5Things on Friday 4 - Tweets from the ISS, a data challenge, Story Maps and more

Welcome to another fun #5Things on Friday – In this fun, summer edition we share some interesting updates including details of a challenge to students all over the World, a webinar of interest, an amazing Twitter map, field data collection tips, and one amazing Story Map. International Space Station (ISS) Tweets Map

We all seem to agree that seeing geotagged tweets on a map is pretty darned cool (think Echosec and SnapTrends for example) but this week we stumbled onto something really darned cool from COGS (the Centre for Geographical Sciences in Nova Scotia) and data from NASA – enter the ISS Tweets Map! Browse the map to identify locations around the World when the crew from the ISS sent a tweet. Icons appear at the location on Earth when the station was directly above or the tweets are georeferenced to a specific location that’s associated with an image or story being shared. Most of the tweets were shared by Canadian astronaut @Cmdr_Hadfield. For a real treat, see also the list of related map projects (under Details, left sidebar) from other missions, including a map showing the view from John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission in 1962, no tweets in this one!

The Esri Global Content Challenge

Esri’s Global Content Challenge is open to undergraduate or graduate students at colleges or universities, as well as high school students enrolled in an Advanced Placement Human Geography or Environmental Science course. From Esri… “We are challenging students all over the world to unleash the power of Esri content by way of their own geographic analyses, visualizations, predictive models and more to tell a compelling scientific story. The story must be presented using the Esri Story Map Journal app”

Field Data collection with Survey 123

An informative video from Esri that introduces you to the capabilities of Esri Survey 1 2 3. Field collection is a critical part of GIS for many organizations and Esri has a new solution of interest in Survey 1 2 3. With ArcGIS, bringing your data from the field to your geographic information system is as easy as Survey123! If Surevy 123 isn’t the solution for you then perhaps Collector is! According to Esri, Collector for ArcGIS is the perfect client for you if your mobile phone or tablet is an iOS, Android, or Windows device. Use Collector to edit your authoritative geographic data in the field without needing a connection to the internet. Read more on the Support blog

DID – U – Know? We assume you that you’re familiar with the MarketPlace, but just in case, let us remind you about this awesome resource. This is a repository for plug-and-play GIS apps built on top of the ArcGIS Online platform. Similar to that of the Apple Store and Android Marketplace available for your smartphone except this one is for GEO-Geeks. Oh, did we mention that we are pleased to be the owners of the Top 3 apps in the marketplace?

More than 100,000 Story Maps and counting!

According to Esri, Publicly shared Online story maps just exceeded 100K! The story map technology makes it easy for anyone to author, serve, and share a map using a number of pre-defined templates and themes. Recently, the team added the story Map Cascade and Story Map CrowdSource templates as a Beta roll- out,giving users and map creators even more ways to author awesome maps! It really is tough to pick out just one story map, however, if we were going to send you to one a great example is this Historical Topographic map explorer

Living Atlas Webinar

Got an hour to kill? If so you can sit back and enjoy this recorded webinar via ArcGIS videos. In this webinar, Andrew Green and Wesley Jones from Esri’s ArcGIS content team described the new vector tile layer basemaps, which include community contributed content. They also demonstrated how to customize the basemaps to fit your needs. About the Living Atlas – The themed content in the Living Atlas is curated from content available in ArcGIS Online. The Living Atlas enables the exploration of people and places around the world, as well as the natural and man-made influences that impact them.