For those of you interested in what went on at the National Geospatial Advisory Committee Meeting on September 1-2 in West Virginia, here is a recap of that meeting.
National Geospatial Advisory Committee Meeting Recap
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Category Archives: News
GIS Day at LA County
LA County will be celebrating GIS Day in November and you are invited to attend. For more information, visit their announcement page.
California Sinking Faster Than Thought
A new NASA satellite image shows that California is sinking even faster than scientists had thought.
Some areas of the central valley are sinking more than 2 inches per month. The rate of sinking is accelerating because the state’s extreme drought is fueling voracious groundwater pumping. Click below for the story.
Call for Participation: Geography Careers Events at AAG 2016
The Association of American Geographers is looking for a diverse group of individuals representing a range of employment sectors, organizations, academic and professional backgrounds, to attend their Geography Careers event in 2016. For more information and to attend, click here.
Is Sexism a Problem in GIS?
A friend of mine is currently working on looking at the issue of sexism within the field of GIS and would like to gather input from the greater GIS community via a survey. You can find the post and survey here.
Google Project Sunroof
Looks like Google is starting to calculate solar information on their building data. They started Project Sunroof to make installing solar panels easy and understandable for anyone by calculating the best solar plan.
Does that sound familiar? It should since LA County has done that already with their Solar Map.
When you enter an address, Project Sunroof looks up the address in Google Maps and combines the map data with other databases to create a personalized roof analysis. They compute how much sunlight hits your roof using their 3D building models, shadows cast by nearby structures and trees, sun positions over the year, and historical cloud and temp patterns. They then recommend an installation size for your roof and reference local solar providers.
Currently Project Sunroof only covers Boston where the Sunroof Team is, the San Francisco Bay area where Google is, and Fresno … where one of the engineer’s mom lives.
Once they figure out the LA area, it will be interesting to compare it to LA County’s Solar Map information.
Take a look at the short video and visit the Project Sunroof website for more info.
Getting to Know ArcGIS, 4th Edition
ESRI has published the 4th edition of Getting to Know ArcGIS. Many of you have probably used past editions to learn the ArcGIS Desktop software or to teach others.
This edition is updated for the latest version of ArcGIS Desktop, 10.2 to 10.3.1. The book teaches GIS concepts and common tasks like how to find GIS data online, create web maps, set map projections, symbolize and label maps, edit GIS data, and geocode address locations. Included is a preview of ArcGIS Pro, however the book focuses on all the tools and functionality available in ArcGIS Desktop 10.3.1.
Getting to Know ArcGIS, 4th Edition was authored by Michael Law and Amy Collins. It is 808 pages long and retails for $84.99 from ESRI Press or about $54 to $58 on Amazon at the time of this post. The book also includes data for the exercises and a 180 day free trial of ArcGIS Desktop available for download at ESRI’s book resources website.
2015 ESRI User Conference Plenary
For those of you that arrived in San Diego on Sunday, you were greeted by a downpour of rain that lasted into the night. However, that all cleared up today for the 36th Annual ESRI User Conference.
During this morning’s Plenary Session, Jack emphasized the “Geography Everywhere” theme and touched on the usual things like web GIS and sharing data. Really there were few surprises. However, they did have a cute little skit about all their apps, posing like individuals in a dating service to get your attention to use them. It was a different way of showing you all the choices you have when it came to apps. You can even vote for your favorite app here.
Here are a few new announcements that might be of interest:
- Vector tiles, finally!
- New Workforce/Dispatcher, Workforce/Mobile, and Navigator apps that will work with Collector
- New AppStudio for ArcGIS that will help you build your own native apps in Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux
- ArcGIS Earth, full KML file support
- New drone app
- Statistical and scientific packages like R and SciPy will be able to run directly as geoprocessing tools/scripts in ArcGIS
- ArcGIS for home use licensing will now extend to the entire ArcGIS product, not just Desktop
- Expect ArcGIS 10.4 and Pro 1.2 in Winter 2016
I would suspect that ESRI will have the Plenary Session video online sometime today. I will update this post when it becomes available for you to watch at home! -mike
4:25pm update: Click here for today’s videos.
New Release of ArcGIS Pro
This week ESRI has released ArcGIS Pro 1.1. Here is a list of some of the enhancements:
- A new SDK for .NET to customize and extend ArcGIS Pro
- A Range Slider that allows you to dissect and visually analyze your numeric data
- The ability to publish 3D scenes containing multipatches
- Layout enhancements, like guides and snapping and the ability to add extent indicators
- Support for working with Excel tables directly
- Date line wrapping allowing you to pan, edit, and work across the international date line
Click below to read more about the release.
City of LA People Street Projects Map
The City of Los Angeles has a mapping tool that allows users to view People Street projects, like plazas and parklets, that have been completed or coming soon. They are turning 7,500 miles of city streets into active, vibrant, and accessible public spaces. Check it out.
SoCalGIS.org 