I know this is a bit of a late notice for everyone - but the first US State of the Map conference is coming to Atlanta.

A little over a year ago I ran into a Cloudmade Ambassador in Chattanooga, TN. A few phone calls and emails later they came to a GA URISA meeting at Gainesville State College . Flash forward from that meeting almost a year later and the conference is coming to Atlanta. I'll be speaking at the conference on OSM and Education or as I like to call it how to get a classroom full of kids interested in maps.

There will be quite a few vendors (Microsoft, MapQuest, etc) and speakers. I know a lot of those speaking and at the absolute worst you're going to have fun.  Plus - it's cheap - $35 bucks and $20 if you're a student.


Come down to Atlanta and visit!

        

        

        

"But for some who dislike the cloud, no amount of technical and legal assurances will ever suffice, simply because they have a fundamental distrust of remote services -- "We never really know what's going on in the cloud!" they say.

And yet, do we really know everything going on in our local computers, even those of us who have spent our professional lives building these technologies?

In most cases, the answer is no. Unless we've written every line of code ourselves, or have compiled every program personally from source code that we've inspected (and presumably understood!) line by line, there is a leap of faith involved in everything we do on these machines."

        

        

"Google received the province's high-resolution, one-metre to one-pixel satellite imagery, which it used to dramatically sharpen the aerial images of B.C. on Google Earth and Google Maps.

The government also agreed to convert its numerous databases on water, air quality, topography, fish, land ownership, land use, mining, parks, tourism and wildlife into the Google Earth format. Google does not physically possess that data; instead, the province spends time and money to retool its information into a format readable by Google and Microsoft mapping software."

This photo below, courtesy of the Government of B.C., shows the Province's high resolution imagery provided to Google on the left and previously existing imagery on the right.

Read the full Vancouver Sun article here. (via the All Points Blog).

        

Gather round Children.....lets talk about some really old stuff.....

So way back in the early 90's (really not that long ago), Young Randy started his GIS career. When I first started out there was this company called Intergraph that pretty much ruled for mapping in the agency for which I worked. They are right down the road from Chattanooga in Huntsville Al. You had all this very boring looking software running on very complicated computers of which I had no clue. The only clue I did have is that we used Intergraph software in combination with Microstation to map stuff. We had 1 or 2 onsite techs. Arc/INFO eventually shut them out. It was a bit sad - a local company gets dumped for a non local company....but that is the way it works.

So about that same time (or a little later) I had to take a trip to Muscle Shoals and printed out my maps from Mapquest. Mapquest rocked. No more fooling with giant Atlases for me - I would print out where I needed to go when I needed to go there. If I remember correctly, and I most certainly don't, that same trip I passed Intergraph off the side of the interstate while holding my Mapquest printouts swerving all over the road. I haven't looked at mapquest in probably 5 or 6 years.

So twice in one week the past came rocketing back.First off - Intergraph was bought by Hexagon. Hexagon it seems is in the business of "precision". From their website "Hexagon is a world-leading supplier of systems for measurement of objects in one, two or three dimensions.". What makes this Interesting for me is that Hexagon also owns ERDAS. I've had a long standing relationship with ERDAS. I've watched them jump around a bit over the last few years as they were bought by Leica Geosystems..... and then Leica Geosystems being bought by Hexagon...... to the re-emergence of ERDAS as a solutions provider for imagery and other stuff (Apollo). So ERDAS and Intergraph are pretty much in the same 6 sided church. ESRI doesn't much care for wither one. Absolutely nothing could come of this.....or everyone is so busy building flex sites they wont' be paying attention.

Second - Mapquest just announced a $1,000,000 dollar investment in OpenStreetMap . I can't remember the last time I went to Mapquest to print out a map. I do remember however the last time I went to Google Maps and printed out a map...and cussed because it was wrong. So is it a bid to remain relevant? Do they really want to make a better map? I don't know but I am interested just because of all the work I've put into the the Chattanooga portion of the map. Plus there is the US State of the Map conference in Atlanta....at which I will be speaking.

Anyway - two things I had pretty much forgotten about suddenly came rocketing back out of the past this week.

        

So for my first official post I decided to dive a bit into education...or standards.....or just go full nerd and call it Episode IV: A New Hope (for GIS).

So how did I get into GIS? I just kinda fell into it. A stint with a government agency led me from folding maps to digitizing roads off a 1:24k topo sheet. Unfortunately for the rest of the geospatial world, they left me with a full set of Arc/INFO 6.00 manuals and my fate was sealed. From that I went on a tour of the department from producing orthoimagery to creating DEM's (or DTM's) to troubleshooting every GIS problem that could possibly occur. It was fun...it was interesting......It drove me nuts toward the end and I quit and started consulting .

One of the things that has intrigued me over the last 18 years was watching how people got into GIS. I was absolutely positive that by 1995 schools would be turning out GIS students right and left and I would become a fossil. A relic confined to my SPARC 2 under a single lightbulb cranking out very angry scripts. It didn't happen.

Flash forward and I found myself sitting as the education chair at GA URISA in January 2010 after a three year affiliation with them. So now I'm "in Charge" so to speak of providing educational opportunities to the professional community. I need to provide training that is useful and interesting. One of the things that being in GA URISA did was introduce me to Gainesville State Community College . They went from a two year degree in GIS to a four year Bachelor's program. They are also a Geotech Center . If you are in the Atlanta area - make a side trip. Go visit.

Anyway, I kept hearing about something called a DACUM and a competency model. Someone was working on one - GA URISA was involved but I was a bit new and didn't understand exactly what was occurring. Apparently it was going on at all the Geotech centers. This past January I was invited to a "summit" where GA URISA, the Geotech Centers, and a host of other people from the area sat down and talked about education, students, and a Competency Model that was running through the Department of Labor. It became pretty clear then what was happening.

Standards are a great thing. Probably the closest the GIS community has had for a standard display of competency is the GISP and the ASPRS certified tests . I know before the flame war starts - there are problems with both. I'm a GISP and will hopefully test for the ASPRS certification shortly.  These two things are great for those who have been in the field. What do you do if you're just starting out? You pick a school and run with it....and do a bit of hoping in my opinion. I have seen great GIS Programs....and I have seen programs so bad they should be dragged out behind the library and shot.

Well today (July 8th 2010) the Department of Labor today released a Geospatial Competency Model . So what? This what: we have a education plan for GIS people. We are, more or less, a defined field now (I know - do the job and you'll see how defined it is). In my opinion this is a large step for the Geospatial community. From being able to communicate effectively to knowing when to use the right spatial model - it's all laid out. I saw a bit of the work going into this - just a small piece - this was detailed and took some time to roll out. This was by no means a rushed job.

To quote: "The model will serve as a resource for career guidance, curriculum development and evaluation, career pathway development, recruitment and hiring, continuing professional development, certification and assessment development, apprenticeship program development and outreach efforts to promote geospatial technology careers."


Check it out - take a look at the website . Visit the Geotech center's website - read up on these guys. I know it's probably not that exciting, but for a small business owner and a GIS Practitioner who is in this for the long haul: this is excellent.

How excellent? Probably not this excellent but close!