GISFish is a brand new Web site of the Aquaculture Conservation and Management Service (FIMA) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) and a number of collaborating institutions. USers will find case studies, training opportunities, data sources, tools and freeware, news and events are featured. Material in GISFish is constantly updated and expanded. Near future improvements will include increased coverage of abstracts and of full papers. Additional links to Cultured Aquatic Species fact sheets will also be made available for each GISFish publication record in which scientific names of plants and animals are mentioned. See http://www.fao.org/fi/gisfish/index.jsp – be sure to check out the fine list of data resurces!
Archives for May 23, 2007
BLM Township and Range data
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) cadastral survey program is responsible for the official boundary surveys for all federal agencies in the U.S. that together manage over 700 million acres. The Public Land Survey System also called the Rectangular Survey System is the foundation for many survey-based land information systems Download PLSS GIS shapefiles. To select and download data, select the Map Viewer and Download button. See http://www.geocommunicator.gov/GeoComm/lsis_home/home/index.html
Google Geocoding API gets an update
Google has announced an upgrade to the software used to handle North American addresses in their Geocoding API. From Google… “This upgrade improves the performance of our service and includes the following changes which may affect your applications:
1. The new geocoder contains an update to the underlying data set for North America.
2. The geocoder has also been updated so that it more intelligently handles incomplete input
3. In the XML data returned from the geocoder, there is a tag called “AdministrativeAreaName” that may contain the state where the address is located.
http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/index.html – See also http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com
2. The geocoder has also been updated so that it more intelligently handles incomplete input
3. In the XML data returned from the geocoder, there is a tag called “AdministrativeAreaName” that may contain the state where the address is located.
http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/index.html – See also http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com
Local Search is a breeze with Loki
Did you catch the focus piece I did on Loki the other day? Loki is a very cool location-sensitive toolbar you can integrate into your web experience. Download and install the Loki toolbar and you then have access to local search from your PC. The coolest part is simply entering a search string and loki goes out, returns a Google map based on your location, then you can search for anything with local results being returned… awesome! Eg. see my search results on pizza – see also www.loki.com and this Loki 2.0 spotlight http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/11663/28/
Looking for blogs from the Intergraph conference? I guess not
Looking for blogs and news from the Intergraph conference? Apparently not… a quick cruise through technorati searching on “Intergraph” http://www.technorati.com/tag/intergraph turned up pretty much nothing (except for one post by yours truly)… interesting the images section pulled images from Intergraph’s UC in 2005 – curiously also posted by yours truly on our GISuser flickr. Searching DIGG (http://www.digg.com/search?section=news&s=intergraph) I found 3 hits. Joe F. who’s from Huntsville AL has posted something this AM about the Neil Armstrong keynote (way cool!) but otherwise its pretty quiet.. too bad. Of interest on the wire I saw a few PR items released today (once again I had to go out and look for these) and one of them got my attention – this due to some clever keywords being used by the company… “Intergraph Integrates with Leading Interactive Mapping Services Delivers Custom Data for Rich Geospatial Mashups”. Jumping on the bandwagon, looks like one of the selling points for GeoMedia WebMap 6.1 will be the ability to quickly and easily create mashups – ie. combining your data and queries with either the Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth map data. I didn’t make it to the INGR gig again this year — too bad or I likely wouldn’t have to rant like this about the lack of exposure ;0) Getting back to a post of mine a few days ago, conference organizers these days would be wise to take advantage of the Web 2.0 and maybe setup a blogger or 2 of their own to get some news out. O’reilly Media does a great job of this with their events. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/ – Perhaps more info will fallout next week once attendees return home. Looking for a link to the INGR conference homepage? I’ll share it with you here as you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone else linking to it – try http://www.intergraph2007.com
Who Gets the H1B Visas? Here’s the Top 200 list
Some interesting findings on the distribution of H1B visas… last year nine Indian firms collectively were issued 19,512 of the 65,000 H-1B visas granted – that’s almost one third of the available visas for technology workers going to 9 India firms. 5 of the top 10 were Indian outsourcing firms. Information week has published the list of the top 200 firms using up the “valuable” H1B visas.. familiar names include: Microsoft number three on the list, IBM number eight, and Oracle USA number nine. Of the Internet players YAhoo! comes in at number 47, Amazon number 81. US Coleges dominate the list though taking up the majority of the positions. So who’s the biggest user of the H1B visa? Infosys Technologies who secured 4908 immigrant workers in 2006. See Information Week for more on this – http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=199601616
Who Gets the H1B Visas? Here’s the Top 200 list
Some interesting findings on the distribution of H1B visas… last year nine Indian firms collectively were issued 19,512 of the 65,000 H-1B visas granted – that’s almost one third of the available visas for technology workers going to 9 India firms. 5 of the top 10 were Indian outsourcing firms. Information week has published the list of the top 200 firms using up the “valuable” H1B visas.. familiar names include: Microsoft number three on the list, IBM number eight, and Oracle USA number nine. Of the Internet players YAhoo! comes in at number 47, Amazon number 81. US Coleges dominate the list though taking up the majority of the positions. So who’s the biggest user of the H1B visa? Infosys Technologies who secured 4908 immigrant workers in 2006. See Information Week for more on this – http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=199601616
Terraserver WW2 D-Day aerial images gone?
Here’s a mystery about some archived WW2 D-Day imagery that a reader has sent my way. Once upon a time (October of 2001 roughly) Terraserver announced they were putting up some cool aerial photos of D-Day on their web site at
http://www.terraserver.com/ww2_images.asp
http://www.terraserver.com/ww2_images.asp
Apparently the images are not there any more, but they used to be found at:
http://web.archive.org/web/
http://www.terraserver.com/ww2_images.asp
http://web.archive.org/web/20020210142241
http://terraserver.com/ww2_images.asp
http://web.archive.org/web/
http://www.terraserver.com/ww2_images.asp
http://web.archive.org/web/20020210142241
http://terraserver.com/ww2_images.asp
Apparently some people still remember and mention these images. Example: http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/dictionary/detail.asp?guid=&searchtype=&DicID=19225&RefType=Encyclopedia
http://boards.cinemax.com/thread.jspa?threadID=263&start=75&tstart=0
http://www.31stwc.com/archived.html (white text on a white background — hard to read!)
http://boards.cinemax.com/thread.jspa?threadID=263&start=75&tstart=0
http://www.31stwc.com/archived.html (white text on a white background — hard to read!)
From the reader though… “But try as I might, I can’t find them anymore.” There’s a UK web site: http://www.evidenceincamera.co.uk/ that is supposed to make available loads of WW2 Aerial Reconnaissance Archives, but the site is pretty thin on content and uses weird applets or something to view images. So… the reader would be interested in once again having access to these old images in digital form again, and would like to georectify them and put them online once more, likely as a Google earth overlay. Any leads or tips on these images are appreciated??