News, Events, and Announcements for the UD GIS community, Spring 2014

by | Jan 15, 2014 | News

News, Events, and Announcements for the UD GIS community, Spring 2014

News

  • Delmarva GIS 2014 is  coming up next month, on May 8th.  This is the major GIS conference for Delaware.  Come out and represent UD, and our strengths in geospatial knowledge fields!
  • We held a roundtable on some of the big changes in GIS technology on 4/7.  The focus was on UD’s resources for ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Server, as guided by the attendees.
    • A quick run down of our conclusions:
      1. a clear policy is needed for acceptable use of UD’s ArcGIS Online subscription (have drafted this page that to serve as landing for the subscription and policy).  This should also be crafted into a questionaire to be used to evaluate projects for potential charge or exclusion from using the subscription.
      2. the ArcGIS Server/Portal instance for Facilities/Civil Eng. /Public Safety will serve as a proof of concept for others for a centralized ArcGIS Server instance.  Desktop interface with ArcGIS Server needs to be  be effortless, proven, and perceived as sustainable.
      3. department/center IT-run VM’s will be promoted, can use IT build image in vmware.  If your department or center is interested in running your own “map server in our cloud” (vm in our cluster), let me know
    • You can view Notes or a recording of the roudtable here (note: let me know if you have difficulty watching this on your system and I will convert into a better format).
    • I would like to hold a GIS Resources Strategy meeting #3 in the early summer  In addition to our research community, we need attendance from our main academic GIS stakeholder departments to make this successful.
  • Exelis (maker of ENVI and IDL) is offering a number of workshops at their offices near Washington, DC.  These are FREE to us because of our site license with Exelis.
  • The inaugural Art and Science: Connections and Intersections symposium will be held on Friday, April 25, at the ISE Lab) on the University of Delaware campus in Newark.  Presentations will circulate around this year’s theme of the “Interpretation of Images, Objects, and Data”

 Collaborations, Publications, and Honors

Software Updates

  • ArcGIS 10.2.1, ENVI 5.1, IDL 8.3, and FME 2014 have been posted on the UD GIS Software Page.
  • You may want to hold off on updating to ArcGIS 10.2.1 (Service Pack 1) unless you are experiencing an issue that’s addressed, since Service Pack 2 is going to be released soon.  Areas addressed by the ArcGIS 10.2.1 update include reconcile/conflict management, replication, geometric network tools and improved performance against enterprise geodatabases. Many other bugs have been addressed as detailed on “Issues Addressed List“.
  • ENVI 5.1 includes a simplified mosaic workflow among other new features.  IDL 8.3 was also released What’s new in IDL 8.3.
  • FME is now on Mac (not clear to me if you have to run it on top of VMWare Fusion, Bootcamp, Parallels) but there’s a Mac “version”, in any case (a .dmg). FME 2014 increases functionality for big data (Amazon DynamoDB, S3, Google BigQuery, etc.), Cloud-based mapping (moving data to the cloud, Google Maps Engine read/write, leveraging ArcGIS Online analysis services in workflows), and web services (reading and writing in workflows). For the full “What’s new” or the updated list of supported formats.
  • IMAGINE 2014 was also released, but we have chosen to not release the updated software on our downloads page as this license will be phased out, and their license manager is not backwards compatible (and license is not forwards compatible).
  • An update to ArcGIS Online was released on March 4th.  Changes include: new map layer types leveraging services and open standards, improvements to geocoding and driving directions, new web app templates, new and updated content and basemaps, dynamic layer symbology.  For more details
  • The first full release of GeoTools 11.0 and GeoServer 2.5.0 have been made on the 20th of March.
  • GeoTrellis 0.9 High Performance Raster Geoprocessing Library

Data Updates

  • Nothing updated yet

Events

Past Events and Webinars

Other Opportunities

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

  • UD’s Delaware Environmental Observing System (DEOS) and Delaware Environmental Monitoring and Analysis Center (DEMAC) seek an individual for the position of Environmental Applications Developer to assist with the development of web-based environmental data applications.  For more information about this job posting or to apply, please use the following link.
  • Internship (Paid) Delaware Emergency Management Agency, to last 10 weeks, responsibilities include: updating core Delaware HAZUS data and updating maps used in the State Hazard Mitigation plan.  Candidates have proficiency with ArcGIS and familiarity with HAZUS
  • 4 GIS Summer interns to do measurements in DC by Bike!  Casey Tress, Washington, DC
  • Applications Business Analyst III-NERC Pepco Holdings, Inc Newark, DE and Bethesda, MD
  • Esri is hiring interns for the summer, in multiple locations  www.esri.com/students
  • GIS Analyst City of Lancaster Lancaster, PA
  • Two Postdoctoral Scientist positions at North Carolina State University. Each position will involve interdisciplinary research that integrates spatial, social, and ecological sciences, with a focus on one of two areas: modeling of forest disturbance and solutions for sustainability
  • Interactive Web-Based Content Developer for Historical, Sociological, Political Science and Demographic Materials, NY, NY
  • Funded MS & PhD Positions in Computational GIS – Texas A&M University, College Station

Recent UD GIS Blog posts

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