Month: June 2024

TWO COMPETING GIS SYSTEMS: GOOGLE EARTH PRO VS ESRI’S ARCVIEW

/ rbordner2015 / Leave a comment

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are apps that combine data and visual graphics, mainly in the form of maps.  Two of the biggest players in this field are ESRI’s ArcView and Alphabet’s Google Earth Pro, but they are dramatically different offerings.  Depending on what you want to achieve and who your audience is, you will have to choose which one is the best fit.

The biggest difference between the two GIS systems is cost:

ArcGIS Professional Standard (the lowest level that allows for database manipulation)= $3000/yr per PC subscription, so if you need 3 machines/users, around $8000/yr (multiple license package).  You also need to have someone who is trained in the app to oversee and coordinate input.

Google Earth Pro is a free download app, also available as free Net app.

They are very different products designed with very different functions and goals:

ArcGIS is designed for controlled access and general public viewing, not editing.  Look but don’t touch.

Google Earth Pro is designed so that any user can modify and edit data.  View and edit.

ArcGIS is great in situations where you want to control data, such as archaeological sites, tax/census information, environmental data.  You want everyone to be able to view it, but you don’t want people messing with the data presented.  ArcGIS is what Federal-State-County agencies use, to provide public access to data without any chance of it getting messed up.  Unfortunately that means that it has limited utility in cooperative or dynamic projects, as getting access is very difficult, cost and time-consuming.  It also requires a high level of specialized skill to use effectively.  You need a high-end PC to effectively run the Pro Standard version, though static viewing can be done from any platform.

Google Earth Pro has morphed into a high-end version of Google Maps.  Everyone can view, use and modify data, with no effective control.  Being free means that accessibility is much higher, but of course that also generates vulnerabilities to misuse.  A relatively low-end PC or high-end tablet can run GEarth Pro, but it does a poor job with large databases (such as our project), as it isn’t designed with large data sets as it’s primary function.  One advantage many aren’t aware of is that GEarth has an extensive collection of historic maps built into the system, which (depending on location) are geolocated into the base map system.  This is also true of satellite coverage, which can be dialed back to older images of the same location.  All locations in Google Earth can be translated/edited into standard GIS location formats (so can be transferred into ArcGIS if so desired).

Bottom Line: ArcGIS is a true option-rich GIS system, but requires realistically around $7-10k/yr for multiple licenses.  It is very complex and requires skilled specialists to input data and manage.  Very complex, great data presentation, but only if you can afford it.

GEarth Pro is a simplistic GIS system, minimal cost involved, most data operations can be learned in a short amount of time.  Very simple, limited data presentation (mainly in size of data files), but free to all users.

For our projects we have gone with Google Earth Pro.  In 2008 we began work on the Shaanxi Provincial Archaeological Atlas Project, under the auspices of the Shaanxi Provincial Preservation Offices.  This project entails moving the Zhongguo Ditu Wenwu Shaanxi (Archaeological Atlas of Shaanxi Province), published in 1989 from it’s paper form into GIS form.  As the goal was to have a robust GIS system in which a number of users would be able to access the Atlas data, we needed a cost-effective solution.  We started with DeLorme’s XMap 5.0, which at the time was a robust product with a large range of China-specific topographic maps.  However they were shut down in 2012 (or so), so we had to look to an alternative app was both cost-effective and accessible both to our Chinese and foreign colleagues.  At this time PRC governmental ministries were still building out their current GIS systems (which we couldn’t access), so the move to Google Earth allowed everyone to access the data.  We decided to accept the limitations since any partner could convert the locations/data into standard GIS (universal) locations when desired (such as conversion to the PRC official GIS systems).

In 2012 we started work on the Old Hawai’i Google Earth Project (compiling archaeological site data in Hawai’i into Google Earth) as a Service Learning project for our Chaminade University students.  In 2017 we added the Mahele Cultural Landscape Project (originally as part of the campus Palolo Project).  Despite the limitations of data file size which had become apparent with the Chinese data, we felt that staying with a app platform that allowed open access was key to both student and community involvement.  The ability of any partner access, share and shape the information to suit their specific needs vastly outweighs the limitations, especially given the cost constraints all of our groups operate within.  This becomes even more critical as we currently will have to add State Tax Map data to input more LCA award information.

MAHELE PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND GOALS

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As the Mahele Project has grown over the years, it’s a good time to restate the purpose of this project as of 2024.

The main goal of the Mahele Project is to place the testimony of the Mahele (1846-1855) that defined personal claims to land in the Hawaiian Kingdom into the Google Earth landscape, to give us some insight into the 1850’s Monarchy social landscape to give us a better understanding of our past.

The Mahele Testimony consists of 16 “Foreign Testimony” volumes and 13 “Native Testimony” volumes. The Foreign Testimony volumes are a mix of English and Hawaiian (especially in the later volumes) but the majority of claimants were Hawaiian, even if testimony was in English. The Native Testimony volumes are exclusively in Hawaiian. Most volumes run from 200-400 pages in length. Just as a note it’s oftentimes forgotten that all the secretaries taking testimony were fluent in both English and Hawaiian, in fact two of the secretaries were members of the Royal Family and later became Monarchs of the Kingdom.

The testimonies are very detailed snapshots of life in Hawai’i in the 1840-50’s, as not only do they include land description and use, but most also include patterns of inheritance, who your bounding neighbors were, how you acquired the land, and who controlled the land. This is a unique historical resource, as it is fixed in one point of time, and is inclusive of an entire society. Elsewhere (say Ohio or Suffolk England, etc.) testimony is individual, based on taxes, inheritance or maybe legal issues. It’s based on family or an individual, not societal at one point in time. Nor is it almost ever as detailed in social nuance, as it usually involves property or ownership. So the Mahele is unique both in type of detail, short period of time and nationally (the entire Kingdom).

The period from 1840-1860 was a period of massive shifts in values and attitudes, as everyone from the King on down, had to constantly make choices on the personal position towards personal ownership, personal success, the importance of community, and how much you hold onto tradition (which of course had been already changing constantly since the late 1600’s, long prior to European contact).

Just like our current world, change was happening, your only choice was deciding how you wanted to deal with it: to you embrace change, or do you fight to hold on to the ‘old ways’? And every day you have to revisit those choices. This is the context of the Mahele testimonies, and once you start to read (and our case transcribe) them to start to get more insight into the struggles that everyone was going through, with no collective sense of guidance and direction (again just as in our contemporary world) since no one can see the future clearly. We frequently get bogged down into critiquing the past based on our view from the present, but rarely do we actually look at ourselves in the mirror and seriously consider how we are also trapped into our narrow perceptions of potential and opportunity when we make daily and life choices. The Mahele reminds us that to the claimants this testimony was part of their PRESENT, and as such they could not understand the ramifications of their decisions into the future.

Google Earth is a free to use app, available both as download (download the Pro version) and also as a web-based app. It is a simple geographic information system (GIS) database, combining graphics (maps) with data into a visually-based system.

In this project we are adding the Mahele land court award locations, boundaries and testimony into Google Earth. Since both the app and our Mahele files are free to access, this means anyone can see the Mahele world of the Monarchy in the 1850s overlaid on our world of the 2020s.

We have intentionally kept all locations approximate (in part simply due to the difficulty of linking hand-drawn 19th-20th century maps into Google Earth), and of course since the testimony is directly transcribed from the original script into usable text (pdf) there are errors. Since the Testimony volumes are available for free download (as scanned pdf files) we recommend that anyone using our material of further analysis have the actual volumes in front of them so they can correct any errors or omissions from our transcriptions. We are largely avoiding transcribing the Hawaiian language testimony into the our pdf transcriptions as we have great difficulty in accurately converting to original script into text-understanding Hawaiian and transcribing Hawaiian are two very different skill sets.

If you are interested in becoming involved in the project, we have several major needs at present:

  1. The first one getting folks that have the background and are willing to take on the Hawaiian language transcription, and possibly also translating those to English.
  2. A second issue is the need to expand our area of mapped claims-currently we are limited to the small number of detailed 19th-20th century maps that detail the LCA claims (such as Waititi, Lahaina and Pearl Lochs). But the vast majority of the islands don’t have such maps, so LCA claims are limited to indicators in the State Land Tax Maps. This process is very labor-intensive (not least of which due to the small scale of each LTM) but soon we will have to expand into resource. Especially with West Maui outside of Lahaina we haven’t been able to locate any other detailed LCA maps, so as we expand from central Lahaina up towards Ka’anapali and down to Kihei we will have to shift over to LTM location maps.