Anything Geospatial

GIS, Maps, Geo and Location Technology by @gletham

Archives for May 2010

10 Favorite Tweets from the Geo-Twittersphere

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A number of really interesting things have streamed  via  Twitter this week. Below is just a sampling of 10 “faves” from the past couple of days. Don’t forget that Gov2.0 is taking place this week in D.C. You can follow the Twitter activity from the event via hashtag #G2E

  • @Thierry_G #ospe Ordnance Survey: “We have released OS OpenData, now where is the killer app? We haven’t seen it yet”
  • @NASA And something not so beautiful is still spreading off the Louisiana coast. Latest oil spill image
  • @JeffHarrison What’s in a Geoname? Our world (updated)
  • @GEOpdx An Open API from MasterCard to Develop Applications? Priceless
  • @brady Informative RT @counternotions: NEW POST: “Apple, Google and the map wars”
  • @GEOpdx Cloud Computing Brings New Dimensions To Geospatial Business Intelligence
  • @ArcVancouver From Information is Beautiful, World Map Of Touristyness
  • @MadameTwit Awesome they’re doing this, check out this quick video: Volunteers Taking Charge in Gulf
  • @jmbergeon GeoEnabling Gov 2.0: Jack Dangermond speaks May 27th at Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington
  • @LindaHecht #oilspill timeline map at

Remember you can follow us via @GISuser @LBSzone and @gletham

The Carol Bartz F-Bomb Moment at Techcrunch Disrupt – Priceless

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Please excuse the harsh language in this video, however, I had to share it with you as once again Carol Bartz is my hero… I caught this interview yesterday via the Techcrunch Disrupt event livestream. Bartz was being drilled repeatedly by the very arrogant Michael Arrington and let fly with the ever-familiar Bartz-F-Bomb – indeed over the years there’s been many engineers and CAD professionals at Autodesk events that have heard this from her, although having it directed at someone like Michael Arrington makes it all the more enjoyable – the only downer part of this is that Arrington is getting tons of coverage from all this, although check out the look on his face in the video… I swear the guy looks like he darn-near soiled his pants! Well done to the Yahoo! CEO – indeed she’s definitely at the top of my list of Silicon Valley CEOs that I’d love to have dinner with some time! Enjoy – warning: if expletives offend you please skip watching this video and don’t bother shooting the messenger please.


Filed Under: gis

Go.USA.gov enables Government users to create ,share, track short urls

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An awesome resource with some great finds via http://go.usa.gov/. The web service enables users to track and monitor the most popular short urls being used to point people to various government resources. Go.USA.gov lets government employees create short .gov URLs from official government domains, such as .gov, .mil, .si.edu, or .fed.us URLs. Currently in Beta, Go.USA.gov registration is limited to people with .mil, .gov, .fed.us, and .si.edu email addresses. So far more than 8,500 urls have been indexed! http://go.usa.gov/

FYI, tiny (or short) urls are commonly used in social media sites these days so that people can easily share long, ugly urls with others via social media – this is particularly useful on Twitter where users are limited to 140 characters.

http://go.usa.gov/
http://go.usa.gov/

Trimble Sets The Date for Dimensions Event

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Trimble has just announced their annual Trimble Dimensions Conference will take place Nov 8-10 in Las Vegas, NV. Speakers, panelists and presenters will address the following disciplines: Surveying, Construction,  Government, Infrastructure, Mapping & GIS, mobile mapping, Resource management, utilities, and more. From Trimble… More than 250 industry expert speakers will participate in the 2010 conference. This year’s comprehensive educational tracks consist of cutting edge, innovative session proposals featuring seasoned and experienced presenters and/or panelists. See more at http://www.trimbledimensions.com – Abstracts are due July 18

Vator.tv announces Geo-Loco Opportunity for geo-location-based startups

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Hey developers, here’s details of another cool competition that could help kick-start your business and get your mobile app some attention! Enter the geo-loco startup competition for a chance to pitch your geo-location company to 100s of Geo-Loco obsessed VCs, angel investors, executives from startups and large companies, and media at the 2010 Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco. Through the Geo-Loco competition, 10 companies will get a chance to present onstage at the Geo-Loco Conference on July 21st in San Francisco. See more details HERE

make your pitch!

Filed Under: LBS

Making my First ArcGIS.com Map – Gulf Oil Spill + ESAs and Wind Direction

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So, you wanna mess around with ArcGIS.com. First, you’ll want to create an account of logging to your existing ESRI global account – not totally necessary, however, for full functionality you’ll want to be logged in.  Once logged in you can begin exploring or even creating your own maps.I started my first map by zooming into an area of interest (the Gulf of Mexico, LA coastline in this case). Then select a basemap to use in your map… this is where it starts getting really cool! Users have about 12 choices in selecting a basemap including: Bing aerial, hybrid, or road map, street basemap, imagery, topo map, or even OpenStreetMap (OSM)… nice! I selected an imagery layer. Next, the fun begins by searching for data layers using the ArcGIS Online service… users can also search the web or a local GIS server for data. Searching for “Louisiana” I discovered a Gulf Coast Environmental sensitivity data layer and added that.
I also discovered a Gulf Coast oil spill 3 day forecast data layer along with data showing wind direction. The data layers were all combined and saved as a map in my collection. Once saved I had the opportunity to enable sharing and discovery of my map by everyone and was provided with a link to directly access my map.
A couple of quick observations. I could not easily locate a way to see my data layers and then toggle them on/off. Also, I had assumed that there might be an embed map option… this was not available as an option either as far as I could tell. To view user maps (including the one I created) see the Gallery http://www.arcgis.com/home/gallery.html
Note: Once saved, maps can be opened and viewed using ArcGIS.com or ArcGIS desktop if available to you.

So, you wanna mess around with ArcGIS.com. First, you’ll want to create an account of logging to your existing ESRI global account – not totally necessary, however, for full functionality you’ll want to be logged in. Once logged in you can begin exploring or even creating your own maps.I started my first map by zooming into an area of interest (the Gulf of Mexico, LA coastline in this case. Then select a basemap to use in your map… this is where it starts getting really cool! Users have about 12 choices in selecting a basemap including: Bing aerial, hybrid, or road map, street basemap, imagery, toppo map, or even OpenStreetMap… nice! I selected an imagery layer. Next, the fun begins by searching for data layers using the ArcGIS Online service… users can also search the web or a local GIS server for data. Searching for “Louisiana” I discovered a Gulf Coast Environmental sensitivity data layer and added that.

I also discovered a Gulf Coast oil spill 3 day forecast data layer along with data showing wind direction. The data layers were all combined and saved as a map in my collection. Once saved I had the opportunity to enable sharing and discovery of my map by everyone and was provided with a link to directly access my map.

A couple of quick observations. I could not easily locate a way to see my data layers and then toggle them on/off. Although, when I viewed my map after saving I could view the map legend (upper left), toggle them on/off, and view other information about the map (Correction, editing/removing data layers is found in lower-left region when creating maps) . Also, I had assumed that there might be an embed map option… this was not available as an option either as far as I could tell. To view user maps (including the one I created) see the Gallery

Note: Once saved, maps can be opened and viewed using ArcGIS.com or ArcGIS desktop if available to you.  You can see my map HERE

Related Links:


ArcGIS Goes Online at ArcGIS.com

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We’ve known for some time now that ArcGIS.com was coming soon, well now you can check it out for yourself at http://www.arcgis.com. Use the online, collaborative resource to browse maps (like Gulf Oil Spill forecast maps, TN flooding maps, weather warning maps, and more) from the Gallery, view and take part in groups, make a map, or use ArcGIS Explorer Online (http://explorer.arcigs.com – Silverlight plugin required) . The switch was turned on this week-end and those of us following the ESRI team on Twitter got a little advance notification inviting us to go mess around – Thanks Bernie! See also this blog post from Bernie on getting started with ArcGIS Explorer online

ESRI Rolls Out ArcGIS Server Cloud Option

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Yes indeed, some changes to the ELA could be in the works for those of you that venture into the Cloud. About the offering… ArcGIS Server Cloud Bundle is an annual subscription to a preconfigured deployment of ArcGIS Server Advanced Enterprise running on a 4-core Windows Server 2008 virtual machine in the Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure. According to ESRI the bundle includes
* Deployment of the annual ArcGIS Server Advanced Enterprise license on a virtual 4-core EC2 server based on the following configuration:
o 2.0 GHz processor per core
o 15 GB of memory
o 1,690 GB of storage
o Microsoft Windows Server 2008 64-bit platform
* Documentation including a deployment guide and best practices
* 12 months of ESRI technical support and maintenance
* Online help
See the official announcement HERE

Filed Under: gis

The GeoCortex virtual user conference

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An update for you from our friends at Latitude Geographics in Victoria BC, Canada.  Recall the company’s annual Geocortex User Conference is scheduled for June 8-9, 2010 (just around the corner). In an effort to accommodate their customers, the company is doing something a little different this year – the event will be a virtual one. Apparently feedback from their clients seemed to indicate that budget cuts have taken their toll and have resulted in limited travel budget for many. In a nice move Steven and crew from Latitude Geographics (ESRI International BP Award Winner) have decided to put on a virtual event complemented with live video streaming and web-enabled interactive tools.

About the event… The conference will officially begin with a live plenary session Tuesday morning. Core sessions delivered Tuesday and Wednesday will provide content for advanced developers, new developers, and non-technical attendees. The conference will conclude on Wednesday afternoon with a live summary session followed by Q & A. More about the event on their blog from CEO Steven Myhill-Jones

See more details at http://www.geocortex.net/uc/

Follow the GeoCortex team on Twitter @Geocortex

I’m sure we’ll be seeing much more of this in the future (example, just this week Google I/O was streamed live on YouTube and many presentations are following). With collaborative tools like GoToMeeting, WebEx, MeetUp.com and Eventful.com for event management, slideshare for PPT archival, uStream for live streaming, Twitter for communication, Flickr for photo archival, there’s many ways that event planners can be creative and efficient!

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