Category Archives: News

Flooding Analysis Help

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Full disclosure, my son works for this company!  They are developing a new product for hydrologists that might need extra compute power for their computations and analysis.  If you work in government, anywhere in the US, and work on contracts with engineering firms that specialize in hydrology projects, they would really like to talk with you.  Read on below and thanks!  -mike

We are looking to talk with people who work in city or county level government who are involved with issuing the calls/contracts to carry out stormwater risk assessment and analysis.  We are working closely with civil engineering firms to carry out flooding simulations due to weather conditions or dam breaches.  Some of the issued contracts come under the names of:

  • Dam safety studies
  • Flood/inundation mapping/remapping
  • Whole watershed mapping study
  • City master plans

I would love to talk to people who are involved in these studies.

Kind regards,

Ivan Ravlich
CEO, Hypernet Labs, Inc.
ivan@hypernetlabs.io
https://hypernetwork.io

Webinar: CGIA and Promoting GIS in California

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The California Geographic Information Association (CGIA) kicks off 2020 with a brown bag speaker series that explores the role GIS plays in various types of organizations, how it is helping to achieve success, and why it should be a part of any strategic plan.

Join CGIA in this first webinar for a general member meeting to learn more about what CGIA is doing to promote GIS in California. We will also hear from Tamar Foster, Deputy Executive Director of the Little Hoover Commission about the findings of their recent report, “Mapping a Strategy for GIS.”

The webinar will be held Tuesday, March 3, 2020, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm, PST.  Click here for more info and to RSVP.

US Interagency Elevation Inventory

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Dear colleagues,

The USGS National Geospatial Program is again updating the US Interagency Elevation Inventory. We invite you to provide us information so that your data is discoverable by others. Your data need not be in the public domain, and the entry will provide a link to inquire about the data, or to a download site if available. This is not a repository for data; it is a way to make data findable. If you have high quality lidar data you wish to donate to USGS data repositories, we can have the conversation at any time.

https://www.coast.noaa.gov/inventory/

If you wish to make your data discoverable through the inventory, we will need the following:
  • Shapefile footprint with metadata
  • Vendor tasking, if available
  • Status (in work, available, etc.)
  • Restrictions (if it is public domain)
  • QA or acceptance reports (so we can calculate quality level)
  • Contact information (for internal purposes only; no PII will be publicly posted)
  • url for download or public inquiry (if available)
Due dates are as follows:
  • Arizona (to Drew by COB 3/25/2019)
  • Nevada (to Carol by COB 3/11/2019)
  • Hawaii (to Drew or Carol by COB 3/25/2019)
  • Pacific Basin Islands (to Drew by COB 3/25/2019
  • California (to Drew or Carol by COB 3/25/2019)

If you have an awareness of data that you did not procure, we are happy to chase down the source if you can provide a pointer to a contact person. We try to duplicate what currently shows in both NOAA’s digital coast and Opentopography.org. If you have updates to an existing entry on the inventory, please let us know by the due dates above.

Any questions, please call either one of us, and feel free to pass this request along to others inside or outside of your organization so that our inventory can be as up-to-date as possible.

Sincerely,

Carol and Drew

Drew Decker
National Map Liaison
U.S. Geological Survey
4165 Spruance Road
San Diego, CA 92101
619-225-6430
619-417-2879 cell
ddecker@usgs.go

Carol Ostergren
US Geological Survey National Geospatial Program
2885 Mission Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
831.460.7539 (office)

California Releases Interactive Public Geoportal

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California has adopted a massive, interactive online database of location-based government data that includes over 1200 publicly available data sets from 25 state entities.

The California State Geoportal collects geospatial data from government agencies including housing, water, transportation and health information. The data is compatible with geolocation software and is designed to be shared, layered onto maps and analyzed.

The portal was designed by ESRI.  Check it out!

calgeoportal

Mapping 2019-nCoV

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On December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of an outbreak of “pneumonia of unknown cause” detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China – the seventh-largest city in China with 11 million residents. By January 23, there was over 800 cases of 2019-nCoV confirmed globally, including cases in at least 20 regions in China and nine countries/territories.  As of this writing, there are now 17,485 confirmed cases and 362 deaths!

Continue reading →

Geographic Masking

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Geographic masking is a technique used to basically move your data around so not to give away the exact geographic coordinates of individual level data.  This is done when locations of individuals (like in health data, crime data, or endangered species data) need to be “anonymized” so they cannot be re-identified through reverse geocoding.

One tool that does this is MaskMy.XYZ.  MaskMy.XYZ helps users perform a time-tested geographic mask from the scientific literature, known as donut masking. Instead of being a toolbox for a specific (potentially expensive) GIS software suite, MaskMy.XYZ uses popular open source JavaScript libraries to mask data without ever requiring users to install or download any software. So whether you’re a GIS expert who can’t be bothered to script this method yourself, or a GIS newbie who knows you need to mask your data but aren’t quite sure how, MaskMy.XYZ makes your life easier and brings previously cumbersome methods into reach.

Everything runs client-side in your browser, meaning there’s nothing to install, data never leaves your computer, and as a result nobody except you ever sees your confidential files. It is a safe and secure way to anonymize spatial data.  Finally, you can map your secret fishing spots and share them with others without giving away the exact locations!  Check it out!

instructions

You Are Being Tracked!

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Here is a scary report from New York Times on how our personal locations are being tracked, and mostly from unregulated location data companies that cross reference your location with other databases to figure out who you are, where you live, and where you have been.

“In one case, we observed a change in the regular movements of a Microsoft engineer. He made a visit one Tuesday afternoon to the main Seattle campus of a Microsoft competitor, Amazon. The following month, he started a new job at Amazon. It took minutes to identify him as Ben Broili, a manager now for Amazon Prime Air, a drone delivery service.”

Click below to read the report, and parts 2 to 7!

tracked