Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Just got home from Washington DC, but it was an extremely busy week with one meeting after another all around the beltway- Rumor is still circulating about us being asked to attend at the State of the Union address... Well, one sad truth is that I ultimately only got to spend about three hours at the ESRI FedUC conference yesterday afternoon. One business development opportunity after another this week - many interesting things brewing.

Got to see a bunch of familiar faces- my friends from the EPA geospatial world were present- Dave Wolf and Dave Catlin of the EPA Internet Geoservices team, Kevin Kirby, point man for the Locational Data Improvement and other initiatives, and Wendy Blake-Coleman, who I've been working with on next-generation architecture for EPA geospatial business. I understand GIO Brenda Smith was slated to speak this morning- unfortunately I was tied up in a meeting to discuss a couple of upcoming DOD projects.

My friends from the Metacarta crew had a nice hospitality room, they want me to get together with their marketing folks to promote our recent successess with integrating their products in EPA. They have a few new tools in the works for their DOD and Intel customers, including an analyst function that includes customizable alert features via e-mail and other notifications, as well as RSS feeds, to provide instant updates when a match of specific geographic and keyword parameters is made- they also have several other new things out and in the process of coming out.

There was a contingent of fellow Pennsylvanians present- PA GIS coordinator Jim Knudson and his deputy Stacy White were there- although I unfortunately didn't get to see Jim, I did say hello to Stacy. I also saw GeoDecisions had a booth- and found out later, over a few beers with a friend from Lockheed-Martin that we have some mutual friends and potential collaborative projects brewing between our company, Lockheed and GeoDecisions. PA firm Michael Baker was also present - who I did business with years back, though manned by the Virginia contingent. Here was Bob Austin, who has also recently been brought into our Integrated Project Team for the EPA Geospatial Data, Metadata and Services Architecture project I have been working on with Wendy Blake-Coleman. It's exciting to see so much synergy between different pieces of different projects, customers and agencies, and past and present partners of ours suddenly converging in many interesting ways.

Well, I've got much to catch up on and much to digest- was a very interesting week, even though most of it was outside of the FedUC context. Certainly there will be more bits and pieces to post as I get caught up tomorrow and over the weekend.