GIS, Maps, Geo and Location Technology by @gletham
This our of Centennial Colorado – The Compass family of geospatial companies has established Compass4Colorado, a collaborative effort to make high-tech GIS and mapping capabilities available at no or low cost to organizations involved in the recovery activities related to the devastating Colorado floods. Free flood-mapping webinars and workshops will be offered starting in October.
[Read more…] about Compass4Colorado Helps Colorado Flood stricken Areas With GeoTechnology
How big is government? Well, this survey of local agencies in the US may clarify that for you. The US Census Bureau has just released the data and findings from the 2012 Census of US Governments. The Individual State Descriptions provide the foundation of how government entities are identified and classified for the U.S. Census Bureau statistics on governments. Conducted every five years, the census of governments provides the only uniform source of statistics for all of the nation’s state and local governments.
[Read more…] about The 2012 Census of more than 89,000 US Local Governments
Something new and of interest from Twitter this week as the company has now rolled out the Twitter Alert notification service. Twitter Alerts are an opt-in service where users can elect to receive “breaking” news and announcements from emergency notification services and accounts like FEMA, the USGS and other government agencies – I’m looking forward to local police force and city government accounts in my region providing these!
[Read more…] about Twitter Rolls Out Twitter SMS Alerts for Emergency Notification
Looking for your very own 3D printer? It’s small but makes up for that in coolness! Peachy Printer comes via a kickstarter project started by a Saskatchewan developer, Rylan Grayston – Sourced via The Winnipeg Free Press online
See more at Peachy Printer Kickstarter page
Yes indeed, once again you can start thinking about GIS… Obviously, what I’m talking about is the 5th edition of one of the most popular GIS / GeoTech books to ever hit the market, Thinking About GIS authored by Roger Tomlinson and published by Esri Press.
The fifth edition has been updated with new resources including case studies, tips, and terminology definitions that reflect the latest advances in GIS technology and information. The accompanying DVD includes examples and templates, exercises, and videos of the seminar Planning and Managing a GIS from the 2012 Esri International User Conference.
Have you ever wondered just how many of your tweets have been geolocated, either on purpose or by accident? An interesting effort indeed as I’m sure this is a much larger issue than what you may have first thought. There’s no doubt that many people are accidentally providing geopositioning in their tweets and may not even be aware that they have enabled GPS tags to be stored with their tweet. Enter GeoSocial Footprint. This web service lets you enter a twitter username and receive back a map showing geolocated tweets. The service returns a ranking, areas of concern, and an option to download the tweets as a CSV file. Pretty darned cool! http://geosocialfootprint.com
Too little too late for Blackberry indeed… imagine, in the same week that the company has reported a massive loss, huge employee cuts/layoffs, and yet we have a new Blackberry device coming to market, the Z30, which I find of interest is not even featured on their website and the Youtube video showing off the device doesn’t have a link to the website for more info – sorry to dump on you Blackberry but good luck with that one!
All the twitter chatter today from #FOSS4G and the hype surrounding CartoDB got me wanting to mashup some data with the awesome open Geo tools out there so I decided to go look for some data and see what I could come up with. It took me a few minutes by I managed to locate some opendata from the DataBC providing me with locations of beer, wine, and liquor outlets, both public and private within the Province. Using my free CartoDB account I could quickly drop in my data, geocode it (almost) and publish a nice map for simple visualization and sharing.. took me about 5 minutes in total and I haven’t used CartoDB in months! Pretty darned sweet… I guess I better go fix the stragglers in my dataset! Jump directly to the BC liquor store locator map here or see the live map below… [Read more…] about Mashing-up Opendata for a B.C Liquor Outlet Map with CartoDB
I love sharing and on Friday I really like to share… and so, here’s a tip off about a cool data viz tool that I learned about from the OpenDataBC gang who recently used tableau to create a cool infographic showing off the makeup of OpenData downloads by Ministries in B.C Canada.
Tableau Public is a free data storytelling application. Create and share interactive charts and graphs, stunning maps, live dashboards and fun applications in minutes, then publish anywhere on the web. Anyone can do it, it’s that easy—and it’s free.
[Read more…] about Free Software Tip Friday… Tableau Public for Data Visualization
Over the past week while the massive flood was occurring in Colorado you may have heard DigitalGlobe touting a service called FirstLook – given that the floods were basically taking place right in the backyard of DigitalGlobe HQ I have to say that I was quite curious as to what the company would be doing in response to the events – Enter FirstLook. Simply put, DigitalGlobe’s FirstLook is an online subscription service for emergency management that provides fast web-based access to pre- and post-event imagery of world disasters delivered to almost any desktop or web-based mapping platform. FirstLook Plus integrates an additional layer of information to identify key features to aid responders by making analysis more efficient.
For those interested in more details about FirstLook, the company will be hosting a webinar on Sept 26. Note, the company has also put together a slideshare of analytics and reports from flood ravaged areas in Colorado.
