It’s that time again … Fireworks! This year the fireworks app has been expanded to include cities in Orange County and Ventura County. Included are days and times when fireworks will be sold and when you can light them up, as well as links to city web sites and telephone numbers. Data was collected from municipal codes and/or contacting each city. Enjoy!
SoCal URISA hosts an Open Source Workshop With Jeff Johnson
Palomar College: 1140 W Mission Rd, San Marcos, CA 92069
Date: 28 Jun 2014 8:00 AM PDT
You have probably heard about open source geospatial tools. Here is the chance to experience them under the direction of experts. Bring your laptop and dive into some of the most powerful, widely used and innovative tools in this area.
Open-Source developer, Jeff Johnson, will lead us into a high level look at the ecosystem of Open Source geospatial tools from QGIS on the desktop to GeoServer and PostGIS on the server and the web application frameworks used to deliver applications using these services on the web. We will then dive deeper into raster and vector spatial analysis on the desktop with QGIS and look at the various freely available QGIS extensions and plugins that GIS practitioners can use in their own projects and workflows. The course material will be drawn from the following 2 workshops. http://workshops.boundlessgeo.com/suiteintro/ and http://docs.qgis.org/2.2/en/docs/training_manual/ and users are encouraged to install the tools ahead of time by downloading from http://boundlessgeo.com/solutions/opengeo-suite/download/ and http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html
We will host a light continental style breakfast along with coffee and a sandwich lunch.
Location: Palomar College, San Marcos in the Natural Science Bldg. NS-127 (GIS Lab)
Directions and parking pass will be emailed out to registrants closer to the date.
Preliminary Schedule:
7:30 am – Registration opens, grab a light breakfast too.
11:30 am – Lunch
5:00 pm – Conclude Workshop
The workshop is Free for SoCal URISA members, otherwise purchase or renew your membership.
$30 Annual Fee
$10 Student Annual Fee
Please don’t forget to save you receipt from this event and use it towards your GISP credit.
Speaker Bio:
Jeffrey is a geospatial software engineer with 15+ years of experience building and delivering applications for the web. Jeff is a developer with a broad range of skills who can work at any level, from writing code and fixing bugs to managing complex projects and making architectural decisions while coordinating technical policy with corporate strategy. He spent the past 3.5 years working for Boundless (formerly OpenGeo) on GeoNode, GeoGit and various related open source projects and has given presentations and workshops on these technologies around the country and the world. Jeff is also deeply involved with the City of San Diego’s Open Data and Civic Technology initiatives. He is a graduate of Humboldt State University where he studied Geography, Cartography, Geology and Geospatial Technology.
Jeff can be reached at ortelius@gmail.com with questions about this workshop or for advice and consulting on projects leveraging open source geospatial tools.
More information and online registration: SoCal URISA hosts an Open Source Workshop With Jeff Johnson
Best regards, Southern California Chapter of URISA
As reported by Los Angeles County Enterprise GIS, CGIA has released an online map showing GIS contacts, websites, collaborative, and networking information for Counties in the State of California.
Hey CalGIS folks,
We’re starting preparations for the 2015 CalGIS and I’m super excited. As mentioned during 2014 CalGIS, we want to get your opinions on a few things before we move forward with location selections. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond to this survey, it should take you less than 2 minutes. We’ll be closing the survey on June 18 so if you want a say, respond before then.
Here’s the link: 2015 CalGIS Location Survey
Thanks!
Christina Boggs
2015 CalGIS Conference Chair
Christina.Boggs@norcalurisa.org
Beginning this summer the Federal Government will release excess engravings once used to reproduce U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) topographic and geologic maps and other scientific illustrations.
The process makes these unique engravings, created from the 1880s to the 1950s, available for transfer to Federal agencies; for donation to State and local governments, certain non-profit educational and other organizations, and public agencies; and for sale to the public.
Those interested in obtaining engravings need to understand the phases of the process; know how to request the engravings; plan the logistics to receive, pack, load, and transport them; and be ready to request a donation or to make a purchase offer when the engravings become available.
More information about the engravings and the process for transfer, donation, or sales of the engravings is available through ftp://ftpext.usgs.gov/pub/er/va/reston/Engravings/.
State and local governments, certain non-profit educational and other organizations, and public agencies interested in receiving a donation should establish their eligibility now with their State Agency for Surplus Property (SASP). The SASPs are listed at http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/100851. Only the SASP can request a donation on your behalf.
The engravings will be available through a process managed by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).
USGS will post supporting status information weekly through ftp://ftpext.usgs.gov/pub/er/va/reston/Engravings/.
Applications for the next round of AAG Cartography Specialty Group Master’s Thesis Research Grants are due by June 15, 2014.
Masters students enrolled full time are invited to apply for the CSG Master’s Thesis Research Grants. These grants are intended to promote scholarly research in cartography by students enrolled in Geography or a related degree program. Grants are available up to a maximum of $500 and may be used for items necessary and relevant to research, such as travel, materials, equipment, and human subject fees.
Deadlines for application are March 15, June 15, and November 1 of each year. Applications and inquiries should be directed to the CSG Non-Academic Director, Sarah Bell, at sbell@esri.com.
For more information and the application form, please visit http://www.csun.edu/~hfgeg003/csg/master.html. You can also access that page from the Awards and Competitions section of the main CSG Web site, http://www.csun.edu/~hfgeg003/csg.
Please share this announcement with your students or other organizations that may have potential applicants. Good luck in the competition!
Stephen Wolfram has worked on the Wolfram Language for about 30 years now. The Wolfram Language is a knowledge based programming language. It’s a language with a vast amount of knowledge about how to do computations and it’s a language that has a model of the world built in. The symbolic nature of the language allows it to accommodate any style of programming. It can even use natural language. And it makes it really easy to create really powerful programs.
The goal of the Wolfram Language is to encapsulate as much computational knowledge as possible so people can go from ideas to deployed products as quickly and easily as possible. The Wolfram Language is a huge language, but it’s built on a small set of powerful principals:
You can run the Wolfram Language in the cloud and access it via mobile devices. You can take any Wolfram Language function and setup an instant API for it that you can call from anywhere on the web. For example, asking for a JSON output of some weather data for a user’s geo-location. The Wolfram Language can interact with connected devices using the Wolfram Data Framework (WDF).
And yes, the Wolfram Language has detailed maps of everywhere built in! This is the future of programming my friends! Check it out.
ESRI’s new Small Government Departmental Platform Agreement allows for unlimited deployments of core ArcGIS software within one governmental department. Departments that have plans to integrate GIS in multiple workflows, such as assessors, health and human services, public works, fire, and planning departments, can use this program to rapidly achieve their goals.
This program is ideal for departments that want to:
The Small Government Departmental Platform Agreement program is open to all governments in the United States with populations of 100,000 or less. For more information, call ESRI at 800-447-9778.
During the 2013 ESRI User Conference in San Diego, ESRI demonstrated what they called ArcGIS Professional. It was still under development at the time, but they said it was slated for a Q4 2013 release. That did not happen, though maybe it was for beta testing sites? Not sure.
Now they are saying it will be part of the ArcGIS 10.3 release planned for the second half of 2014. If you have not seen it yet, below is a video from the ESRI Federal GIS Conference in February 2014.
ArcGIS Pro has a ribbon interface that would be similar to Microsoft Excel and Word products. I personally don’t like that type of interface, the functionality gets lost to me. Others might find it natural though.
ArcGIS Pro is a 64-bit multi-threaded application that is designed to be the premier application for visualizing, editing, and performing analysis using your local content or content from your ArcGIS Online account or Portal for ArcGIS. You can author content in both 2D and 3D and publish it as feature, map, and analysis services, 3D web scenes, and web maps.
ESRI states that ArcGIS Pro will not replace ArcGIS for Desktop. Prediction: I give them 3 years before Desktop goes to live with ArcView 3.
The initial release will not have all the functionality that ArcGIS for Desktop has, but Pro will have capabilities that Desktop does not right now:
Map documents (.mxd), scenes (.sxd), and globes (.3dd) can be imported into ArcGIS Pro and saved as projects (.aprx). WHAT? Having ArcView 3 flashbacks?!!!
ESRI did state that projects are not backward compatible so you cannot go back to ArcMap. But keep in mind the geodatabases you use in Pro will also be accessible by ArcMap so there can be collaboration at the data level. Services published with Pro can be shared with ArcMap. Also, both can run side by side on the same machine.
ArcGIS Pro is part of ArcGIS for Desktop, so only ArcGIS for Desktop customers will be able to receive ArcGIS Pro. ArcGIS Pro will come in three licensing versions that correspond to Desktop license levels Basic, Standard, and Advanced. Also, the initial release of Pro will be able to work with the following Desktop extensions: 3D Analyst, Spatial Analyst, Network Analyst, Workflow Manager, and Data Reviewer.
ArcGIS Pro will run on Windows 7 or 8 on a 64-bit machine. 8GB of RAM or more is recommended.
There is no doubt that ArcGIS Pro will be featured at the ESRI Conference in San Diego this year! Looking forward to it. -mike
From Drew Decker at USGS:
