Project capabilities

Excalibur projects can be edited to add and remove capabilities at any time. The type of capabilities you add to a project determines which tools are available in the Tools Panel. Initially, saving a project provides a quick and convenient way to organize the resources and instructions for basic and common workflows.

The following resources are required to create an Excalibur project:

Optionally, you can also include a web map with geospatial reference layers to help provide context while you work on the Excalibur project.

Add observation layers

Adding observation layers to a project provides a workflow for collecting observations from imagery or video, including resources for accomplishing observations, editing, and creating derived information products from these activities. These layers provide observation tools in the Tools Panel when you open an Excalibur project. An observation layer can be a feature layer or an ArcGIS Knowledge graph entity layer.

Note:

ArcGIS Knowledge graph layers must be spatial entities. Non-spatial entities and relationships are not supported. Additional capabilities not supported for knowledge graph spatial entity layers include:

  • Collecting observations in the Focus panel.
  • Editing existing ovservations (copy and delete workflows are supported).
  • Integration with the Time Slider and Feature Table.

Layers that do not have the ArcGIS Excalibur system-managed fields can be added and used in an Excalibur project. Observations collected with these layers are added to the project, but they will not contain any previous observations in the layer if they are not time-enabled.

Create an observation collection layer

Creating a project containing observations requires at least one observation collection layer. In ArcGIS Excalibur, the observation collection layer can be created within a project that you own, or through the Publish Hosted Web Layer workflow . With each workflow the following settings will be enabled on the layer:

Manage system fields and settings

If your observation layer was not created in ArcGIS Excalibur and does not have the system managed fields, you can go through a guided workflow to add them. This allows the layer to automatically populate information from the image when an observation is collected. Additionally, the layer will be time-enabled if it is not already. The following fields will be added:

  • ics_xy_excalibur
  • image_classification_excalibur
  • image_dtg_local_excalibur
  • image_dtg_utc_excalibur
  • imageid_excalibur
  • mapscale_excalibur
  • observation_dtg_local_excalibur
  • observation_latlon_excalibur
  • predicted_niirs_excalibur
  • projectid_excalibur
  • raster_id_excalibur
  • service_url_excalibur

Add GeoEnrichment definitions to an Excalibur project

Adding a GeoEnrichment definition to a project can enhance your observations with information from a related layer during observation collection. You can choose which fields are automatically populated in a point or polygon observation layer by matching them to fields in one or more related polygon context layers.

To create a GeoEnrichment definition in an Excalibur project, the following criteria must be met:

  • You must be the project owner or a portal administrator.
  • You must have a point or polygon observation layer in your Excalibur project.
  • You must have a polygon context layer in a web map that has been added to your project.

Follow the guided workflow to add, view, or remove GeoEnrichment definitions to an Excalibur project.