Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Earlier in the month, I attended the EPA's Environmental Information Symposium - While I didn't post any updates here during the conference, I will now take the opportunity to carry over some of the more fun posts that I made to the Ning site that was set up for the Symposium:
Wordle: Web 2.0 Themes for the EPA Environmental Information Symposium

A Web 2.0 Success Story: Apps for Democracy

I touched on this during my presentation:

• “Smarter, Better, Faster, Cheaper: Pick 4” – Vivek Kundra, District of Columbia CTO



• The District of Columbia published an Open Data Catalog: GeoRSS, XML, KML and other data types



• They then posted a contest and allowed the public to build applications, built on their Open Data Catalog



• RESULT: In 30 days: 47 new applications for the web, facebook and mobile clients, over $2,000,000 in development at a cost of $50,000 = over 4000% ROI



• http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/

The Web is the Platform

As a potential future paradigm, web-enabled connectivity binds together disparate resources, across EPA program offices, regions, labs, both horizontally and vertically, by transparently supporting access to data, analysis and resources:

I will be flying out to Phoenix, Arizona December 9th-12th, to attend the US Environmental Protection Agency's annual Environmental Information Symposium... This year, I will be participating on a panel, to discuss collaborative geospatial tools, web services and data publishing, integration and visualization frameworks for environmental science, such as Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Earth. I am definitely looking forward to sparking some discussion and engaging more people who collect, manage, consume or make decisions based on environmental data... My particular interest at this point is not just in publishing data via open, standards-based (not just OGC, but REST, JSON and others), accessible, dynamic data resources, but also in modeling and analysis, and beginning to look at workflows toward solving a wide variety of environmental problems.

Last year, I got to have a lot of fun developing a turbo Virtual Earth integration in 36 hours, for the Puget Sound Information Challenge. To blow my own horn, my application was recognized by EPA's CIO as one of the most interesting contributions made to the effort. Needless to say, I am really looking forward to attending again this year.

The event will be held at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort in Phoenix,

• Agenda
• Registration

From my colleagues at the Penn State Department of Geography:

Please share with colleagues or students who might be interested. Note that the conference is open to undergraduate as well as graduate students, and Sunday's session (sponsored by our SWIG -- Supporting Women in Geography--chapter) will focus on professional development/networking; former AAG President Jan Monk will be the keynote speaker.

The CFP is available as a PDF document at http://www.geog.psu.edu/noboundaries/noBoundaries2009_CFP_Poster_final.pdf

Additional information, including updates as available, can be found at http://www.geog.psu.edu/noboundaries

***********************************************

The graduate students of the Penn State DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY invite graduate & undergraduate students to present their research at our annual interdisciplinary conference, which takes place on Penn State's University Park campus Saturday, February 28-Sunday, March 1, 2009.

We welcome submissions on subjects including:

Politics, economics, and international development; Ecology and environmental sciences; History, culture, and society; Gender, race, class, and sexuality; Urban & rural policy and planning; Hazards, vulnerability, and global change; GIS, spatial analysis, and geovisualization.

What unites us (and hopefully you) is an attention to space and place, scale, and connections between the human and physical realms. If your research intersects with any of the above, please join us! (more

information: www.geog.psu.edu/noboundaries)

PAPER SESSIONS

Paper sessions will be organized along common themes with 20 minute timeslots (15 minute presentations followed by a 5 minutes of Q and A).

If you would like to present your research, send a title and abstract (250 words or less) to noboundaries@psu.edu.

POSTER SESSIONS

Graduate and undergraduate students are invited to present posters. Send a title and abstract (250 words or less) to noboundaries@psu.edu.

SPECIAL SESSION: BALANCING ON THE ACADEMIC LADDER—SUPPORTING WOMEN IN

GEOGRAPHY AND BEYOND

Creating supportive spaces for a diversity of women within academia is an ongoing process that involves personal and political action at a variety of scales. This year’s special session of the no)BOUNDARIES conference looks to acknowledge the successes as well as the challenges faced by those striving to create a more supportive academic environment for all women.

We are soliciting papers for panel sessions on the themes of:

- Life in the Department: Departmental Climate; Mentoring; Access to Information; Student Organizations (e.g. Supporting Women in Geography)

- Life Beyond the Department: Publishing; Work/Life Balance; Career Track; Outreach; Networking

These are merely suggested topics; we welcome any and all contributions.

Balancing on the Academic Ladder will consist of workshops as well as panel sessions to encourage the generation and exchange of creative ideas and strategies. Send paper abstracts to noboundaries@psu.edu.

Submission deadline for abstracts is February 1, 2009

While everyone else is off to Where, et cetera - I'm going off to the EPA GIS Workgroup meeting in New York City...

Here's a neat site - Discovery Channel's "Earth Live" features a 3D globe, which can be revolved by the user, with in layers relating to various stories, news items and features carried on the Discovery Channel - in some cases, the layers feature time-sequence animation (screen capture of polar ice cover layers below):

Though you can't zoom in or out, or add custom layers you can mix and match layers to create your own views... A neat little 3D globe.

http://dsc.discovery.com/guides/discovery-earth-live/discovery-earth-live.html?dcitc=w01-104-ae-0010

from slippy maps to spinny maps...

Posting live from EPA's Environmental Symposium in St. Louis - One of the things that's being discussed there is a challenge put forth by Bill Ruckelshaus, former EPA Administrator, who is now heading up the Puget Sound Initiative, to clean up this natural resource that forms a big part of Northwest Washington State.

As part of this, they established a wiki, and are having mashup camps to rapidly get as much content relating to Puget Sound and its' environment as possible:

In a few short hours, I was able to develop a Virtual Earth mashup, which performs MetaCarta searches against EPA and other federal and state documents, pulls in EPA Toxic Release Inventory for Washington State as a KML layer, WMS layers for USGS Wetlands and Land Cover (NLCD), as well as NHD layers showing streams and impaired waters.



There is also a great OpenLayers-based mashup builder and other tools - anyone interested in improving the environment in the Puget Sound area will be encouraged to participate as things move forward.

I also built a standalone version here: http://www.synergist-tech.com/Demo1/PugetSound.html

After combating on proposals for a few recent projects, I am getting a bit frustrated with the preponderance of IT generalist firms chasing after the same work we do. Seems there is still a notion out there that information technology is the solution to everything. Problem is, the reality is that IT in and of itself is not and will be a driver to compare with the actual business. And if the actual business requires understanding of geospatial analysis, or of geodesy and high-accuracy locational data, or of environmental science, or of transportation and congestion, then these are still the primary drivers.

Sure, you can hire some button pushers cheap... but will they really serve the need? Maybe, but most likely not. Will they display any thought leadership or vision? Definitely not. Is any of it meaningful to the IT generalists? No. Just butts in seats, generating revenue, quantity versus quality. Whatever happened to qualifications, domain expertise and past performance?