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Hi, this post is about four solutions about how to perform offline basemap creation for mobile mapping in Android or Apple IOS devices. For this first part. I will demonstrate about GeoPDF format that is widely supported in most GIS Software. I will demonstrate how to write GeoPDF in ArcGIS Desktop (ArcGIS Pro also has this functionality) and QGIS, followed by how to load the GeoPDF Map in a supported Android/IOS App. Unfortunately, when this video is made, the only app that can read GeoPDF is only Avenza PDF Maps (available in Android and IOS). The rest is no longer updated (TerraGO GeoPDF) or part of paid services (Global Mapper Mobile Pro). Utilizing GeoPDF for field mapping basemap is very effective and simple. All data in one file. They are structured and tailored according to your setting on the GIS Desktop. They also provide good loading performance as long as the file is not relatively huge. For the second part. I will demonstrate the ArcGIS Mobile Map Package (MMPK) forma...

This post is designed as continuation from previous Post .  Now if you understand from my previous blog posts, many online map providers publish their online maps as tiled raster/vector map. There also many geospatial data format has been developed to store these tiles. One of them is MBTILES Format. MBTILES stores all tiles into one packed file grouped into its respective zoom levels. Because the tiles structure inside the MBTILES has been standardized, mosaicking those tiles into one single raster dataset is pretty much possible. There are plenty ways to do the mosaicking, one of them is utilizing MOBAC software. You can also use SasPlanet to do this. At my previous post, I show you how to make custom styles of Google Maps using snazzymaps, now I will continue to generate single raster maps of my Area of Interest from the custom google maps. Here is the workflow 1. From my previous post, the endpoint URL of my custom styled Google Maps is shown below. https://ma...

I will continue my previous blog post. Okay, now how to make the mbtiles of our data directly from our own maps. In ArcGIS you can make Tile Package (TPK) which can be converted into other tiling scheme using certain tool (one of them has been covered in part 1) In QGIS (or Global Mapper) you can actually generate directly tile packages to be consumed in WebGIS, either in compressed tile ZIP or Mbtiles format. For this task, we going to need QTILES Plugin which can be downloaded and installed from QGIS Plugins menu. And then, just open your QGIS map project (usually stored in qgs file) or just make it from the scratch. QTILES can be accessed from Plugins drop down menu, once it is loaded, just set all the parameters according your needs. Here is an example of mbtiles hosting using TILESERVER.PHP running on my local XAMPP machine. stay tuned for the part 3, part 4, part 5. lols

Imagine if all the published basemaps over the internet is not suit to your needs, what you can do?. The answer is simply, just make your own basemaps. And how to make them ? by convert the created map into raster tile package of course. From the created tile package, we can feed it off to map service provider like ArcGIS.com, Mapbox, etc, or just put it on your own server and webgis application/geoportal. Basemap can be authored using ArcGIS or QGIS (just to name the BIG TWO software these days). I am going to talk about ArcGIS first for this post. in ESRI ArcGIS environment, the tile package is called ArcGIS Tile Layer Package, and has *.tpk file extension. How to make them?, simply 1. Make your own map in ArcMap (symbolization, labelling, etc and save it on MXD. 2. Boot ArcToolbox, go to Data Management Tools > Packages > Create Map Tile Package 3. Set the tiling scheme (just use arcgis online/google tiling scheme), tiling format, level or details, tag, summary, ex...