-prj. 

Hope this is helpful

Dennis

[David Osborne]

Hi Dennis,

Thanks, that's very useful. I should be able to load my ArcGIS data into PostGIS in the Postgres which Arches is using on my Ubuntu VM.

I'm looking forward to seeing how DISCO develops, thanks for the link.

Kind regards,

David