News, events, and announcements for the UD GIS community, May 2013

News

The Delaware DataMIL will no longer be available after June 30, 2013. You can read the complete announcement at the DataMIL. Users can still access Delaware Spatial Data Framework layers through the Delaware Geospatial Data Exchange, and aerial photography tiles through UD’s Delaware Environmental Monitoring and Analysis Center (DEMAC).
The newest version of Maptiler now has a Mac OS GUI/Installer. This should be great news for Mac users, as previous installation and use steps were difficult. Maptiler was recently featured in our Digital Humanities GIS workshop.
As has been noted on the UD GIS email list, Bing Maps use in ArcGIS has changed. Complimentary Use of Microsoft’s Bing Maps with ArcGIS to be phased by year’s end. ArcGIS will continue to be usable with Bing Maps, but you will have to obtain your own Bing Maps key directly from Microsoft and then input the key into ArcGIS products. I would recommend using one of the other (free) basemaps available through ArcGIS … the World Topographic Map is my favorite.

Recent UD GIS Blog Posts

Software Updates

Other New Webinars

Events

5/8/13 9a-12p: Delaware Geographic Data Committee, Kent County Admin. Complex Rm 220, Dover, DE
5/9/13: 2013 Transportation Research Showcase, Paradee Center, Dover, DE
5/21-23/13: 2013 UCGIS Symposium, Collaboration Across Communities: GIScience 2.0 and Beyond
6/4-6/7/13: Spatial Statistics Ohio State Columbus, OH
6/11-6/12/13: VISualize 2013: Global Change and Environmental Monitoring (ENVI/IDL), call for abstracts has now begun.
7/6-7/9: Esri Education GIS Conference, San Diego, CA
7/8-7/12: Esri International User Conference, San Diego, CA
9/16-9/17/13: Northeast Regional Energy GIS Conference, Cannonsburg, PA

Past Events and Webinars

As a follow up to the Spatial Digital Humanities Workshop (for which we posted opening remarks on the last UD GIS Update), we now have a narrated screencast of the material, posted
I attended FME World Tour 2013’s stop in Washington, DC. I was impressed by FME’s workflow automation capabilities, which I think should be considered for anyone currently using the ArcGIS model builder. FME is made available for free to UD by the developer, SAFE Software, via the UD GIS software page. In particular, the capabilties for publishing regularly updated datasets in a variety of formats (e.g., to email, ftp, web services, feeds, KMLs) were impressive. As well as parsing/writing verbose and multidimensional output (LIDAR, NetCDF,etc.), and processing real-time inputs.
I attended a Philly Python User’s Group meeting on machine learning and natural language processing. The conversation mostly focused on algorithms for intelligently parsing text (using scikit-learn and the Natural Language Tool Kit), but there may be applications for geospatial analysis in feature extraction and classification.

Other Opportunities

5/15/13: Call for papers deadline for Northeast Regional Energy GIS Conference
9/30/13: Deadline for manuscript submission, special issue of the International Journal of Geo-Information, focused on Coastal GIS
The 1/2/13 deadline for complimentary Esri passes has come and gone, and we still have a few left. Please let me know if you are interested. The remaining passes will be granted on a first-come-first-served basis.
Opportunity to teach GIS to underprivileged schools in a developing nations

Area/Forwarded Job Postings (if no link, email me mearns@udel.edu, and I’ll forward the email announcements)

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or ideas that you’d like to discuss.