April 11, 2011 – Anything Geospatial

With all the hype and news surrounding the recent earthquake in Japan and the subsequent damage that has resulted to the country’s nuclear power facilities there’s much renewed interest in the topic of nuclear power. People are concerned about their safety and concerned for the environment – and for good reason. For those of you interested in seeing exactly how close you are to a nuclear facility Esri has an interesting web service that can provide you with the answer.

Using the “How close am I” service, the Esri powered app takes a user-specified location (like your city name), runs a proximity analysis, and and returns an interesting map that describes exactly how far away you are from facilities of interest. Users also have the ability to customize the map by adding additional layers of information, like earthquake fault lines, evacuation zones, and tectonic boundaries. Optionally, the user can also select from several basemap data layers including simple streetmap, OSM, Satellite imagery, and topographic. Once finished, the user has access to copy/paste a direct link to the map (see this link for an example) or can also grab the embed code (see embeded map below) or share on Twitter of facebook. Click HERE To try the service for yourself

This week in Grapevine (Dallas) Texas, the annual GITA Geospatial Solutions Conference is taking place and if you happen to catch some of the reports coming from the event (Thanks to Matt Ball and his @spatialsustain Twitter account) it sounds like this could be the final GITA conference – I’m a little old school, but like many of you, I still prefer to refer to the event as “The GITA Conference”. Sad to hear, however, it appears that this could be the end of an era with the annual event winding down, seemingly with relatively little fan fare.

There’s no question that organizing, planning, and running a conference is no small task and with innovations in technology like live video streaming, web conferencing, social media, etc… people have a number of options. Then there’s the economy, with many companies cash strapped, layoffs have been massive and widespread over the years, corporations and individuals forced to slash spending and seek alternative ways to enhance and support their professional development – conferences have been hard it indeed!

I’ve seen many conferences re-invent themselves over the past couple of years. Some have gone by the wayside, others have gone online, some turned to cool, web2.0 formats, others have been turned over to the community. Who knows what the future will hold for the GITA event or how this will affect the organization for that matter. I have some ideas of my own … time will tell I guess.

Follow Tweets from the GITA event on hashtag #GITA – See also Matt’s blog post GITA Annual Event Sunsets as Solutions Mature