[Talk-us] Getting data from ArcIMS servers

[Toby Murray]

My county uses ArcIMS to serve up their GIS data. I have received
permission to use their 6" resolution aerial photos for tracing things
in OSM and when asked about accessing the data, I was pointed at the
ArcExplorer software. Now I just need to figure out how to use it. It
seems like ArcExplorer itself is a pretty dumb client that just
displays images it gets from the server.

I did a packet capture while loading some data into ArcExplorer and it
looks like it is a pretty simple protocol. The client sends an XML
document specifying an <ENVELOPE> element with a bounding box
(although I'm not sure what the units are in... it doesn't look like
lat/long) as well as tags indicating which layers it wants. The server
renders the request and then sends back a response in XML with an
output URL tag that specifies a .jpg that the client then downloads
and displays. All layers do appear to be pre-rendered into a single
flat image so getting shape files out of it doesn't seem possible.

Now, my county DOES have an FTP server where I can probably get access
to the raw data however getting access to it will require more begging
on my part. Not that I have a huge problem with that... but talking
with others on IRC, it sounds like ArcIMS is a fairly popular product
for city/county GIS systems. So I was wondering if anyone already
knows more about it and if there is a good way to get OSM-usable
images and/or data out of it without FTP access. If not, would it be
worth it for me to look at this in more detail? The most spectacular
outcome I could see would be a JOSM plugin that lets you give it an
ArcIMS server URL and then acts like the WMS plugin to download
background images.

Thoughts?

Toby