If you missed the Sharpen Your GIS Skills Seminar put on by ESRI last fall, you can view it online here:
http://www.esri.com/events/seminars/fall-seminar-series
Included is data used in the demos so you can try it out too.
The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today’s maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles, Canada and the United States.
For instance, where you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you “The Tawny One”, derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured, desert”.
Here is a True Names map of the USA. Click for more info.
18 months ago ESRI acquired Portland-based startup Geoloqi and now has put the startup’s technology to use by releasing a new geotrigger service. The geotrigger service, which was in beta since November, allows developers to more easily serve content to users based on their location, for example, if a user enters an area, send a notification email.
Of course this new service is not free, however you can try it out for with an introductory developer account. Find out more here. The service does use “a fraction of an ArcGIS Online credit” which is 1 credit/12 geotrigger events.
I saw this poster created using a DEM from Lidar data. Very beautiful presentation of a river with a shallow elevation range.
If you are a full or part-time undergraduate, graduate, and first year post-doctoral student attending accredited colleges and universities anywhere in the world AND working on a research paper in the history of cartography, then you might want to enter your work in the Ristow Prize Competition. The winner will receive a $1000 cash prize and publication in the The Portolan, Journal of the Washington Map Society. The deadline is June 1, 2014.
If you are interested in how the Fire Department City of New York (FDNY) developed and utilzed geospatial capabilties during the most recent Super Bowl, then you should register for this free online training session on 2/26/2014.
Looks like the EPA will be releasing their ArcGIS data to the public using ESRI’s cloud option. Read more here.
And here is more on ESRI’s ArcGIS Open Data.
Dr. Roger Tomlinson has passed away.
Tomlinson is generally recognized as the “father of GIS.” He is the visionary geographer who conceived and developed the first GIS for use by the Canada Land Inventory in the early 1960s. This and continuing contributions led the Canadian government to give him its highest civilian award, the Order of Canada, in 2001. Text for that award reads, “he pioneered its uses worldwide to collect, manage, and manipulate geographical data, changing the face of geography as a discipline.”
Tomlinson tells the story of how this came to be. In the early 1960s he was working as a photo interpreter for Spartan Air Services in Canada. They had a contract to identify the best location for a tree plantation in Kenya. They turned to their young geographer Tomlinson and asked him to develop a methodology. He tried various manual methods for overlaying various environmental, cultural, and economic variables, but all were too costly. He turned to computers and found the solution. Subsequently he sold this approach to the Canada Land Inventory that had the responsibility of using data to assist the government in its land use planning activities. His GIS approach reduced the task from three years and eight million Canadian dollars to several weeks and two million dollars.
He went on to serve the community in many ways. He chaired the International Geographical Union’s GIS Commission for 12 years, where he pioneered the concepts of worldwide geographical data availability. He is a past president of the Canadian Association of Geographers a recipient of its rare Canadian Award for Service to the Profession.
Other awards followed including the James R. Anderson Medal of Honor for Applied Geography (1995) and the Robert T. Aangeenbrug Distinguished Career Award (2005) from the American Association of Geographers. He was the first recipient of the Aangeenbrug award and also the first recipient of ESRI’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1997). National Geographic gave him its rare Alexander Graham Bell Award for exceptional contributions to geographic research (2010). He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the recipient of multiple honorary doctorates in addition to his own PhD from University College London.
Since 1977 he operated Tomlinson Associates, Ltd., Consulting Geographer which has advised clients like the World Bank, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.S. departments of Commerce and Agriculture, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of the Census, the Canadian Forest Service, and numerous U.S. state and Canadian provincial and municipal government agencies. The Order of Canada award documents the impact of that work. “Governments and scientists around the world have turned to him to better understand our environment and changing patterns of land use, to better manage urban development and our precious natural resources.”
His book, Thinking About GIS: Geographic Information System Planning for Managers, provides guidance for both senior managers responsible for a broad range of activities in their organization and the more technical managers responsible for actual implementation of GIS. The 5th edition of this popular book reflects the latest trends in geospatial technology and includes updated case studies. Exercises from Roger Tomlinson’s course Planning for a GIS and a video of the “Planning and Managing a GIS” seminar from the 2012 Esri International User Conference are included on the accompanying DVD.
University Consortium for Geographic Information Science
http://ucgis.org/ucgis-fellow/roger-tomlinson
Take a look at this video from the ESRI Federal GIS conference. Something new that will be released in March, The Executive Briefing Book. It is optimized for use on a tablet and organizes your content like pages in a book.
Check out this story of the man behind the Cahill-Keyes world map projection. You can buy a high resolution 61″ x 29″ wall map of it by clicking below.
Crisp 4pt font and 0.05mm thick semi-transparent lines!
SoCalGIS.org 