The 15th Annual South Florida GIS Expo in Palm Beach County is a great opportunity to learn more about GIS and also provides an opportunity to present. This event is FREE, and its always a good time. Check out the flyer and register at www.gisexpo.org.

Yesterday's SEFLIN Future of Libraries Conference was great. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet with regional librarians and exchange ideas. I had the pleasure of presenting and sharing my experiences with GIS. I think that even though libraries may not provide GIS services, just knowing that its out there and knowing what it can be used for is important.

Check out the presentation.

From our friends at Harvard, this website's purpose is to serve as a geospatial data portal that will provide easy and free access to data concerning the earthquake that struck Sichuan, China on May 12 2008.

Britain has signed an agreement to make data produced by government agencies more freely available. "The commitment to make public sector information free, or charge no more than the marginal cost of maintaining and distributing the extra copy, appears in the Seoul declaration for the future of the internet economy, signed in the South Korean capital last week. The UK was one of nearly 40 countries to endorse the declaration, drawn up by the OECD club of developed nations."

As you may already know, it is typically very difficult to find international data, specifically from government agencies within a partifular foreign nation. This increased access to data will help many researchers in a large number of fields obtain data easily and freely (or for a minimal fee). I think we in this country take our access to data from government agencies for granted (I know, I know there is still plenty we DON'T have acc ... Read More »

IPUMS-International has added 32 new sets. The data release includes 9 new countries -- Austria, Canada, Egypt, Ghana, Iraq, Malaysia, Netherlands, Panama, and United Kingdom -- as well as additional samples for China, Colombia, Mexico, United States, and Venezuela. The data series now contains 263 million person records from 111 censuses in 35 countries. Learn more about the data released.

Google has created Google Map Maker, a wiki style map that allows users to contribute to their maps by adding new roads, buildings, landmarks etc. Map editing is only available for a a small number of countries throughou t the world, such as Bermuda,Cayman Islands, Iceland, Pakistan and St. Lucia. This trend towards collaborative map making is emerging as a way for "neogeographers", or map makers/geographers who are non-professional, to create maps. Want to contribute, here are a couple collaborative map maing sites.

wikimapia.org

OpenStreetMap

After watching today's "What's New in ArcGIS 9.3" training seminar, I got very excited about some of the new features. Particulary

• ArcGIS Desktop Resource Center, which creates a centralized information forum for desktop users along with ArcGIS Online base maps
• Abilitity to export KML files
• HTML Pop up tool
• Adobe PDF map exports that have increased interaction cabilities.

If you want to learn more about these features and more in ArcGIS 9.3 read "What's New in ArcGIS 9.3". Keep up the good work, ESRI!

So, this afternoon as I'm drinking my coffee and clicking through various blogs/news and such, and I came across this little tid bit. Whenever I introduce GIS to new users/students, I always say anything can be visualized in a GIS, as long as the data has a geographic component. I know this is true, but every now and again I see something mapped that is a cross between "really?!" and "how come I didn't think of that?" Check out what I mean here.

"This Terrorism and Insurgency Centre Map tracks up-to-the-minute terrorist and insurgent activity using the interactive events database. It analyzes these activities using an archive of over 47,000 records of events built up over the last ten years, advanced mapping technology and a vast archive of related thematic analysis on issues such as terrorist financing and radicalisation."