to wherever you are.
Care to talk maps ?
The Weary Traveler in Madison, WI
1201 Willy St.When: about 5:30
What's new ??
- On campus: It's a new semester @ UW-Madison implying new talent, new ideas and new projects.
- State: a working group has been working for a while to create and instantiate a Wisconsin Geographic Information Coordination Council, or WIGICC - they now
have most of their members, a first meeting date (9/23) and a first meeting for the still nebulous thing called the WIGICC Network (10/28), immediately preceding this year's
ESRI Wisconsin User Group Meeting in Appleton. Funny - both those meeting dates are on Tuesdays - guess it's a good day for mappers.
- National: Next week marks the
Annual Conference of the National States' Geographic Information Council - a national non-profit of State GIO-types - this conference gets more exciting every year - and this year promises more of the same... certainly the addition of Microsoft and Google as sponsors this year hints at the stature of the stakes at hand.
- International: in 3.5 weeks comes the
Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference 2008 in Capetown South Africa.
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2 things on that last note: First, speaking of South Africa, I recently noted the
University of Kwazulu Natal in South Africa. Regardless of what drew my interest, what I noticed was that they too (like UW-Madison) had retirement and attrition in their Land Surveying program in the late '90s followed by declining enrollment. But in contrast to our own program disappearance, they proceeded to adjust the program, re-name it to Geomatics, infuse new hardware tools and alas, their Summer surveying camps are as big as ever. I realize this cannot happen everywhere... but the reality is, Wisconsin may soon be hurting for Surveyors well-trained in the profession. We (as a state) are at an all time low for accredited Surveying programs statewide. While some UW-Madison decision makers may consider this all too applied ... I would argue the art and science of land measurement, sensor observation, modeled reality, image extraction/interpretation are in need of research now as much as ever. In our case, prospective students may have to go elsewhere to get this education. Rather, some of the classes are here - but you'll have to take one from each department on campus with little coordination between 'em.
// end rant on the importance of Geomatics Science and lack thereof at UW-Madison - a place formerly lauded for advances in this very field.
Second, speaking of open source geospatial, the
Open Geospatial Consortium (international industry/gov't/academic group responsible for open standards, not software) recently announced their sponsorship for FOSS4G 2008. This pleases me and further, reminds me that while there is no implied or required connection between open standards and open source, it is an easy marriage. Open source software developers have found, at times, that open industry-developed standards are preferable to open but custom methods... and standards advocates have found that, often, open source can react to (through distributed, self-motivated developers) react to, update code and offer ready support for new standards and standard revisions faster than commercial software... hmm.
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What else is new ?
- Speaking of open source, today, google released a new browser on the market -
Chrome. Try it, you just might like it... I did. What's this have to do with mapping ? Among other things, Google incorporated enhancements for the speed of javascript execution - key to many Web 2.0 API-driven Rich Internet mapping applications.
- And... for those of you interested in trying out open source GIS, maybe even trying out Linux, and want to do it all without disrupting your Windows environment. Enter pre-release of
GISVM - or GIS Virtual Machine. Mind you, this is not for the faint of bandwidth (1Gb download, 3Gb image uncompressed.) Nonetheless, with install of a free VMWare player, you've got yourself a whole GIS'd Linux box right inside your machine running Windows... the lines are getting blurry my friends.
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Just getting back in the swing of writing this - let me know if you'd like to see something specific. I'll be writing from Colorado next week...
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until next time,
are you weary ?
